Herbs From The Mediterranean Littoral
Herbs From The Mediterranean Littoral – Last spring, when I visited Epidaurus in Greece, where Asclepius had his sanitarium, or a few weeks earlier, had walked along the shores of Lake Kinnereth, as the Sea of Galilee is called today, events that occurred two to five thousand years ago did not seem at all far away.
Closeness to bygone ages was particularly real when I saw plants I raise in my own New York Garden, such as parsley, rue, sweet marjoram, the thymes, and mints, growing wild or in gardens and noted how they were being dried and used for the same flavor’s, perfumes and foods and processed to provide medicine for the same illnesses’ as they have been since before the beginning of history.
Most herbalists, and I among them, have begun their studies with— the herbals of the sixteenth century. In the Near East, however, one is very much aware that written records began a thousand or so years earlier. For source material, there is the Bible, but of more value to the botanist are the writings of Dioscórides and Theophrastus.
According to Agnes Arber in her book, Herbals, these two summed up all known Materia medica of their time and dominated the field until the sixteenth century.
Cilicia in Asia Minor, lived in the first century A.D., traveled widely, and is alleged to have been the physician to Anthony and Cleopatra.
I turned to him because he knew Greek medicine as it was practiced by Asclepius and his descendants from about six hundred B.C. for twelve hundred years. I used R. T. Gunther’s Dioscórides published at Oxford in 1934.
A valuable book on Asclepius was compiled by Emma J. and Ludwig Edelstein, entitled Asclepius, A Collection And Interpretation of the Testimonies, and published by the Johns Hopkins Press in 1945.
They took this material from the testimonies, written by cured patients, found in the ruins during the excavations at Epidaurus, which were begun in 1881 by the Greek Government and are still in progress. To these findings, they added gleanings from contemporary Greek and Latin writers.
The testimonies were described in the second century by Pausanias, who visited Epidaurus and said there were six in existence and that they were written in the Doric dialect.
The Edelstein’s present forty-three. These testimonials tell the patient’s name, describe his disease and how he was cured.
Other sources on Near Eastern medicinal plants are the writings of the great Spanish-Arabic doctor, Ibn Baithar, who lived in the tenth century.
When I was in Israel, Dr. Michael Zohary gave me a list he and Naomi Feinbrunn had compiled from botanies in 1930, in order to advance their search for plants valuable today.
Zohary also gave me a delightful and valuable book written by a native Palestinian, Louise Balden Sperger, with Grace M. Crowfoot, entitled From Cedar to Hyssop and published by The Sheldon Press, London, 1932. I also used G. Post, Flora of Syria, Palestine and Sinai, 1896, and, of course, Rehder, Bailey, — the Dictionary and Cyclopedia.
The land in Israel (I call it that, when referring to the new country, but Palestine, when speaking of the whole area as well as the land before 1948) is fertile in the north and along the coast where there are quantities of lush plants growing wild.
As in California, the desert portions require only water to produce fine crops. Almost immediately after trees have been planted in desert regions, adventitious plants appear in their shade and birds come to nest.
Undoubtedly in a short time the whole countryside will be as colorful with wildflowers as the moister hills and valleys are now. The height of bloom is in March and April. Hybrid tea roses begin to bloom in October and keep on into June. Summer is very dry.
In Greece there is very little rain and most of the land is stony and mountainous.
In early days, for I cannot call the people who came at the beginning of history “ancient” or “olden,” Hellas and her colonies spread out into Asia Minor and along North Africa.
The story of medicine, there, centers about Asclepius and his descendants, their shrines and temples. The sanitarium at Epidaurus, where Asclepius is said to have been buried, is on the Peloponnesus not far from Mycenae, the home of Agamemnon, or from Argos, whence Jason set out to find the Golden Fleece, reputedly accompanied by the great doctor.
Patients came to the sanitarium in early days, on an eight-mile road across the hills from the coastal city of Epidaurus, which no longer exists. Today it is reached by a bumpy road that leads through olive orchards and farms from the picture-book town of Nauplia situated on a bay off the Atgean Sea.
In spring, the sides of the road are pink and white with blossoming cherries, in a brilliant contrast to the black costumes of peasant women. The land is scantily covered with low colorful plants, some of them long since introduced to European and American gardens, such as Ornithogalum’s, grape hyacinths, and vividly colored anemones.
In Attica in spring, the fields were gay with many plants, such as Aubrietia, alyssums, brooms, rosemary, and quantities of low vetches with bright flowers.
The site of the “Herion,” as the sanitarium was called, is a ruin except for the theatre considered to be the finest and best preserved in Greece. The temple was dedicated to Asclepius and is said to date from 400 B. C.
The visitor is shown ruins of an inn for relatives of patients, of baths, the stadium and gymnasium, all indicative of how Greeks cured illness mainly by making the body strong and well.
The most famous buildings were the circular Tholos, considered to be one of the most beautiful structures in Greece, and the Abaton, a two-storied portico situated against the side of a hill where the patients slept the night, they saw the God in their dreams and awakened, cured, the next morning.
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