I'd like to know everything I can about the history of apples in Mesopotamia, especially as it pertains to root grafting of desired cultivars. Here's what I've got so far:
The Sumerian word for "apple" is "hašhur," wr. *^(ĝeš)*hašhur; hašhur; ha-šu-ur2; or *^(ĝeš)*ha-šu-ur2
The Akkadian is hašhûru.
A bunch of casual apple-themed arboriculture books that turn up on an internet search seem to repeat the timeline assertions of [this Ohio State University Newsletter](https://southcenters.osu.edu/sites/southc/files/site-library/site-documents/HORT/newsletters/OhioFruitNews/Vol%204%20No%2024%20Aug%203%2000.pdf), so I tried to fact-check the veracity of the oldest ones.
The 5,000 BCE bit about Feng Li seems to be apocryphal; no such book as "The Precious Book of Enrichment" seems to exist, and the oldest Chinese reference to grafting that I could find was in Jia Sixie's Qimin Yaoshu, from the 6th century CE - it talks about grafting pears onto crabapples, and grafting persimmons. Had domesticated apples not made it China yet?
Back to the near east, there were indeed apple slices on a string found in the famous tomb of Puabi at the Royal Cemetery excavations of Ur III, identified as Malus orientalis, a potential candidate for being one of the genomic ancestors of domesticated apples: [Some food offerings from Ur]((https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/0305440378900304?via%3Dihub)
Supposedly there were apple remains found at Jericho as early as 6500 BCE, but I can't find any reliable historical source for that claim - it might be from M. Hopf, *Plant Remains and Early Farming in Jericho,* 1969.
Next up, there's an account of an apple orchard sale by one Tupkitilla, an Assyrian from Nuzi, for the price of 3 sheep, circa 1500 BCE. This one seems so specific that it should be easy to find, but I can't track it down! The Nuzi tablets are well-known, but there are sure a lot of them. Any help here would be hugely appreciated.
It seems believable because I *did* find one reference to an apple orchard in the Old Babylonian period, belonging to a daughter of Sin-Muballit (~1750 BCE), so it's totally plausible, but I'd like to confirm it nonetheless given the erroneous info about Feng Li.
I'm really intrigued by something I noticed about the Sumerian cuneiform for "apple" - one of the written forms, *^(geš)*ha-šu-ur2 , could possibly (if I'm not mistaken?) be read as:
>(tree/wood determinative)+uncertain sign (found elsewhere in HA^(sar), "a vegetable," with "sar" being a common sign in plant-related words, meaning "garden" on its own) + hand + root)
A compound that's something like "tree-vegetable hand-root" sure sounds like root grafting, doesn't it?
In *Horticultural Reviews Volume 35* I found a section on the history of grafting, and here's what it says about Mesopotamia:
> III. HISTORICAL EVIDENCE
>A. Mesopotamia
>The evidence that grafting was used in ancient Mesopotamia is murky at best. Harlan (1995) speculates that grafting developed in Eurasia before classical times but offers no specific evidence. Circumstantial evidence for grafting is suggested by Harris et al. (2002) and Juniper and Maberly (2006) based on the text of a Sumerian cuneiform fragment dated approximately 1800BCE. The text, translated and interpreted by Lion (1992), refers to the transport of grapevine shoots to be replanted at Mari (present-day Iraq). However, Lion’s commentary does not mention grafting per se, and there is no reason to surmise that the vine shoots were intended as scions, because grape shoots root readily from hardwood cuttings, and cutting propagation was the standard method of grape propagation throughout the Middle East. The suggestion of Juniper and Maberly that gradual salinization of agricultural soils may have motivated farmers to graft edible but salt-intolerant grapes onto salt-tolerant wild grape rootstocks is a fascinating conjecture and if true would represent the first known use of grafting to take advantage of specific rootstock effects.
Finally, [this apple propagator's site](https://sonneruplund.dk/eng/applesmesopotamien.html) makes some bold claims about the history of Sumerian apple grafting, specifically that the 'tree of life' motif depicts a method of open-air root cultivation. That doesn't accord with any of the numerous other theories about that artwork that I've read, but what do you all think?
Thanks for your time!
edit: yikes, formatting changed since I posted here last, sorry for the ugly links edit2: I tried to fix the links and made it worse, what the heck has reddit done
What are you specifically interested in? Root grafting is one of those things that's so ancient we don't have a definitive date of its invention. There are literary references from about the 2nd milennium BC, so it's very old.
Meanwhile, the existence of 'apples' is another subject entirely. For example (to take an iron age case), the Classical Greeks and Romans had no conception of apples as we today conceive them. They were part of a wider category of fruit that included other fruit trees. For example, the Latin term for apricots is sometimes translated as "Persian Apples" (Malum Persicum). However, a more literal translation would be something like 'Persian Fleshy Tree Fruit'. The modern conception of apples is a medieval phenomenon.