[Of] this wily race be wary, for saffron was stirred into their dishes for no other reason than to befuddle and weaken the brain.
Ancient warning for travelers to Persia
The Ancient World and the Silk Road
It was those skilled sailors from the Levant, the Phoenicians, who brought saffron both in processed form and its corms to their homeland, but also through trade to Egypt, Iran (Persia), and the Roman Empire. Of these, it was the Persians who became most enamored of the golden filaments that were being obtained through trade. In what could only be called a growing obsession, early Iranians found ingenious ways to incorporate saffron into everything from household goods to cosmetics to medicine to food.
As early as the tenth century BCE, early versions of the rugs for which Persian weavers became so famous for millennia after featured saffron threads within the weave. Later, the intense yellow color that could be extracted from the stigmas became a key dye in these floor coverings that featured elaborate garden designs. Even in death, the Iranians kept their saffron close, using it to dye burial shrouds, just as the Egyptians used it to dye the wrappings of noble mummies. Persians also used saffron in bathing water, considering its astringent and clean-smelling scent a cleansing agent, and also a medication to soothe bruised or ruptured skin. The Persians’ most triumphant use of the precious spice, however, was culinary.
Known for their elaborately elegant mode of eating in antiquity, as they are in modern times, Persians based cuisine on the principle of sarde va garme, or ‘cold and hot’, properties of their food in a methodology very similar to Indian Ayur-veda. Hot foods were not necessarily spicy or warm, just as cold foods were not necessarily chilled, temperature-wise. Rather, this principle was based on the inherent properties of foods and how they allegedly operated within the body metabolically, ultimately affecting everything from disease to demeanor. If, for example, people were suffering from ailments that were thought to be provoked by hot foods – say, a skin eruption or rash – they were given cold foods as an antidote. Persian cooks strove then, as now, to balance hot and cold foods in every culinary preparation. Saffron, which was considered hot by nature, was used to flavor stews, desserts, teas, and tisanes. Most notably, the spice was integral to the layered rice dishes called polow, for which the Persians were most esteemed and upon which Mogul Indian biryani and later pilafs are based. Rice, which is integral to Persian cuisine, is considered a ‘cold’ food, so its pairing with saffron was both logical and desirable.
Given this prodigious use of saffron, Persians did not long remain satisfied with the limited access to the spice afforded by the trade routes, and by the tenth century BCE, saffron was being formally cultivated in orderly rows over vast tracts of land in Iran. As much as Greece was the source of saffron itself, Iran was truly the source of its international reach. After that initial journey in the pouches and pockets of Phoenician traders, it was the Iranians who brought the love of saffron to the world using the Royal Road, which traversed much of what would become a vast empire, spanning, at its height, all of the Middle East to the Caucasus, to North Africa and the border of Europe via Greece and Turkey. Potentially formed by earlier routes created by Assyrian kings, the Royal Road was a postal route that served as the original ‘Pony Express’, about which Herodotus wrote: ‘Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds.
There is every reason to believe that this ancient route was involved in the transport of saffron even before the rise of the Persian Empire in the Assyrian period, a pre-Iranian empire covering much of the known world. The empire then included latter-day Persia/Iran until just after its height in the seventh century BCE under the rule of King Ashurbanipal, when early Iranians revolted against their Assyrian overlords. Ashurbanipal and his predecessors were known for their love of botany. Ancient texts of the time describe the attention they paid to their royal gardens, where exotic plant, brought by trade and conquest were cultivated. Within these pleasure gardens, the saffron crocus enjoyed a place of prominence. Some scholars have speculated that King Ashurbanipal’s gardens at the Assyrian capital Nineveh were the actual Hanging Gardens of Babylon referred to by Herodotus as one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World. An ancient botanical text said to have been written by Ashurbanipal outlines the uses of saffron as a medicinal plant. Elsewhere there is a reference to the Neo-Assyrian city of Azupiranu, or ‘Saffron City’ – but it is not known whether the city was so called because saffron was cultivated there on a large scale or simply because the town was a key trading post for the spice. Later the Persians, like the Assyrians before them (or perhaps even taking cues from their predecessors), became known for their lush, enclosed gardens, or paradeisos (the origin of the word ‘paradise’), filled with fruit trees and rare botanicals, some for their beauty and many more for their culinary and medicinal purposes. Again, chief among these was the saffron crocus.
As the Persians pursued their course of empire building, they spread the saffron corm wherever they intended to spread the influence of Persian culture. Over a period of more than two and a half millennia, this reach extended to Kashmir on the Indian subcontinent, where cultivation of saffron was successful enough by the sixth century BCE for Kashmiri saffron to become a desirable commodity on the Phoenician trading routes. Consequently, it made its way back to Greece, not only as pure saffron but in the form of perfume and medicines. The Persian love of saffron was well entrenched by the time Alexander the Great pushed east into Iran on his mission of world conquest in the fourth century BCE. Certainly, the Macedonian prince had knowledge of saffron, but the Persian obsession with the spice must surely have been something of a surprise. Soon enough, however, he, too, quickly succumbed to its allure.
Of all the lands conquered by Alexander’s army, none had the emotional sway upon the leader that Iran did, and he quickly adopted all manner of Persian customs. This included wearing Persian clothes and adopting the Iranians’ form of religious worship; he also married Roxana, the daughter of the conquered Persian king Darius. But he embodied his adopted land most fully in his use of saffron, from consuming the layered rice dishes hued gold with saffron water to taking medicinal baths heavily steeped with saffron, said to be an effective remedy for soothing aching muscles and curing battle wounds. In fact, he believed this to be so therapeutic that he prescribed it as a course of treatment for all of his soldiers.
Alexander’s belief in the therapeutic and cultural value of saffron was so great that his lavish use of the precious threads became an effective marketing ploy for traders who hawked saffron throughout the known world, but particularly back in the Mediterranean, where Alexander’s conquest had already earned him god-like status. Claiming their wares to be the very variety used by Alexander, or touting the many benefits he had recognized in the spice, traders stirred up consumers’ desire for saffron. In some ways, the Macedonian prince became saffron’s celebrity spokesperson. A century later Iran became a major center for trading silk, operating as a bridge on the northern silk routes between China in the East, the Middle East, and Europe beyond in the West. The exchange of goods was not one-way, nor was it limited to silk. Dates, pistachios,
and saffron are recorded as entering China from Iran. In one third-century Chinese text, writer Wan Zhen makes note of the saffron being grown in Kashmir, where it was mixed with wine and its flowers being given as a ritual offering to Buddha. This indicates that saffron must have also entered China via a southerly silk route that traversed Kashmir.
Medieval Chinese texts indicate that saffron was not only used to scent wine. The spice took on a singular medicinal purpose, for which it is still used today. Saffron was believed to have the ability to ward off offensive smells and generally be a purifier for the body against bad chi – the ‘vital energy’ of any living thing. Perfumes were also made from saffron in China at this time. Interestingly, then as now, there was limited, if any, use of saffron in traditional Chinese cuisine. It can be said that saffron was something of a soldier of fortune in an ancient world that saw empires rise and fall. With the conquest and the forced and amiable interchange of cultural ideas, as well as the ever-expanding commercial enterprises that built trade on both land and water, saffron managed to remain consistently on the bill of saleable goods, either as a finished spice or in the form of corms for cultivation. This remained the case even as other exotics fell out of fashion or favor. The Romans, who held sway over the last and largest European empire before the onset of the Dark Ages, were no less susceptible to the charms of the saffron crocus than other ancient cultures. Early Romans certainly encountered it first in trade with Minoans and then later through conquest. As Rome took over much of what is today Europe and parts of the Middle East and North Africa, it was ideally placed to bring saffron further west and throughout imperial Rome. The Romans’ lavish use of saffron was a way to demonstrate the empire’s mind-boggling wealth. Romans used saffron in their baths, as perfume, and in extravagant dishes; it was even strewn along the streets to cleanse the air of the malodorous vapors of daily life.
The Silk Road expanded saffron’s reach even further than the original Persian Royal Road, enabling the spice to travel to India, China and Europe.
