As noted earlier, three cereals (barley, durum or emmer wheat and einkorn wheat), four species of legumes (pea, lentil, chickpea and bitter vetch) and flax, which is neither a cereal nor a legume but rather belongs to the Linaceae family, form the founder crops of the Near East. In this chapter, we compare the biological characteristics of the two main crop groups, the cereals and the legumes. Through this comparison, we shall attempt to trace the manner in which Neolithic farmers assembled their agricultural crop package. As in previous chapters, where we compared wild and domesticated plants and traditional and modern farming systems, in this chapter, too, we compare cereals and legumes based on a detailed study of the different wild species and their domesticated derivatives. Here, as in Chapter 7, we use traditional cultivars (landraces) (see Glossary, Botany, Ecology and Agronomy, Traditional cultivar (landrace)) as a reference rather than modern cultivars that were bred during the last century.