Flax for seed or fibre use? Flax capsules from ancient Egyptian sites (3rd millennium BC to 2nd century AD) compared with modern genebank flax accessions

Abstract In order to determine whether ancient Egyptians had already selected and cultivated very specialized flax types according to their purpose for textile or oil production we compared archaeobotanical flax finds that are kept at the Botanical Museum of the Free University in Berlin, Germany with diverse genebank accessions kept at the Plant Gene Resources of Canada (PGRC). The main result was that fibre flax was most probably already cultivated in Egypt during the the 3rd millennium BC, whereas in all later periods an intermediate flax and/or oil type was in use. The collaboration between archaeobotanists and genebank curators shows how knowledge about ancient usage of plants can be generated by interpreting observations made on ancient findings using characterization data obtained from diverse genebank material.