How Egyptians, Mesopotamians, Indians, Chinese, Greeks and Romans used spices and herbs, from embalming and incense to medicine and cookery, and what the surviving texts and finds actually show.
Overview¶
Spices in the ancient world were never only food. The same bark or seed might be burned as an offering, rubbed into a corpse, mixed into perfume, prescribed for a fever and stirred into a sauce. The line between flavouring, drug and luxury good was drawn differently from ours, and the evidence for cooking is often thinner than for ritual and medicine.
Egypt¶
Egyptian embalmers used resins, oils and aromatic plants, and textual and archaeological evidence points to imported aromatics among them. The best-known single find is the black peppercorns placed in the nostrils of the mummy of Ramesses II, who died in 1213 BC; since black pepper grows in south-west India, it shows a long-distance trade already in place. The Ebers Papyrus (c. 1550 BC), a medical text, lists hundreds of remedies using plants including coriander, cumin, garlic and fennel. Coriander seeds were found in the tomb of Tutankhamun. Everyday Egyptian cooking relied more on local plants, onions and garlic than on costly imports.
Mesopotamia¶
Three cuneiform tablets in the Yale Babylonian Collection, dating to around 1750 BC, contain the oldest known written recipes. They are mostly stews and broths, and their seasonings are local: leek, garlic, onion, cumin, coriander and herbs, often with salt and fat. The tablets are terse and some ingredients are still uncertain in translation, but they show a cuisine already built on alliums and aromatic seeds.
India¶
South Asia was a source as well as a consumer. Black pepper, long pepper, cardamom, turmeric and ginger were native or long cultivated there. Residues of turmeric and ginger have been reported on cooking pots from Indus Valley sites of the 3rd millennium BC, though such studies are few. Later Sanskrit medical compilations, the Charaka Samhita and Sushruta Samhita (their core texts are usually dated to the early centuries BC and AD), prescribe spices extensively within the Ayurvedic system, and trikatu, a combination of black pepper, long pepper and ginger, appears as a standard preparation.
China¶
Sichuan pepper, ginger and cassia were used in China from early times, and Sichuan pepper husks were used in ritual and aromatic contexts as well as food. Cloves from the Moluccas were known at the Han court; a much-repeated story that officials had to hold cloves in their mouths to sweeten their breath before addressing the emperor comes from later tradition and is hard to verify. Chinese pharmacology, eventually systematised in works such as the Shennong Bencao Jing, classified many spices as medicines.
Greece¶
Greek cooks used local herbs heavily: thyme, oregano, mint, dill, fennel and coriander, along with silphium from Cyrenaica, a resinous plant so prized it appeared on the coins of Cyrene. Imported spices such as pepper and cinnamon were known but mostly in medicine and perfume. Theophrastus's Enquiry into Plants (c. 300 BC) describes aromatic plants, and the physician Dioscorides's De materia medica (1st century AD) became the standard European reference on medicinal plants for over 1,500 years. See herbals and herbalists.
Rome¶
Rome is where spices entered cookery on a large scale. The collection of recipes attributed to Apicius, compiled probably in the late 4th or 5th century AD from earlier material, uses pepper in the great majority of its savoury and many sweet dishes, alongside lovage, cumin, coriander, rue and the fermented fish sauce garum. Pliny the Elder, writing in the 70s AD, recorded that long pepper sold for 15 denarii a pound, white pepper for 7 and black for 4, and complained that India, China and Arabia drained the empire of a vast sum each year.
Rome had specialised pepper warehouses, the horrea piperataria, near the Forum, built under the emperor Domitian. When Alaric the Visigoth besieged Rome in 408, the ransom he demanded included 3,000 pounds of pepper, according to the historian Zosimus.
📜 The lost spice
Silphium, the most famous seasoning of the Greek and Roman world, had disappeared by the 1st century AD; Pliny says only a single stalk had been found in his lifetime and was sent to Nero. Overgrazing and overharvesting are the usual explanations. Romans replaced it with asafoetida, a related resin from Persia and Afghanistan, which they considered inferior. Whether any living plant is silphium remains unproven.
What the ancients did not have¶
No ancient Old World cuisine had chillies, allspice or vanilla, all of which are American and arrived only after 1492. See the Columbian exchange. Nutmeg and mace, though they reached the Mediterranean by late antiquity, were rare there until the Middle Ages.