A sickle, bagging hook, reaping-hook or grasshook is a single-handed agricultural tool designed with variously curved blades and typically used for harvesting or reaping grain crops, or cutting succulent forage chiefly for feeding livestock.

This great diversity of sickle types across many cultures can be divided into smooth or serrated blades, both of which can be used for cutting either green grass or mature cereals using slightly different techniques.

The serrated blade that originated in prehistoric sickles still dominates in the reaping of grain and is even found in modern grain-harvesting machines and in some kitchen knives.

Sickle blades found during this time were made of flint, straight and used in more of a sawing motion than with the more modern curved design.

[1] Research on domestication rates of wild cereals under primitive cultivation found that the use of the sickle in harvesting was critical to the people of early Mesopotamia.

The relatively narrow growing season in the area and the critical role of grain in the late Neolithic Era promoted a larger investment in the design and manufacture of sickle over other tools.

[5]Due to this passage, despite the fact that Pliny does not indicate the source on which he based this account, some branches of modern Druidry (Neodruids) have adopted the sickle as a ritual tool.

Bigger Hasiya is called Khurpa (or Khoorpa) where the curve is less pronounced, is much heavier and is used to sever branches of trees with leaves (for animal feed), chop meat etc.

The genealogy of sickles with serrated edge reaches back to the Stone Age, when individual pieces of flint were first attached to a "blade body" of wood or bone.

In many countries on the African continent, Central and South America as well as the Near, Middle and Far East this is still the case in the regions within these large geographies where the traditional village blacksmith remains alive and well.

Then, by 1897, the Redtenbacher Company of Scharnstein, in Austria—at that time the largest scythe maker in the world—designed its own machine for the job, becoming the only Austrian source of serrated sickles.

While in Central Europe the smooth-edged sickle—either forged or machined (alternately referred to as "stamped") - has been the only one used (and in many regions the only one known), the Iberian Peninsula, Sicily and Greece long had fans of both camps.

The many small family-owned enterprises in what is now Italy, Portugal and Spain produced sickles in both versions, with the teeth on the serrated models being hand-cut, one at a time, until the mid-20th century.

The Falci Co. of Italy (established in 1921 as a union of several formerly independent forges) developed its own unique method of industrial scale serrated sickle production in 1965.

Their innovations, which included tapered blade cross section (thicker at the back - for strength - gradually thinning towards the edge - for ease of penetration) were later adopted by Europe's largest sickle producer in Spain as well as, more recently, a company in India.

A blade which is used regularly to cut the silica-rich stems of cereal crops acquires a characteristic sickle-gloss, or wear pattern.

Examples include the Japanese kusarigama and kama, the Chinese chicken sickles, and the makraka of the Zande people of north central Africa.

It developed from the sickle in most parts of Britain during the mid to late 19th century, and was in turn replaced by the scythe, later by the reaping machine and subsequently the swather.

It was still used when the corn was bent over or flattened and the mechanical reaper was unable to cut without causing the grain to fall from the ears and wasting the crop.