Leafing through my papers I came upon some notes on the history of composting, which I have kept over the years and
which are probably very incomplete but provide a brief insight into the history in Germany (cum grano salis) besides the documents from East Asia where composting is known to have been practiced for appr. 4000 years. These snippets encouraged me to sift through the literature to, on the one hand, confirm the many unverified statements and, on the other hand, seek the assistance of my colleague Dr. Luis F. Diaz to help add further pieces to the mosaic.
Numerous statements on composting in historical times can be found in the literature. Unfortunately, in most cases without any indication of source. We added to the following collection only those pieces of information that are verified by sources that we have read and can quote. So, if the observant reader has the impression that some information is missing that often appear in the introduction of publications on composting, then this concerns those that we could not verify. This is especially true for references to composting in China and in the Orient as well as to vermicomposting.
In terms of literature, composting is a top performer. Already in 1972, a list of the literature on waste management, published in "Müllhandbuch" ('Waste Manual') by Erich Schmidt Verlag, included more than 1600 citations, which is far more than any other area of waste management can offer. I am not a slow reader, but it is still not easy to obtain an overview due to the enormous amount of literature written on composting. Google returns appr. 573,000 hits to the search word "Kompostierung" (German for 'composting'); the search word "composting" returns 17,000,000 sites on the internet.
Compared to this, the well-known musicians, the Beatles, look quite outdistanced with only 173,000 sites. Our own libraries comprise a humble 4000 articles and books on composting. Who then could still be able to keep track; and even if many texts are merely quotations of earlier ones these have to be skimmed at least to find out if they contain new information or if they are only citations of earlier articles. We hope that the reader will forgive us that, in all probability, we were able to consider only a small fraction.
The following is thus a journey through the literature of 4000 years and, due to the abundance of information, surely it is a mere extract without any claim on being complete.