Detecting The Poppy!
Post date: Mar 04, 2017 10:43:53 AM
The poppy is a potent symbol in Britain today and can arouse strong emotions, one only has to look at the reactions to FIFA banning the wearing of the poppy emblem on the football field. I recently wrote a piece about the poppy, commemoration and World War One; to help me understand why the poppy aroused so much emotion, I explored its history and discovered a story of human connections, a story that evolved over an enormous span of time. The story hinted at Mesopotamian roots, but the evidence seemed to be elusive, so I decided to find out more.
Today the corn poppy can be seen in high summer, when the fields are full of golden corn; it is synonymous with human action, disturbed earth and cultivated fields. Likewise, the opium poppy enjoys tilled earth and the acquaintance of people. It is hardly surprising therefore that the poppy has been associated with some of the first people that tilled the earth.
Writing in 2013, Nicholas Saunders explored the story of the poppy. He reasoned that the Sumerians were likely to know of the poppy, their agriculture having been developed out of plant domestication. The Sumerians occupied the southern Mesopotamian plains (between the Euphrates and Tigris rivers) and flourished from around 3000 BC. Saunders states that ‘the relationship between Sumerian agriculture, religion and an as yet unspecified poppy cultivar is clear in art if not yet in archaeology’. This is based on a carved stone fragment of a drinking vessel (in the State Museum of Berlin) which shows Nisaba, Sumerian goddess of the grain harvest, with ‘poppy capsules’ extending from her shoulders. Actual archaeological evidence for the poppy plant itself, however, is missing.
Cuneiform texts discovered over 100 years ago in Nippur (modern day Nufar) were studied by Professor Raymond Dougherty (1927); he suggested that pictographic signs spelt out the words HUL GIL, which he translated as the ‘joy plant’ – could this be opium?
Dougherty began to look for more evidence of opium in the cuneiform record. This time he
translated Assyrian texts found at Nineveh in 1849. The Assyrians ruled much of northern Mesopotamia from 2000 BC, from around 900 BC, their territory extended north into Anatolia and as far south as Egypt. Dougherty discovered many examples of the HUL GIL symbol on tablets which once belonged in Ashurbanipal’s (668 – 627 BC) royal library (see right).
Dougherty was not the only scholar to examine cuneiform tablets for medical information, R. Campbell Thompson, who dug at Nineveh with Max Mallowan (and their wives) in the 1930s, also suggested that opium was part of the Assyrian medicine cabinet. Georges Roux (1992) in his book on Ancient Iraq, quotes Campbell Thompson’s translation of a recipe for urinary retention!
Crush poppy seeds in beer and make the patient drink it. Grind some myrrh, mix it with oil and blow it into his urethra with a tube of bronze. Give the patient anemone crushed in alappanu-beer.
I can see why it might be necessary to first drink poppy seeds in beer!
Disease was seen by the Assyrians as a punishment from the gods, its treatment was very much the realm of priests who would be charged with finding the ‘hidden sin’, the resulting demons of which could then be exorcised. This, however, is not the whole story; a number of medicinal texts have also been found in Mesopotamian contexts. Physicians worked alongside the priests and had an emerging knowledge of medicine, for example, myrrh is described as having anti-infectious, anti-inflammatory and anti-septic properties in a modern book on essential oils.
My interest was piqued, could I use the Ancaster Mallowan Collection to find out more about the poppy? It has been a while since I explored the collection and digitised Max Mallowan’s notebooks from Syria. This was the opportunity I was looking for to rediscover the collection, and begin exploring its complexity.
Assyrian King Ashurnasirpal II (883 – 859 BC) held his court at Nimrud, and it was here that he introduced a new artistic fashion, that of creating bas-reliefs. Saunders suggests that some of these provide the best visual evidence for the presence of the poppy. One example, held in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York clearly shows a winged ‘priest’ holding what could be described as a posy of poppy heads (see left).
I decided to search the Ancaster Mallowan Collection for more examples; the collection possesses a series of black and white photographs (taken for Max Mallowan) of elaborately carved ivories from Nimrud, many of which had been found ‘dumped’ in a well. Many of these contain similar images to the large bas-reliefs, namely images of priests stood before a ‘sacred tree’ driving off the demons of disease. There was only one possible image of poppy seed heads in the photograph collection (see below), but it is not at all certain that they can be interpreted as such.
What was evident from looking through the photographic collection was the detail with which the sculptors recorded the flora and fauna of Assyria. I decided that I needed to know more about Assyrian art and in my search, came across an interesting book The Flora of the Assyrian Monuments and its Outcomes, by Emmanuel Bonavia, M.D written in 1894. It is interesting to look back at old arguments and ideas. Bonavia mentions the poppy twice, once in a passing comment about the Assyrians possibly taking opium, and secondly to compare the outline of a poppy seed head to that of a lotus seed head (see below).
Banavia does not suggest that the poppy has a place in the artwork presented on Assyrian sculptures. The lotus flower, however, does appear on Assyrian monuments and its seed head is remarkably similar to that of a poppy seed head. Banavia is more intent on suggesting that many of the poppy like images on the sculptures are pomegranates rather than lotus seed pods (see below). This adds some doubt to Saunders argument that ‘the relationship between Sumerian agriculture, religion and an as yet unspecified poppy cultivar is clear in art if not yet in archaeology’.
The Ancaster Mallowan Collection contains a quantity of books that once belonged to Max Mallowan or his second wife Barbara Parker, many of which explore the archaeology of Mesopotamia. For example, there is a copy of R. Campbell Thompson and Max Mallowan’s book The British Museum Excavations at Nineveh 1931—1932, and many of the books come with illustrations and translations of cuneiform. I spent some time looking through these to see if I could find any mention of the poppy, but it was conspicuous by its absence. I have copied a line from Banavia to remind me that although something is absent from the records it does not mean that it was not present!
I recently re-read Agatha Christie Mallowan's Come Tell Me How You Live (1999); and I remembered that Agatha mentions the flowers she sees when she travelled with her husband Max to Chagar Bazar (Syria) in the 1930s. At the end of the book she writes ‘I am remembering a little hill all covered with golden marigolds … and closing my eyes, I can smell all around me, the lovely scent of flowers and of the fertile steppe…’. Henrietta McCall (2001) in her biography about Max Mallowan lists the flowers Agatha saw - ‘tiny blue lupins, wild tulips, marigolds, and broom, as well as scarlet ranunculous’; no mention is made of the poppy, although this could be explained by the fact that the excavations were usually concluded by late spring.
Having explored some of the cuneiform and artistic evidence I turned my attention back to the poppy plant itself and discovered an article examining The Spread of Neolithic plant economies from the Near East to northwest Europe: a phylogenetic analysis. The evidence in the report was based on the archaeological record of plant species found and identified during excavations from the Levant through to northwest Europe. The poppy bucked the trend, the evidence suggested that the opium poppy was domesticated in western Europe rather than in the Near East. Is this, therefore, where the poppy comes from, or is this just the result of a lack of archaeological evidence?
Before this blog post turns into a paper, I am going to use another line from Bonavia:
From the study of the poppy, commemoration and World War One (my beginnings), grew this study to find a Mesopotamian poppy! This blog represents only the very beginning of my musings about the Mesopotamian poppy, already I have colleagues and friends involved in the research and it would be fantastic if any readers wanted to add to the story via email.