Translations:Benutzer:Arian/Klett-Mini-Test/244/en

This sacral-artistic capacity of the ancient Persians did not exhaust itself only in the development of domestic animals and cultivated plants, but related equally — and precisely — to the working of the earth. Soil cultivation developed there where the «organism in natural growth» offered the ideal conditions for its unfolding. It was the mountain valleys and river regions of the Afghan and east-Iranian highlands mentioned above, which trailed away to the south-west into desert regions and to the north into the Turanian steppe territories. Here the active human being was called upon. Through ingenious irrigation systems — among others through spring catchments in tunnels driven deep into the valley slopes — the soil was on the one hand enlivened through water and on the other hand brought partially to dying through the scratch plough and the hoe. Here the handling of the interplay of death and life, of die-and-become, rises to an art. Every mechanical intervention in the soil means the stimulation of breakdown processes. Here, then, is founded the high art of arable farming, which, in connection with the cultivation of cultivated plants, rests upon the mastery of the life-bearing cosmic forces and the death-bringing earthly forces.