Oh, my graciousness. One does find the most unexpected things in the course of research. Look at what I found in Six Thousand Years of Bread: Its Holy and Unholy History by H.E. Jacob, originally published in 1944 and out of print until 1997, when it was republished by the Lyons Press. These comments are excerpted from the chapter on the invention of the plow:
In all of history no subsequent invention vies with this in importance. The discovery of electricity, of the railroad, or the airplane was not of such far-reaching effect and did not so alter the aspect of Mother Earth as the plow. We shall never know where plowing was first discovered, but primitives used it from Ireland to North Africa, from western Europe to India and China.
This we know, however, that it was invented in some river valley, for only well-irrigated land would lend itself to the first crude plow. The oldest real culture was, necessarily, an oasis culture…
Wherever men learned to utilize the plow, throughout the Orient and the Occident, it powerfully inflamed the sexual imagination. It resembled the instrument with which man overcomes woman, inflicting upon her the selfsame violence that the furrowing plow inflicts upon the earth…
The righteous plowman, in his labor, conducts himself as a husband toward his wife. To symbolize this ethical relationship, the Roman monogamous marriage was solemnized upon a plow. And Hesiod adjured the Greek plowman to walk naked behind his plow. The sacred nexus between the man and the earth must not be impaired by clothing. When the harvest had been taken and the earth stripped of its blessing, the peasant was directed to lie with his wife upon the naked soil in holy copulation. They would remind the earth that it must bear afresh!
Hmm, erm, I think I need to go lie down now…
Yes, ‘mouse, it is. Did you not receive the memo?