Literary evidence for taro in the ancient Mediterranean: A chronology of names and uses in a multilingual world.

Ilaria Maria Grimaldi,Nicole Boivin,Giulia Tozzi,Tinde Van Andel,Peter J Matthews,Antonino Nastasi,Sureshkumar Muthukumaran,Rainer Bussmann

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0198333

Abstract

Taro, Colocasia esculenta (L.) Schott, is a vegetable and starchy root crop cultivated in Asia, Oceania, the Americas, Africa, and the Mediterranean. Very little is known about its early history in the Mediterranean, which previous authors have sought to trace through Classical (Greek and Latin) texts that record the name colocasia (including cognates) from the 3rd century BC onwards. In ancient literature, however, this name also refers to the sacred lotus, Nelumbo nucifera Gaertn. and its edible rhizome. Like taro, lotus is an alien introduction to the Mediterranean, and there has been considerable confusion regarding the true identity of plants referred to as colocasia in ancient literature. Another early name used to indicate taro was arum, a name already attested from the 4th century BC. Today, this name refers to Arum, an aroid genus native to West Asia, Europe, and the Mediterranean. Our aim is to explore historical references to taro in order to clarify when and through which routes this plant reached the Mediterranean. To investigate Greek and Latin texts, we performed a search using the Thesaurus Linguae Graecae (TLG) and the Thesaurus Linguae Latinae (TLL), plus commentaries and English and French translations of original texts. Results show that while in the early Greek and Latin literature the name kolokasia (Greek κολοκάσια) and its Latin equivalent colocasia refer to Nelumbo nucifera Gaertn., after the 4th century AD a poorly understood linguistic shift occurs, and colocasia becomes the name for taro. We also found that aron (Greek ἄρον) and its Latin equivalent arum are names used to indicate taro from the 3rd century BC and possibly earlier.

Highlights

We referred mainly to the Thesaurus Linguae Graecae [28], a digital corpus of Greek texts from Homer (8th century BC) to the fall of Byzantium (1453 AD), and the Thesaurus Linguae Latinae [29], a Latin lexicon which includes all Latin texts from the classical age to the 7th century AD
Taro is widely distributed across the Mediterranean (Fig 1). It is extensively cultivated in Egypt [2, 62] where it is a common root crop known by the Arabic name qolqas (‫)القلقاس‬ and in Cyprus, where it is known by the Greek name kolokasi [2]
A century later, Paolo Boccone, a Sicilian botanist, wrote that people living in Mililli, used to eat taro, known among them as Culcasi [see S8 Text], in times when wheat and bread were overpriced [61]. This indicates that taro was considered a substitute for wheat and served as a secondary, reserve crop, a role noted in modern Cyprus [2]. The textual records, those in Arabic, strongly suggest that by the 8th to late 12th centuries, taro was widespread in the Mediterranean as a food, medicinal and ornamental plant, and identified with various cognates of the names qolqas or colocasia

Summary

Introduction

For which literary evidence suggests cultivation in Mesopotamia from the 12th century BC [116], taro could have been grown in the flooded plains of ancient Iraq before being taken westwards to the Mediterranean Such a chronology for the introduction of the crop to the Mediterranean region fits with what we know generally about the exchange of domesticated crops and cattle in the Classical period.

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Conclusion