A reaping knife, or sickle, is a manual agricultural tool used for harvesting grain crops and moving grass to feed livestock.

The first insert sickles appeared in the Mesolithic era. The most ancient specimens found by archaeologists date back more than 10,000 years.

These ancient tools differed significantly from modern sickles. They had a straight shape, the blade was decorated with stone inserts or microliths, which were embedded into a wooden, bone, or horn handle. Before the advent of agriculture, reaping knives were actively used in gathering.

Subsequently, it acquired a more curved shape, increasingly adapted for harvesting. This evolution led to the development of the sickle, which researchers interpret as the beginning of the transition to agriculture.

In the Bronze Age, sickles made of fired clay and solid stone appeared. The first metal sickles began to be manufactured in the early third millennium BCE.

In the religions of agricultural peoples, the sickle was assigned the role of a ritual instrument. In Egypt, for example, the harvest festival was opened by the pharaoh himself, who cut the first sheaf with a golden sickle, and then ceremonially presented the sacrificial ears of the new harvest to a statue depicting the god of fertility Min.

A similar ritual existed among the Slavs, whose calendar marked August, the month of harvest, as “sickle month” (serpen’).

The museum collection houses reaping knives that were made in the 12th century, during the Jurchen Empire. They are known as Chinese-type sickles. The sickle blades are placed almost perpendicular to the handle, similar to a scythe.

The Jurchens inhabited the territory of the modern Primorsky Krai. Their agriculture mainly focused on cultivating grains. Millet crops prevailed: foxtail millet and common millet, with a significant portion dedicated to wheat. The Jurchens adopted a paddy-field agriculture system, in which all plantings were carried out on special elevated long ridges. The direction of these ridges was chosen so that water runoff would not erode the furrows and would evenly distribute across them. This helped the soil rid itself of excess moisture. This system is still used in Manchuria and China.