#ancient lothing

Ancient art and genetics reveals saffron crocus was first domesticated in Bronze Age Greece

“The authors argue that artworks from the Minoan civilization of ancient Greece are likely the oldest to depict domesticated saffron. For example, the dense patches of crocus flowers on the fresco ‘The Saffron Gatherers’ from the island of Santorini (approximately 1600 BCE) suggest cultivation. Another fresco on the same island, ‘The Adorants’, shows flowers with long, dark-red stigmas which overtop dark violet petals, typical of domesticated saffron. Flowers with these traits are also depicted on ceramics and cloth from Bronze Age Greece, and symbolically rendered in the ideogram for saffron in the ancient Linear B script. In Egypt, tombs from the 15th and 14th centuries BCE depict how ambassadors from Crete brought tribute in the form of textiles dyed with saffron.”