The Mechanical Handling and Storing of Material

CHAPTER XLII THE WAREHOUSING OF GRAIN Silo warehouses are intimately connected with the mechanical handling of material, as grain and seeds must be conveyed to and from silos or floor warehouses by mechanical means, and the storage of grain in elevated silos will admit of its being withdrawn by its own gravity without the aid of manual labour. A silo warehouse has obvious advantages over a floor warehouse as far as labour saving is concerned, but it is also an undoubted fact that some grain, particularly home- grown English and other soft wheat, is better stored in floor bins, because grain stored in high silos is subjected to great pressure, which has a tendency to raise the temperature of damp wheat. If it must be stored in silos it is neces- sary to turn it over at intervals. Fig. 941. Ancient Egyptian Granary, from The problem of how to store grain engaged the attention of the early Egyptians and of other nations of antiquity. Two distinct systems of grain storage were known to the ancients. The most primi- tive way was in all proba- bility that of storing grain in pits or excavations in the ground, the object being to keep the grain as far as possible from contact with the air. This system is still in extensive use in Turkey and other Eastern countries, an instance in point being the rock pits of Malta in which wheat is stored to-day. The ancient Egyptian granary illustrated in Fig. 9411 is from a fresco in the tomb at Beni-hasan, twelfth dynasty after Lepsius, and represents the officers of the Nomarch Khnumhotep at Beni-hasan with the scribes and functionaries of the government. On the left is the treasury, where the gold and silver rendered in exchange for grain is weighed, and the amount booked ; in the middle is the steward of the estate, who records the amount of corn bought; and on the right the sacks are filled with grain and carried into the granary under the supervision of an official, and a clerk records the quantity deposited in the store. Later on another and radically different system was adopted, which is still used even in this country. This method consisted in spreading grain over a floor of hard earth or concrete, and of bringing it as much as possible in contact with the atmosphere by turning the layers of grain over from time to time. In modern days the ancient practice (which is undoubtedly the most correct one) of more or less excluding the air from stored grain has been to a great extent reverted to. 1 From “ Engineering of Antiquity” by the same author. C65