Vanilla may have been used in Israel long before its domestication in Mesoamerica, according to a new find in an ancient tomb. The monumental stone tomb stands near the palace from which ancient kings once ruled the Canaanite city-state of Tel Megiddo, in modern-day northern Israel. Later, the ancient Greeks knew the city by another name: Armageddon. Yes, that Armageddon. But Tel Megiddo is a major archaeological site for reasons that have nothing to do with the theological cloud that hangs over it.

In 2016, archaeologist Melissa Cradic of the University of California, Berkeley, and her colleagues excavated a 3,000- to 4,000-year-old tomb near the palace. Along with the remains of at least nine people, the tomb contained lavish decorations and funerary goods, including four small jugs. When archaeologist Vanessa Linares of Tel Aviv University analyzed the organic residues left behind on the insides of the jugs, she found something surprising: three of the four contained organic compounds called vanillin and 4-hydroxbenzaldehyde, which are the major compounds found in vanilla extract; they’re the chemicals that give vanilla its familiar taste and scent. After Linares and her colleagues ruled out other possible sources of contamination, they determined that the residue left behind on the offering jugs could only have come from the seed pods of the vanilla orchid.

“This is based on the profuse quantity of vanillin found in the juglets that could have only derived from the abundant amount of vanillin yield from the vanilla orchid pods,” wrote Linares in an abstract for her presentation at the American Schools of Oriental Research annual meeting. She pointed out three species as the most likely sources: one native to central East Africa, one from India, and one from Southeast Asia.

Vanilla worldwide

About 110 species of vanilla orchids grow worldwide in a belt of tropical and subtropical environment stretching from the Americas, across Africa and southern Asia, to the islands of the Pacific. It’s the most popular—and the second-most expensive—spice in the world, but the three domesticated orchid species that supply today’s booming vanilla trade all derive from a single ancestor, first domesticated along the eastern coast of Mexico by the Totonac people. The conquering Aztecs adopted the spice in the 1400s, and Spanish colonizers brought it back to Europe in the early 1500s.

Some archaeological evidence suggests that the Maya used vanilla to flavor their cacao beverages long before Europeans arrived on the scene, but genetic studies suggest that today’s commercially grown vanilla is most closely related to that originally cultivated in north-central Veracruz, the heart of former Totonac territory. People domesticated and used vanilla at multiple times and places in Mesoamerica, it seems, but only one of those crops spread around the globe and redefined our taste in desserts.

And the tomb at Tel Megiddo offers the first evidence that people outside Mesoamerica also used vanilla about 2,000 to 3,000 years before the conquistadors carried it home from Mexico. Then, as now, it would likely have been a pricy commodity, because it requires so much work to harvest and produce—and any of the three species Linares identified would have been imported goods. Megiddo sat perched at a crucial point on an ancient trade route called the Via Maris, which linked Egypt with the Levant, Mesopotamia, and Anatolia. Each of those destinations would have had its own trade networks, easily capable of reaching India or eastern Africa.

But what’s it doing in a tomb?

As an expensive imported spice, the small jugs of vanilla extract fit in perfectly with the lavish burial goods in the tomb, which include ceramic vessels and decorated bone inlays. The last three people buried there—a man, woman, and child—wore ornate gold, silver, and bronze jewelry to their final resting place. And the tomb itself is a stonework monument in an elite part of the city, not far from the palace. If the people buried inside weren’t royalty, they were certainly wealthy and important, according to Cradic.

“These results shed new light on the first known exploitation of vanilla, local uses, significance in mortuary practice, and possible long-distance trade networks in the ancient Near East during the second millennium BCE,” wrote Linares. The find makes it clear that Megiddo had trade contact, even if it was indirect, with distant locales in East Africa, India, or Southeast Asia and that ancient Canaanites valued vanilla enough to consider it a worthy funeral offering for the city’s elites. What’s not clear is whether vanilla had a particular role in Megiddo’s funerary traditions or whether it was just an expensive luxury to include alongside jewelry and finely crafted ceramics. The presence of vanillin and 4-hydroxbenzaldehyde also isn’t enough to reveal exactly where in the world vanilla was being harvested at the time, how it was used, or what eventually happened to the crop.

But there’s a final plot twist in vanilla’s story. Today, most domesticated vanilla comes from Mesoamerican stock, and although it’s still a commercial crop in the Caribbean, Central America, and South America, it’s grown mostly on Madagascar and in the islands of the Indian Ocean, including Indonesia.