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> rice - which would have not been cultivated or traded in West Asia yet

Surprisingly it was still imported in surprising quantities nearly 1000 years before it started to be cultivated. Not significant enough quantities for it to be a common staple, but still an interesting tidbit

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One day, someone - someone like you, maybe, someone with the Hacker Nature - was looking at the rice they'd bought and thought "You know what, it just *cannot* be all that difficult to just grow this stuff here, it costs a fortune to import. How hard can it possibly be?"

So they set to digging irrigation trenches, and had a go at it, and maybe a couple of shitty harvests later they'd got the trick nailed.

And here we are.

Possibly! It seems more likely that migrants brought rice cultivation. Or maybe a mixture of both. Maybe some "I wonder how we could grow that here. Lemme visit that new community of immigrants"

In Sicily and Spain, rice cultivation began because Islamic expansion brought advanced irrigation and cultivation techniques. It's called the "Arab Agricultural Revolution"

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