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Allium sativum L. (Liliaceae)
Turkish: sarmisak; French: ail; Italian: aglio; Spanish: ajo; Greek: skordon; Arabic: thum
Plant origin
The wild ancestry of cultivated garlic is not known at this time. Garlic is thought to derive from A. longicuspis Regel, a plant that is native to central Asia. The Mediterranean is second center of origin.
Plant history
Garlic was used extensively by the ancient Egyptians, according to Herodotus, who tells us that inscriptions of Egyptian characters on the pyramids speak of garlic, onions, and radishes being the food of the workers who constructed the pyramids. The only problem with this interpretation is that the inscriptions on the pyramids do not detail the affairs of mortals. In an Egyptian medical text, referred to by Egyptologists as the Ebers Codex (from the 18th Dynasty (1567-1320 B.C.), compiled about 1550 B.C.), garlic is described in a variety of ways as a remedy for some ailments. From this same period, several well-preserved dry remains of garlic have been found in the tombs.
In ancient Akkadian, an extinct Semitic language spoken in the northern part of Mesopotamia in about 2500 B.C., the word for garlic was sumu, a word closely related to the Arabic word for garlic. Garlic has been discovered in the tomb of Tutankhamun and in the sacred animal temple at Saqqara in Egypt. In the Bible (Numbers 11:5) we know that the Israelites complained to Moses after their Exodus from Egypt that they missed the garlic they used to eat. Pliny admired garlic and devoted a legthy section to its benefits. As with Pliny, the Prophet Muhammad recommended garlic as an antidote to snake and scorbion bites. The ancient Greek writer Aristophanes described athletes eating garlic before exercising to ward off lethargy. The most famous ancient Greek writers on natural history - Theophrastus, Aristotle, Hippocrates, and Dioscorides - all
described garlic in a medicinal context. The Romans are said to have been put off by the strong scent of garlic, but they fed it to workers to make them stronger and to soldiers to give them courage.
Garlics have always been thought of as a food of the common people. Charlemagne listed garlic in his Capitulare de Villis mentioning that it had an Italian origin. In medieval times, garlic was eaten for dietetic reasons, especially because of the belief that it had a favorable effect on sexual performance. Garlic continued to be thought of medicinally rather than gastronomically throughout the 14th, 15th, and 16th centuries. It was referred to as the peasant's theriaca (a medieval antidote to poison) by the 13th century doctor Arnold de Vilanova. In the Middle Ages, Europeans traded gold and silver for the spices of the East, a fact that displeased kings and finance ministers, who thought the spice trade a poor one. Ferdinand of Spain tried to stop the importing of cinnamon and pepper in exchange for silver by saying "Buena especia es el ajo" (Garlic is a perfectly good spice).
