Summary: Seed vaults have existed at least since Ancient Egypt and continue today, culminating with the Doomsday Vault Project.
At an anthropological museum in Cairo, in the tomb of King Tut, there was a small partitioned box holding more than 25 varieties of barley seed, each in its own compartment. The reason assumed for this being included among the other treasures in the tomb is that they didn't know what the soil would be like in the afterlife, so a variety of seeds was included for the King's passage into the afterlife. The natural seed banks are those areas, especially in Africa, that still grow a wide variety of crops. A more recent example of a seed bank is the Native Seeds/SEARCH program, which seeks to stock and encourage the use of crops well-suited to the conditions at hand. They focus on seeds from the southwestern US and northwestern Mexico. There is also the International Center for Agricultural Research in Dry Areas (ICARDA), which holds seeds from 131,000 varieties of plants from the Middle East, Central Asia, and North Africa, but is threatened by political tensions between Syria and the Western World. Finally, there is the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, or the \"doomsday vault\". The idea for a facility of this sort has existed since the 1980s, but has only recently been acted upon. It is a vault in Norway under ground, in the ice, where seed samples will be protected. It is run by a trust that is supporting gene banks in 40 countries to regenerate and update their records on more than 100,000 samples identified as the highest priority by crop experts. They are also helping about 50,000 samples outside larger collections in 83 additional countries get regenerated as well. The trust provides equipment, supplies, training, and labor to help protect the highest priority crops maintain their genetic diversity.