Has anyone seen this blog, titled 'The Polyglot Vegetarian: grazing through the world of words'?
http://polyglotveg.blogspot.com/
This is an entry where he speaks of Kamut, the 'great-grandfather' of grains, that could be from Khorasan Province in eastern Iran (north of Arg-e Bam and south of Mashad is a long stretch of desert today; hardly an ideal climate for wheat production). Anyway, on the right-hand side of the blog, you'll find tools to trace etyomologies (digital dictionaries, etc). Bob, he also breaks down the major divisions of wheat.
"My wife likes variety in her breakfast. So we have a box of Kamut Flakes on the kitchen table. The back of the box says, "Cereal of the Pharaohs", and the front,
KAMUT (kah-moot), the "Great Grandfather of Grains".
Derived from the ancient Egyptian word for "Wheat", this high-energy grain was discovered thousands of years ago.
Never mind coordination problems in the telling, there are stories of the origin of the food and its name here.
Kamut® is a trademark for cultivar QK-77 of Khorasan wheat, owned by the Quinn family and their company. It is also a Protected Plant Variety (8900108), which allows control of seed distribution under any name. As its website admits and the Wikipedia page explains, it does not descend from a few grains preserved for millennia in a sealed tomb, but from some relatively isolated Middle Eastern crops that were introduced to the North American plains around WWII.
The major divisions of wheat (Triticum spp.) are:
Einkorn (T. monococcum), a diploid species that was cultivated early on.
Emmer (T. dicoccon), a cultivated tetraploid species from Wild Emmer (T. dicoccoides), a wild hybrid of two other diploid species.
Durum (T. durum), another tetraploid species from Wild Emmer.
Spelt (T. spelta), a hexaploid species, hybridized under cultivation from Emmer or Durum and some wild diploid species.
Common wheat (T. aestivum), another hexaploid species.
Khorasan wheat is tetraploid like durum and has been variously classified as T. polonicum, T. turgidum, and now T. turanicum. (All these tetraploid species are sometimes considered subspecies of T. turgidum.) Here is a diagram of the genealogy. Looks like it's the Uncle of Grains (on the web, it was "Great-Great Grandfather"). It is also known as Oriental wheat; in Chinese, 杂生小麦 za2 sheng1 xiao3 mai4 'mixed breed wheat'; in Russian, пшеница туранская pshenitsa turanskaia 'Turanian wheat'.
Further color to the story is supplied by the article “Kamut: A New Old Grain” in Gastronomica. This article can be purchased online as a DRM-encumbered PDF for $12. But that is the cover price of the whole magazine. Fortunately, the MIT Press bookstore (at once one of the nerdiest and one of the hippest bookstores in Boston) has just started to stock Gastronomica, including some back issues. (The article incorrectly states that the protection certificate lasts for sixteen years, and so expired in 2006; it lasts for eighteen years until 2008.)"