Abstract
Saffron crocus (Crocus sativus) is a male-sterile, triploid flower crop, and source of the spice and colorant saffron. For over three millennia, it was cultivated across the Mediterranean, including ancient Greece, Persia, and other cultures, later spreading all over the world. Despite saffron crocus’ early omnipresence, its origin has been the matter of a century-old debate, in terms of area and time as well as parental species contribution. While remnants of the ancient arts, crafts, and texts still provide hints on its origin, modern genetics has the potential to efficiently follow these leads, thus shedding light on new possible lines of descent. In this review, we follow ancient arts and recent genetics to trace the evolutionary origin of saffron crocus. We focus on the place and time of saffron domestication and cultivation, and address its presumed autopolyploid origin involving cytotypes of wild Crocus cartwrightianus. Both ancient arts from Greece, Iran, and Mesopotamia as well as recent cytogenetic and comparative next-generation sequencing approaches point to saffron’s emergence and domestication in ancient Greece, showing how both disciplines converge in tracing its origin.
Highlights
From Greece to Iran, from paintings and dyes to spice and perfumes, saffron’s flavor and sparkly yellow color has made its trail in human history
The first use of the word “saffron” dates back to the 12th century to the old French term safran that consecutively originated from the Latin safranum, the Arabic za’farān, and the Persian zarparan with the meaning “gold strung” (Asbaghi, 1988)
A recent study by Busconi et al (2021) reported a surprising amount of genetic differences. This was detected by a genomewide approach, in which primarily the global DNA methylation across five different saffron accessions was analyzed and a high epigenetic variability has been shown. These findings indicate that saffron has a higher genetic variability than previously assumed or detected
Summary
From Greece to Iran, from paintings and dyes to spice and perfumes, saffron’s flavor and sparkly yellow color has made its trail in human history. The ideogram (script character) representing saffron shows very long stigmas overtopping three pictured petals (Day, 2011a; Dewan, 2015) matching all afore-mentioned representations as well as today’s cultivated saffron This leads to the assumption that most likely all depicted phenotypes across Akrotiri and other excavation sites belong to only a single Crocus species. The main applications of saffron in Persian art were as a dye in royal carpets and funeral shrouds as well as in paper colorings and Persian miniature paintings to prevent the corrosive effect of the verdigris pigments (Willard, 2002; Barkeshli, 2016; Dehboneh et al, 2019) Despite these many occurrences across artworks of the ancient world, the first written evidence of cultivated saffron (C. sativus) is only found around 350–300 BCE in the Historia Plantarum (Theophrastus, n.d.; Figure 1E), where the saffronspecific propagation through corms is described in detail. Understanding and interpreting the ancient arts can push this time limit back for over a millennium, assisting us in formulating theories, and enabling modern saffron genetics to follow and verify these leads
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