Session 4: PHARMACOBOTANY IN SAGAS, MYTHS, AND APPLICATIONS, IN ANCIENT CIVILIZATIONS 

Organizers: Prof. I.B. Chinou & Assoc. Prof. Nektarios Aligianis (National and Kapodistrian Univ of Athens, Section of Pharmacy, Lab of Pharmacognosy and Chemistry of Natural Products, Greece)

Abstract:

The history of technologies of pharmacology and botanology in ancient World characterizes an environmental and political status proper for the development of natural medicine and more. Research on the diachronic information about a region rather than one specific site, coupled with contemporary landscape and vegetation is mostly in demand. There was the wide-scale transition of many human cultures during the Neolithic period from a lifestyle of hunting and gathering to one of agriculture and settlement, making an increasingly large population possible. These settled communities permitted humans to observe and experiment with plants to learn how they grew and developed. This new knowledge led to the domestication of plants.

Nomadic hunter-gatherer societies passed on, by oral tradition, what they knew (their empirical observations) about the different kinds of plants that they used for food, shelter, poisons, medicines, for ceremonies and rituals etc. The uses of plants by these pre-literate societies influenced the way the plants were named and classified—their uses were embedded in folk-taxonomies, the way they were grouped according to use in everyday communication. The nomadic life-style was drastically changed when settled communities were established by the end of the last Glacial period and the onset of the Holocene, with the called agricultural revolution, during the early Neolithic Revolution which extended from about 10,000 to 4000 BP depending on the region. With these communities came the development of the technology and skills needed for the domestication of plants and animals and the emergence of the written word provided evidence for the passing of systematic knowledge and culture from one generation to the next (Morton 1981). Changes in key traits occurring during the processes of plant domestication have long been subjects of debate. Only in the case of genetic analysis or with extensive plant remains can specific sets of changes be documented. Historical details of the plant domestication processes are rare and other evidence of morphological change can be difficult to obtain, especially for those vegetables that lack a substantial body of archaeological data. Botanical records chronicled in the ancient literature of established ancient civilizations, such as that of Greece and China, are invaluable resources for the study and understanding of the process of plant domestication.

In the great civilizations (e.g. Greek, Chinese, Egyptian, Indian) pharmacology and botany are cultural assets, and in antiquity actors played a significant role in the transmission of pharmacological and botanical knowledge. The session welcomes contributions related to sagas, myths and the applications of botanology as pharmaceutical entities to therapy. Botanology first appears in the teachings of Aristotle’s student Theophrastus at the Lyceum in ancient Athens in about 350 BC; this is considered the starting point for modern botany. In Europe, this early botanical science was soon overshadowed by a medieval preoccupation with the medicinal properties of plants that lasted more than 1000 years. During this time, the medicinal works of classical antiquity were reproduced in manuscripts and books called herbals. In China and the Arab world, the Greco-Roman work on medicinal plants was preserved and extended (Wang et al 2008).

The cultivation, trade and transmission of knowledge was established by the authorities who claims to have expertise and effective treatments. Transmission occurred orally, and attitudes toward the written word in general, and recipes in particular, were ambivalent. The question of efficacy from a cross-cultural point of view is of interest and here where botany meets archaeology and archaeometry. The culturally bound efficacy is adopted in the modern era using ancient texts for bioprospecting (“new” remedies). This interdisciplinary session involves collaborative studies including historians, archaeological scientists, environmental archaeologists (ethno)-pharmacists, geoarchaeologists.

Presentations involving documentation of analytical work (organic residue analysis etc), and agro-cultural evidence, but literature sources too, on the duality of pharmacobotany and ancient cultures. Examples of key research interests include: research results on palaeobotanical remains that archaeologists can recover and the methods used to analyse them, the importance of iconographic and textual evidence on ancient plants, diet and palaeoeconomy, medicines, poisons, and psychotropics; perfumes, cosmetics, and dyes; and prestige.

Bibliography:

Totelin L.M.V 2016 Technologies of Knowledge: Pharmacology, Botany, and Medical Recipes. Oxford Handbooks online. Series:  Classical Studies, Ancient Science and Medicine. 

Morton, A. G. (1981). History of Botanical Science: An Account of the Development of Botany from Ancient Times to the Present Day. London: Academic Pres

Jin-Xiu Wang, Tian-Gang Gao, Sandra Knapp (2008) Ancient Chinese Literature Reveals Pathways of Eggplant Domestication. Annals of Botany, Volume 102, Issue 6, 891–897.

Day Jo (2013) Botany meets archaeology: people and plants in the past. Journal of Experimental Botany, Volume 64, Issue 18, 5805–5816.