Early Uses of the Ginger Family

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the oldest evidence for the use of ginger family spices has been found in Asia, where it is native. A study of starch grain analysis of dental calculus from cattle teeth at Farmana, India, provided the first direct evidence of cooked ginger and turmeric.⁶ This study showed that the Indus Valley Harappan civilisation were eating food flavoured with ginger and turmeric by the second half of the third millennium BCE.

In India, turmeric was the most important of the ancient Ayurvedic spices and its use may date back even further – to 4000 BCE or earlier.⁷ Furthermore, ginger is mentioned in the Sushruta Samhita of c. 800 BCE.⁸

The use of ginger as a medicine was recorded by the legendary Chinese Emperor Shen-Nong (c. 2800 BCE) in his Shen-Nong Ben Cao Ying; the original text is lost but later compilations are supposedly based on Shen-Nong’s work. The seventh-century CE Tang Herbal includes turmeric as a drug. Confucius (551–479 BCE) considered ginger highly important to diet – ‘He never went without ginger at a meal’.⁹ J. Innes Miller referred to the practice of ginger being grown in pots in Chinese ships as fresh food (from the Buddhist monk Fa-hsien’s Travels).¹⁰

Ptolemy said of Tabropane (Sri Lanka) in the second century CE: ‘The country produces rice, honey, ginger, beryl, hyacinth …’¹¹ Gingers in the Middle East

Roy Strong refers to Mesopotamian royal banquets in the second millennium BCE in which guests received a phial of oil perfumed with cedar, ginger and myrtle to anoint themselves at the start and finish of the meal.¹² Also, turmeric and cardamom were cultivated as early as the eighteenth century BCE in Babylon and that they must have been introduced from India, where they were indigenous.¹³ Both were included in the scroll listing aromatic plants from the great Assyrian library at Nineveh (established by King Ashurbanipal, 668–663 BCE).

Ancient DNA preserved inside fifth- to third-century BCE Greek amphorae demonstrated the presence of ginger among a range of other foods, proving that it was part of the maritime trade of that era in the Mediterranean region.¹⁴

Both Pliny and Dioscorides have suggested that ginger was grown in ‘Troglodytical Arabia’ (i.e. the south-western coast of the Red Sea). This idea has had its supporters, though it seems very unlikely – ginger is a tropical plant.¹⁵ Pliny stated:

zingiberi, or ginger … is very like it [i.e. black pepper] in taste. For ginger, in fact, grows in Arabia and in Troglodytica, in various cultivated spots, being a small plant with a white root. This plant is apt to decay very speedily, although it is of intense pungency; the price at which it sells is six denarii per pound.¹⁶

Pliny lamented about the cost of ginger in the same manner that he did with pepper – this implies the popular use was a relatively new ‘fad’: ‘Both pepper and ginger grow wild in their respective countries, and yet here we buy them by weight – just as if they were so much gold or silver.’

Dioscorides commented that it could be mixed and made into a drink, and its pale roots tasted similar to pepper and had a pleasant smell.¹⁷

The error in reporting the provenance of certain spices was not uncommon, for several reasons: information was second or third hand; the actual source was at the limit or beyond the bounds of the world known to western chroniclers; and middlemen traders persisted in disguising the actual sources in order to protect their monopoly. More importantly, the error proves the route by which ginger was imported from India, i.e. by the Red Sea route certainly and probably also via the Persian Gulf. The absence of ginger from the lists of imported goods in the Periplus implies that it was imported by third parties – probably Arab or Persian traders, or by Indians themselves. The same false provenance logic can be applied to amomum and cardamom (Figure 18).

And Pliny observed that ‘Amomum is produced, also [i.e. as well as from India], in that part of Armenia which is known as Otene; as, also, in Media and Pontus’.¹⁹ Pliny also commented about cardamom: ‘It is gathered in the same manner both in India and Arabia … Cardamom grows also in Media.’²⁰

Dioscorides said that amomum came from Armenia, Media and Pontus, while cardamom came from Commagene, Armenia and the Bosphorus, as well as India and Arabia.²¹

Warmington also cited Tyrian (Gallus or Virgil), Babylonian (Galen) and Assyrian (Statius) examples.²²

These all point strongly to an overland export route via the Silk Roads for amomum and cardamom in the Graeco-Roman era. But cardamom remains have been found at Pattanam (the site of Muziris on the Malabar coast from where pepper was exported to Rome), which implies that there was at least some export of cardamom to Rome in the early centuries CE along with pepper, i.e. via the Red Sea, even though it wasn’t mentioned in the Periplus. By the third century CE, the provenance of certain spices would have been better understood.

Ginger was documented in Europe in the first century CE from Roman trade with India.²³ Apicius refers to it in numerous recipes and after pepper it was the most important of the Far Eastern spices.²⁴ It was an ingredient in spiced salts, in Oxyporum (a digestive), in salad, dishes with peas, suckling pig, stuffed chicken, roast meats and others. Turmeric, however, is unlikely to have been widely used in Ancient Rome.

The ginger family’s use as medicines has a long history. Hippocrates listed amomum (probably cardamom) in his medicines.²⁵ Theophrastus mentioned both amomum and galangal.²⁶ Celsus used cardamom in several remedies – e.g.

Turmeric appears less frequently in classical literature, though Dioscorides’ description of ‘Indian cyperus’ might have been turmeric – it was similar to ginger and had a bitter taste.²⁹ However, a recent study by researchers from Tor Vergata University of Rome on the 2,000-year-old remains of teeth and plaque of a young woman from Tuscany who lived with coeliac disease, found that ancient Romans used medicines including roots and herbs only grown in Asia.³⁰ The chemical residues in her dental plaque pointed to use of medicinal plants such as ginseng and turmeric to treat her condition (which was found by an earlier DNA study). The importance of finding turmeric here proves that there must have been some trade in it between East and West at that time. She was buried with gold, therefore was from a wealthy family, and consequently could afford expensive spices. The Indian author Susruta II (second century CE) referred to it among an extensive list of plant-based medicines.³¹

By the second century CE, caravans regularly departed the then Chinese capital city of Luoyang with ginger, cassia, cassia leaf and cinnamon.³² These and other spices were moving along the Silk Road towards the West both during and after the Roman era – in addition to the much larger quantities of spices shipped directly from India to the West via the Red Sea and Persian Gulf. The Alexandrian Tariff of Marcus Aurelius issued between 176 and 180 CE lists fifty-four items subject to import duty, including many botanicals. Diocletian’s Maximum Price Edict of 301 CE lists amomum, prepared ginger and dried ginger among the 1,200-plus products, at least showing them to be actively traded items. Justinian’s Digest of 533 CE lists fifty-six items subject to vectigal (import tax) – in what was essentially a repeat of the Alexandrian Tariff – both included amomum, ginger and cardamom.³³