Rural entreprise

ENAR

“Agriculture at the National Museum? No, we don’t have anything about that here.” The answer was definitive. I was visiting the museum in search of traces inscribed in stone or clay of the millennia-old relationship between Lebanon’s people and the land. As it turned out, there is not a single farmer represented in Lebanon’s National Museum. Thousands of years harnessing nature and all we have to show for it is an ancient section of cedar tree and a pre-Common Era terracotta figurine of a child carrying a goose. This very absence of agriculture at the center of the nation’s heritage is an apt signifier of the state of rural enterprise in Lebanon as a whole: overlooked, undervalued, and yet, fundamental to its history and social fabric. For millennia, people have worked Lebanon’s land in order to provide for themselves and their families. From the monumental staircases that the Phoenicians carved