Carrots in Ancient Manuscripts

Illustrations of Carrots in Ancient Manuscripts or Early Printed Books

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This page takes a detailed look at how carrots were illustrated in some of the famous Materia Medica Manuscripts and Early Printed Books. (most images have a larger version, please check the hyperlinks) Read some of the significant references in Ancient Herbals here.



NEWS - The World Carrot Museum has the honour of having an article published in the renowned academic journal Chronica Horticulturae. Co-authored with Jules Janick, the James Troop Distinguished Professor in Horticulture, Department of Horticulture & Landscape Architecture, Purdue University. The item is called Carrot History and Iconography, a fascinating journey through the Carrot's development from Wild to Domesticated Orange and beyond. Full copy here (page 13 onwards). Extract here.

osed to being printed or reproduced some other way. The term may also be used for information that is hand-recorded in other ways than writing, for example inscriptions that are chiselled upon a hard material or scratched (the original meaning of graffiti) as with a knife point in plaster or with a stylus on a waxed tablet (the way Romans made notes), or are in cuneiform writing, impressed with a pointed stylus in a flat tablet of unbaked clay. (Left - Tractatus de herbis (Herbal); De Simplici Medicina ; Circa instans; Antidotarium Nicolai, 1280-1310, Egerton MS 747 f. 33 Carrot - Source: British Library Illuminated Manuscripts ). Carrots are said to have been recognised as one of the plants in the garden of the Egyptian king Merodach-Baladan in the eighth century B.C. There is no documentary evidence for this and the clay tablet, held in British Museum, with cuneiform inscription gives a list of plants in the garden of an earlier Babylonian king, Marduk-apla-iddina, the Biblical Merodach-Baladan, who reigned at Babylon in 721710 and 703 BC. It would probably have been placed amongst the aromatic herbs along with fennel, suggesting that the root was discounted, using only the pleasantly scented flowers and leaves in cooking. Merodach Baladan was the king of Babylon in 702 b.c., a Chaldean and father of Nabopolassar and grandfather of Nebuchadnezzar. The clay tablet is located in the British Museum. It lists 67 plants and appear in two columns, subdivided into groups, perhaps to represent plant beds. Only 26 plant names have been identified with certainty including leeks, onion garlic, lettuce,radish, cucumber, gherkin, cardamom, caraway, dill, thyme, oregano, fennel, coriander, cumin and fenugreek.Many remain to be identified. Carrot is currently not amongst those identified, though some of the above identified are umbellifers. A manuscript is hand written information that has been manually created by one or more people, as opposed to being printed or reproduced some other way. The term may also be used for information that is hand-recorded in other ways than writing, for example inscriptions that are chiselled upon a hard material or scratched (the original meaning of graffiti) as with a knife point in plaster or with a stylus on a waxed tablet (the way Romans made notes), or are in cuneiform writing, impressed with a pointed stylus in a flat tablet of unbaked clay.). One of the first late medieval herbals to depict plants and vegetables accurately, although it may have been based on a now lost Byzantine prototype. Such illustrated handbooks of health, as well as numerous herbals, offer a rich visual record of the sorts of vegetables deemed worthy by the physicians and for the dining table in that period. Colours in illustrations obviously degrade over time depending on such factors as type and availability of materials used and storage methods. If then you also factor in personal artistic interpretation, the colours we currently see in manuscripts and hand coloured books may well have changed over time and cannot be regarded as definitive. Another point to bear in mind is that many manuscripts are copies, or interpretations of earlier manuscripts. This is evident in another paper co-authored by the Carrot Museum Curator - "Synteny of Images in Three Illustrated Dioscoridean Herbals: Juliana Anicia Codex (JAC), Codex Neapolitanus (NAP), and Morgan 652" - where it was concluded that M652 illustrations are based on images from both JAC and NAP. A database of the three herbals is available online www.hort.purdue.edu/newcrop/herbalimages. It was previously shown that 44% of the images in JAC and NAP are common to both herbals. (Sources - Journal papers - (a) Comparison of JAC/NAP; (b) Synteny between JAC/NAP/Morgan comparison; (c) A Database for Three Dioscoridean Illustrated Herbals) The above-ground parts of plants tend to be showy, but often the roots are hidden from view. Though roots are endowed with the beauty of nature, they are enmeshed with the mystery of the unknown. Roots have been both a boon and hazard to humans. They have been used as drugs and poisons and as food. They have been the sources of comfort in myths of fairies and forest nymphs, as well as a source of fear in popular legends of devils and curses. A rich association has existed between people and roots throughout and before the development of "civilized" societies. This relationship was most often one of dependence on roots as a source of food, then medicine. But sometimes because of their appearance, colour, odour or actual chemical properties roots were given a special importance by ancient peoples. Herbals are a particularly interesting group in the history of written communication in that they have always been in circulation since the antiquities and were not 'rediscovered' during the Renaissance. Despite the faithful transcription of the manuscript text by monastic scribes, distortions inevitably crept in as the work passed from one hand to the next. Greater variation exists among the illustrations which were often painted without reference to the living world. Regional variation in both plant types and knowledge as well as differences in editorial control also contributed over a thousand years of copying to a body of herbal manuscripts deriving from a few ancient sources. This all makes for a complex history but there are two lines or branches generally identified in classifying the lineage of a herbal. Perhaps the most important is the five volume pharmacopoeia/herbal, 'De Materia Medica' by Dioscorides from the first century AD, which represents the Greek/Arabic tradition. This work also supplies much of the textual origin for the other branch, the latin tradition, referred to as Pseudo-Apuleius (sometimes called Apuleius Platonic, to distinguish him or them from a number of other authors from the middle ages called Apuleius). The original Pseudo-Apuleius Herbal was produced in about the 5th century AD.

Early handwritten herbals were often illustrated with paintings and drawings. A typical example (left) is Adam Lonitzer's Kreuterbuch - Frankfurt 1582 - A very early manuscript clearly shows an orange root, entitled "Pastenachen Mören Pastinaca sativa, & sylvestris".

(Photo, compliments of the Smithsonian Digital Collection of Early manuscripts.)

Like other manuscript books, herbals were "published" through repeated copying by hand, either by professional scribes or by the readers themselves. In the process of making a copy, the copyist would often translate, expand, adapt, or reorder the content. Most of the original herbals have been lost; many have survived only as later copies (of copies of copies!), and many others are known only through references from other texts, with pictures not made from direct natural observation. They tend to follow the same pattern - the plant's physical appearance, smell, taste and natural habitat, followed by a discussion on any known medicinal qualities, culinary virtues, and then any useful products obtained from the plants roots, leaves, seeds or flowers. Sadly colour variations (of carrot) were rarely described until much later.

European herbal medicine is rooted in the works of classical writers such as Pliny the Elder who wrote Historia Naturalis (here); and Dioscorides (here), a Greek physician and author of the first known illustrated guide to medicinal plants whose De Materia Medica (78 C. E.) formed the basis of herbals in Europe for 1,500 years and the most influential herbal of all time.

For most of human history, people have relied on herbalism for at least some of their medicinal needs, and this remains true for more than half of the world's population in the twenty-first century. Much of our modern pharmacopoeia also has its roots in the historical knowledge of medicinal plants.

A commentary on references and imagery from some of the significant manuscripts through the ages.