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

RESEARCH ARTICLE Literary evidence for taro in the ancient Mediterranean: A chronology of names and uses in a multilingual world Ilaria Maria Grimaldi1,2*, Sureshkumar Muthukumaran3, Giulia Tozzi4, Antonino Nastasi5, Nicole Boivin1,6, Peter J. Matthews7, Tinde van Andel2 a1111111111 a1111111111 a1111111111 a1111111111 a1111111111 1 Research Laboratory for Archaeology & the History of Art, University of Oxford, Oxford, United Kingdom, 2 Naturalis Biodiversity Center, Leiden, The Netherlands, 3 Faculty of History, Yale-NUS College, Singapore, Singapore, 4 Dipartimento dei Beni Culturali: archeologia, storia dell’arte, del cinema e della musica, Università degli Studi di Padova, Padova, Italy, 5 Dipartimento di Lettere, Arti e Scienze sociali, Università degli Studi “Gabriele d’Annunzio” of Chieti-Pescara, Chieti, Italy, 6 Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History, Jena, Germany, 7 National Museum of Ethnology, Osaka, Japan * Abstract OPEN ACCESS Citation: Grimaldi IM, Muthukumaran S, Tozzi G, Nastasi A, Boivin N, Matthews PJ, et al. (2018) Literary evidence for taro in the ancient Mediterranean: A chronology of names and uses in a multilingual world. PLoS ONE 13(6): e0198333. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0198333 Editor: Rainer Bussmann, Missouri Botanical Garden, UNITED STATES Received: November 28, 2017 Accepted: May 17, 2018 Published: June 5, 2018 Copyright: © 2018 Grimaldi et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. Data Availability Statement: All relevant data are within the paper and its Supporting Information files. Funding: European Research Council [grant number 206148 “SEALINKS” (to NB)] http://www. sealinksproject.com/; Wolfson College Oxford (fieldwork grant), the Meyerstein Fund (fieldwork grant)and the Temminck fellowship (to IMG), Naturalis Biodiversity Center all supported this work. 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. Introduction Taro, Colocasia esculenta (L.) Schott,(Fam. Araceae) has a likely natural range extending from Southeast Asia to Australia and Papua New Guinea [1–4] and is now distributed as a cultivated vegetable and root crop (producing corms) in tropical to temperate regions of the world [2– PLOS ONE | https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0198333 June 5, 2018 1 / 23 Taro in the ancient Mediterranean Competing interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist. 3,5]. While the geographical origins of cultivated taro within its natural range remain uncertain, the Asian origin of taro as a species is clear [3, 4]. Its introduction to the Americas is historically modern, and was primarily from Africa via the slave trade, while its presence in Africa is ancient with Egypt (and thus the eastern Mediterranean) considered a possible route of introduction [6]. The plant is primarily grown for its edible, starchy corms, but in many areas the leaf blades and petioles are also eaten (in all cases, with cooking to remove an acrid, ‘itchy’ factor). Within the Mediterranean, including southern Europe, taro is widely grown but its use as a food crop is now largely confined to the eastern Mediterranean (southern Turkey, Cyprus, the Levant, and Egypt). Taro was previously grown as a food plant in Italy, Portugal, and Spain [7], but it is now naturalized and mainly used as an ornamental plant, embellishing fountains and ponds. The origins of taro cultivation in the Mediterranean remain unclear, despite the existence of many written records [2]. The single archaeological finding of taro in this region consists of fragments of corm tissue found in Egypt and dating from ca. 1000 AD [8–9], long after the earliest written indications of taro. The exceptionally long historical and linguistic record relating to taro in the Mediterranean has never been comprehensively investigated, and is reviewed here with the aim of understanding spatial and temporal aspects of the introduction and spread of taro in the Mediterranean basin. We use modern historical sources to introduce the current geographical distribution of taro in the Mediterranean, and then consider (possible) attestations of taro in early Greek, Latin, Hebrew, and Arabic texts. Like other writers of the era, Renaissance botanists were keenly interested in classical (Greek and Roman) sources, for information on plants, but also began to re-interpret, supplement and expand the earlier writings with their own field observations and plant illustrations [10]. The Linnaean genus name for taro, Colocasia, has ancient roots as a Greek vernacular name, but early usage of the name has been a matter of debate for centuries [11–12], in part because of its connection with another plant of deep historical interest [13], the sacred or Indian lotus, Nelumbo nucifera Gaertn. The scientific naming of taro has been reviewed by Hill [14], Plucknett [15], Hay [16], and Orchard [17]. Modern confusion in the naming of species within the genus Colocasia resulted in part from the fact that Linnaeus and subsequent authors based many of their descriptions and names on cultivated forms produced by human selection. Here we focus on the genus name Colocasia, which is der (...truncated)