In a Sumerian poem the hoe argues with the plough, and the hoe wins
Some four thousand years ago, Sumerian scribes wrote a debate in which a talking hoe and a talking plough trade boasts about which is more useful. The hoe is declared the winner. It had seniority on its side: the hoe predates the plough and was perhaps preceded only by the digging stick.
Sumerian myth credited the tool's invention to Enlil, chief of the gods' council, and another composition from the same era, the Song of the Hoe, is devoted entirely to praising it. The Debate between the Hoe and the Plough dates to the 3rd millennium BC. Hoes also turn up in the Code of Hammurabi, from around the 18th century BC, and in the Book of Isaiah, roughly a thousand years later. The eye hoe, with a ring in the head to take the handle, has been made since Roman times.
Most designs fall into two camps. Draw hoes have a blade roughly at right angles to the shaft; the user chops in and pulls back, digging deeper or shallower by tilting the handle. Scuffle hoes skim just below the surface to sever weed roots. The Dutch hoe is sharpened on every side so it cuts on both the push and the pull, and the hoop or stirrup hoe is a loop of sharpened strap metal usually 8 to 18 centimetres wide. The grower Eliot Coleman designed the razor-edged collinear hoe in the late 1980s.
Hoes have shaped history in less obvious ways. Jethro Tull championed horse-drawn hoes in Horse Hoeing Husbandry, believing they released nourishment for wheat; the modern view is that crops simply gained from losing their weed rivals. Along with the seed drill, the horse hoe helped drive the big productivity gains of the British Agricultural Revolution. Short-handled hoes, which forced workers to bend double, left many with permanent back injuries. After a struggle led by César Chávez, backed politically by Governor Jerry Brown, the tool was declared unsafe in the California Supreme Court and banned under state law in 1975.
Archaeologists have lately adopted the hoe for clearing large open sites. It is less precise than a trowel but quicker, and leaves a cleaner surface than a shovel or digger bucket.
Source: Hoe (tool)
