# Plough > Opening the soil for seed - Date: c. 5,000 BCE - Era: Prehistory - Domain: [Agriculture & Livestock](https://lastcodex.org/en/domains/agriculture/) - Rebuild stage: II (Settlement) - Difficulty: 2/5 - URL: https://lastcodex.org/en/inventions/plough/ A plough is pulled through the ground to cut and loosen the soil before sowing. The first ards only scratched a furrow; the mouldboard plough, which turns the soil over, opened up the heavy, wet lands of northern Europe. ![Plough · Opening the soil for seed](https://lastcodex.org/_astro/plate.BPfvpPst_26G5hW.webp) ## Legend 1. Yoke 2. Beam 3. Handles (stilts) 4. Coulter 5. Share 6. Mouldboard ## What it is ![A prehistoric wooden ard with a curved beam, a single handle and a pointed share](https://lastcodex.org/_astro/v1.vmC1gaK9_ZmFMQe.webp) *An ard made entirely of wood.* A plough is a blade dragged through the earth by people, animals or an engine. It breaks up the top layer of soil, buries weeds and the remains of the last crop, and loosens the ground so that a harrow can then break the clods into a seedbed. With a plough and a pair of oxen, one family could farm far more land than with a hoe or a digging stick. The ard, or scratch plough, has a pointed share that drags through the soil and opens a shallow groove without turning it over. The mouldboard plough cuts a slice of soil and turns it upside down. The plate shows both: an ox team pulling an ard on the left, and the parts of a mouldboard plough on the right. ## How it works An ard is a wedge. The share runs at a shallow angle, a few centimetres below the surface, and pushes the soil up and to both sides. It loosens the soil without inverting it, which suits light, dry ground where moisture must be kept. Farmers often ploughed a field twice, the second time at right angles to the first, so ard fields tended to be square. ![Cross-section of ploughed ground with slices of soil turned over in a row of ridges](https://lastcodex.org/_astro/v2.BggTaZMu_ZajuD.webp) *Turned furrow slices lie against one another, grass side down.* In a mouldboard plough three parts work in turn. The coulter, a vertical knife hanging from the beam, slices the ground ahead. The share, a flat blade near the bottom, cuts the slice free underneath. The mouldboard, a curved board behind the share, lifts the slice, twists it and lays it upside down against the previous one. Weeds and stubble end up buried, and the soil underneath is exposed to air and frost. A fixed mouldboard always throws soil to the same side. Medieval ploughmen worked each long strip round its centre line, so every pass turned soil toward the middle and the strip slowly rose into a ridge, which helped drain wet clay. A light ard needs one or two animals. Medieval heavy ploughs on clay could need teams of up to eight oxen. Today a tractor pulls several bodies side by side, each turning a slice 20 to 30 centimetres deep. ## How to build A simple ard can be made from wood alone, with an axe, a knife and an auger. The steps below are an outline, without measured drawings. **Find the timber.** Look for a hardwood branch, ash or oak for example, with a natural bend where a thick limb meets a smaller one. The long arm becomes the beam; the short one, cut to about 40 centimetres, becomes the share and sole. A crook grown in one piece is far stronger than a joint. **Shape the share.** Trim the short arm to a blunt point, flat on the underside. It should meet the ground at about 30 degrees when the beam is raised to the height of the yoke. Bare wood wears quickly, so carve a spare tip; a tip of iron lasts far longer. **Add the handle.** Bore a hole through the beam just above the share and fit an upright handle, wedged tight, so the ploughman can steer and press down. **Make the yoke.** A neck yoke is a beam shaped to sit in front of the oxen's withers, with wooden bows or straps around each neck. Tie the far end of the plough beam to the middle of the yoke with rope or a wooden peg. **Plough.** Use only oxen already trained to the yoke, with an experienced driver at their heads. Start with short runs on moist, not wet, soil, and lean on the handle to keep the share in the ground. > **Safety.** Oxen are strong and can panic. Never stand between an animal and the plough, keep a quick-release knot on the hitch, and give the team rest and water. Stop at once if a yoke rubs: a badly fitted yoke causes sores and injuries. Keep your feet clear of the share. ## History and evolution The ard came after cattle had been tamed to pull, though nobody knows exactly when. The oldest plough marks found so far, scratches sealed under river silt at Sion in Switzerland, date from 5100 to 4700 BCE; younger ones in northern Italy, Denmark and at Prague-Bubeneč date from about 4300 to 3500 BCE. No plough marks survive from the Near East, where it may be older still. Seal impressions and texts from Mesopotamia show ploughs in the third millennium BCE, some with a funnel that dropped seed straight into the furrow. A ploughed field at Kalibangan, in north-west India, dates from about 2800 BCE. Around 1000 BCE ploughs in the Near East gained a detachable, replaceable share, and Chinese farmers used iron shares by about 500 BCE. Under the Han dynasty, in the first and second centuries CE, Chinese workshops cast curved iron mouldboards that turned the soil cleanly with a small team. In Europe, finds from late Roman Britain suggest ploughs that could turn the soil, although their exact form is debated. The heavy plough with coulter and mouldboard spread across the clay plains of the north from the seventh century, often on wheels and pulled by large ox teams. With it, more land came under cultivation and the long strip fields of the medieval village took shape. ![A nineteenth-century plough with wooden handles and a single polished steel mouldboard](https://lastcodex.org/_astro/v3.CmSVsO3B_Z1pFbBT.webp) *A self-scouring steel plough: sticky prairie soil slides off the polished metal.* In the eighteenth century English makers built lighter ploughs. The Rotherham plough, patented in England in 1730 by Joseph Foljambe, had a triangular frame and iron on its mouldboard, and two horses could pull it. In the American Midwest, sticky prairie soil clogged cast iron. John Lane in 1833 and John Deere in 1837 made ploughs with smooth steel blades that cleaned themselves as they cut. Steam engines hauled ploughs on cables from the 1850s, and tractors took over in the twentieth century. Bare, turned soil blows away in drought and washes off in rain, as the American Dust Bowl of the 1930s showed. Many farmers now plough less or not at all and sow directly into the stubble. ## Key figures - Oldest plough marks found: Sion, Switzerland, 5100–4700 BCE - Heavy iron mouldboard plough: Han China, 1st–2nd century CE - Working depth of a modern mouldboard plough: 20–30 cm - Self-scouring steel plough: Illinois, 1833–1837 ## Requires - [Stone Tools](https://lastcodex.org/en/inventions/stone-tools/): The first cutting edge (3.3 million years ago) - [Rope & Cordage](https://lastcodex.org/en/inventions/rope/): Twisted fibres that hold the world (50,000 years ago) ## Leads to - [Crop Rotation](https://lastcodex.org/en/inventions/crop-rotation/): Keeping fields fertile year after year (c. 700 BCE) ## Sources - [Plough](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plough), Wikipedia - [Ard (plough)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ard_(plough)), Wikipedia - [Europe's oldest plow marks discovered at Anciens Arsenaux site](https://archaeologymag.com/2024/03/europes-oldest-plow-marks-discovered-at-anciens-arsenaux-site/), Archaeology Magazine (archaeologymag.com) - [When was the plough invented?](https://joeroe.io/2025/08/24/ploughing.html), Joe Roe (archaeologist) - [Tillage (chapter 10), D. Franzen](https://www.ndsu.edu/agriculture/sites/default/files/ebook/Franzen/PDFs/Franzen_Ch10.pdf), North Dakota State University Extension - [Development of the Plough: the Rotherham Plough to Now](https://dennyfarmlandmuseum.org.uk/?p=1138), Farmland Museum and Denny Abbey - [Oldest evidence of ploughing in the Czech lands (Bubeneč)](https://www.stonepages.com/news/archives/004695.html), Stone Pages Archaeo News - [Estimating Tillage Draft (TechGuide 2G-210)](https://tillersinternational.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/01/EstimatingTillageDraftTechGuide.pdf), Tillers International - [Matching tillage implements to draught animal potential (F. Inns)](https://www.fao.org/4/w0613t/w0613T0g.htm), FAO Fact-checked on 2026-10-11. --- The Last Codex · https://lastcodex.org/en/inventions/plough/ · © The Last Codex. Texts, plates and figures: CC BY-NC-ND 4.0.