An attentive reader caught an error in my book on The Scientist in the Early Roman Empire (which was based on my Columbia university dissertation). It actually involves a Weird Fruit Mystery. So this article will serve as a corrective footnote, and a solution to the mystery!
In my book I have a whole chapter on progress in the Roman Empire, which includes a lengthy section listing all the things invented during the Greco-Roman era (it’s hundreds of things), every one breadcrumbed by footnote to the scholarship and sources so you can explore the evidence for it. One subsection of that is “Techniques as Technologies” whereby procedures actually count as inventions, so we shouldn’t neglect them. Obvious examples in history at large include language, urban planning, and agriculture: all are tools we invented by which we accomplish things, every much as an axe or the wheel. An obvious example from the Romans is the Julian calendar (which received a minor Christian tweak into the Gregorian 1600 years later, once they realized Jesus fucked up and they needed to keep a calendar going for thousands of years—just kidding, they just needed to get Easter right—but also, they gave in and admitted they needed to keep a calendar going for thousands of years).
In the midst of this I listed some agricultural advances that fall into that subcategory (p. 197):
Agriculturally, even Peter Green [who once laughably claimed the ancients only invented thirteen things] acknowledges the Greeks introduced “double or even triple crop rotation,” adopted the cultivation of cotton and sugar for the luxury market and the domestication of the peach, cherry, and apricot, and invented a new fast-growing wheat that could produce a double harvest. The cultivation of melons, lemons, mangos, and pineapples also spread under Roman tenure.
I’m leaving the footnotes out (you can find them in the book) and instead I put some Wikipedia or other links here (starting new breadcrumbs). One minor correction needed here is that, contra Green, whether the Romans “cultivated” sugar is less certain, but it was certainly by then imported, even from as far away as India, and Greco-Roman botanists were familiar with the sugarcane plant’s properties and cultivation. Sugarcane was cultivated as near as Arabia, parts of which were Roman by the 2nd century, but its cultivation may have been a bit further south (in Yemen). Cotton was mostly imported but some studies indicate cultivation was beginning in North Africa, which was less arid then.
The bigger error (?) is “mangos, and pineapples.” Mango cultivation is at least plausible, because it was an Old World product (it was a huge industry in India), but there is no (good) evidence it was known or cultivated further West until much later, and the artwork that has been claimed to depict a mango might simply be depicting apples or pears, from before modern efforts to grow “correctly shaped” fruit for a wider consumer market standardized the look and shape of pears and apples. An ancient wonky pear or apple is not surprising. But Pineapples seem impossible. They were a New World fruit, spread into Atlantic isles, but, so far as we know, not as far as the Western continents (Africa or Europe), until the Age of Exploration or even later. See Julius Lloyd Collins, The Pineapple: Botany, Cultivation, and Utilization (1960), pp. 18–20, and Jashemski & Meyer, The Natural History of Pompeii, p. 81, who critique this claim of pineapples in Pompeii.
I had cited for this Jürgen Renn’s 2002 study “Introduction: On the Trail of Knowledge from a Sunken City,” pp. 11–24 in Renn & Castagnetti’s volume Homo Faber: Studies on Nature, Technology, and Science at the Time of Pompeii. Renn claims that “evidence of the existence in pompeii of mangos, pineapples, and even cloth made from pineapple fibers suggests extensive trade with Africa.” They cite a presentation based on archaeology (recovered art and materials) that was later expanded into a book by Annamaria Ciarallo. But as best I can tell, the claim traces back to a linguistic confusion, and a mosaic (and a painting) recovered at Pompeii.
Here is the mosaic:
What was the artist, in Italy before 79 A.D., seeing in the bowl of fruit he painted before him here? We see (left to right), figs, apples or pears, grapes, pomegranates, and…?
Looking into this I found a blog article in Russian (use your browser to render it into English) that dove into the history of this and found that it began with speculations from this discovery in the 1950’s that this “proved” the Romans discovered the Americas. This then found its way into the Afrocentrism movement of the 1970s (see Jason Colavito, The “Pineapple” of Pompeii). That’s a stretch (if pineapples made it to the ancient Mediterranean, it was more likely by birds and floating trees, the same way they got to islands yet further West). This author prefers the theory that those aren’t pineapples, but “pine cones,” with pine needles (naturally growing from the base of its stem). That seems correct to me. This is not a pine-“apple” but a pine-“cone.” The size (too small for a pineapple), the availability (many sources attest a Roman love of the pine nuts that one extracts from these), and the accuracy of the painting confirm this.
Here is what that weird fruit is, the cone of either the Mediterranean Aleppo Pine or the Stone Pine, also known as the European Umbrella Pine, whose “fruit” would be the nuts enclosed:
The crown in the mosaic is not simply “pine needles,” but more likely a cut stem with needles. The artist was limited in resolution by the diameter of their mosaic tiles, like having to render this in 16-bit game graphics (or would this be 32-bit?). Anyway you can get a picture of what that looks like in nature here:
This also explains the reference to “cloth made from pineapple fibers,” which is a mistake again between “pineapple” and just “pine,” in this case, referring to an interesting example of cloth made of woven pine needles (itself an invention worthy of note), documented by Cirafici et al., “Pompeii and the Renewed Thread: Antique Textures and Contemporary Narratives,” in Textiles, Identity and Innovation (2020), p. 42. So all of this may just be some kind of translation error into English, although Renn’s inference that this indicated “trade with Africa” suggests not: Renn mistook modern African pineapple cultivation for ancient (there is a lot of evidence for trade between Pompeii and Africa, from pottery to papyrus to exotic animals and of course even people, just not this: Africa did not yet have pineapples then either). But whatever the case, the error is now corrected.
We have another example that has been used to claim pineapples in Pompeii, a wall painting, which you can see depicted here:
So, definitely a pizza. So that mystery is settled—no tomato sauce yet, but still (the invention of the pizza is explicitly credited to the mythological founder of the Roman people, the Trojan Aeneas, in Virgil’s Aeneid). But what are those pineapples (?) doing there? These are different things, clearly. But alas, not pineapples. Again, too small. And the leaf and long thick stem don’t match. This has also been examined and it’s rightly concluded that that’s probably a garland of arbutus, or madrone berries:
These are small (the size of strawberries), but what’s depicted here is a tight cluster of them:
You can see in the painting the correct kind of attached leaf and stem, even down to the nodules lining the stem.
So, Mystery Fruit solved.
Text corrected.
Some pineapples are small. Like most domesticated food plants, the wild source had much smaller fruits. But, yes, these are recognizably not pineapples for the other reasons stated. The poster child for anomalous propagation of new-world food crops was the adoption in Polynesia of sweet potatoes of Amazon-basin origin, along with its west-coast American name, centuries before European contact.
The 16-bit game graphics remark is confusing. First, it probably refers to 8-bit games, the number being the register size of the CPU executing the game. The low resolution was a product of the high cost per pixel of the memory needed to represent the image, and of how many pixels the 1 MHz-clocked CPU could update at the frame rate.
Correct. That’s how we refer to that colloquially. It refers to graphics capability, which translates to pixel capacity. The monitors (the “actual pixel depth” available) did not change (until long after the era of 32-bit graphics).
This is most amusingly shown in the seasons of IT Crowd, whose opening sequence went each season from 8 to 16 to 32 bit.
Not only that, but you can readily buy mini-pineapples like in the mosaic — here in Europe anyway. They taste even sweeter and you can eat the core without removing it. I believe they’re more seasonal than large pineapples, presumably meaning they aren’t imported from all over the planet.
They are now (pineapple, and mango, production has spread to nearly every continent now). But not then.
Visually the mosaic looks like a pine cone, not like a pineapple. Frankly I don’t think any European would’ve ever interpreted that as an ananas. I’m just concurring that size is likely fairly irrelevant.
PS These are even smaller, but just to give an idea of possible variety in size.
https://northcoastjacarandas.com.au/products/dwarf-pineapple-ananas-comosus-nanus
In “Wren’s London” (1988), Colin Amery suggests that the decorative architectural properties of the pineapple were so obvious that only a few years elapsed from its being brought to the British Isles for the first time, and its application as a decorative element in the neo-classical architecture of the 17th c.
Amongst all the decorations of ancient architecture — acanthus and palm leaves on capitals, “egg and dart”, etc — as far as I know, the pineapple never appears once. If they had known of it, this seems to me somewhat unlikely.
Correct. The theorists propose architectural examples exist, but per the linked discussions here, they are confusing pineapples with pinecones.
Thanks for the interesting article!
I think there may be a typo in the sentence, “Cotton was mostly imported but some studies indicate cultivation was beginning in North Africa, which was led arid then.” Should it be, “…which was less arid then.”?
Good catch. Fixed.
Apologies if you don’t want article-unrelated comments but Dr. Carrier what is your opinion on the “Secret Gospel of Mark?”
It’s a forgery. I suspect Smith was the forger (his colleague, William Harris, was my dissertation adviser at Columbia and he was pretty sure Smith did it, and the arguments against it are naive or propagandistic, and misunderstand how forgers actually operate—Wikipedia has an extensive discussion now); but if not, then it was forged in the Middle Ages or possibly the 18th century (most experts deem the hand it was scribed in was of that century, after a fire damaged manuscripts there and this specimen was copied out to preserve it; or it was fabricated as just a bit of fun).
To be clear, we mean a forgery of a letter of Clement of Alexandria that quotes this supposed heretical Gospel. We don’t have the Gospel. And that letter is nowhere else attested and was not found in any Clementine collection. In fact we are not aware of Clement ever publishing any letters at all (and yet we have extensive discussions of his opus, e.g. in Eusebius, his own writings, other collections). So the entire letter is dubious. And its congruity with Smith’s interests is a weird coincidence (why would that be the guy who found this in a completely unrelated tome that it just so happened he was studying? And then it mysteriously vanishes right before Smith’s death so no one can date it? Etc.).
@Dr Carrier (sorry can’t reply directly) Yes honestly that makes sense. There are just too many red flags about the letter in general to me. Like why would it go missing so conveniently? Why does it end right when Clement is about to offer an explanation of the scandalous-seeming material (like the forger didn’t want to write anything that could explain it away as mundane symbolism)? The whole thing feels like “Salamander Letter” shenanigans to an extent
It does. Granted, each of these things “has an explanation,” but it’s not a fully probable one, and to depend on so many “just so” stories to get it to be authentic lends us evidence it’s not. Really, I think the only debate left is what century it was forged in; and not whether it is a forgery. But even within the “when” debate Smith remains suspect number one.
I think, this is neither a pineapple nor even a pine cone, it’s just an ancient pastry (small savory buns with olives, look like Greek κουρού πιτάκια cookies). There’s also another bun behind it. The green “tail” clearly doesn’t belong to this object; it’s just some greenery, like the one on the left.
That’s an interesting hypothesis but IMO it doesn’t track. The bowl is only fruit (we’d say fruit and nuts, but that wasn’t as strict a distinction then). It represents nature’s bounty, not processed goods (hence the unprepared fish and still-living fowl).
The thing behind it is another cone. And there wouldn’t be any reason to depict mystery floating greenery there (especially something scraggly and unidentifiable). The artist intends that to signal what they are depicting: a pinecone plucked from the tree (this isn’t a painting but a mosaic, it’s thus designed, not drawn from life).