[Sca-cooks] Lemons was Noty or Notye

[Terry Decker]

The Indus site with the lemon shaped earring is Mohenjo-Daro.

Aristophanes, Virgil, Theophrastus, Pliny and Antiphanes have presumably 
written about lemons (or possibly citrons; one needs to remember that 
Linnaeus considered lemons to be a variety of citron and their establishment 
as a seperate species is fairly recent) which pushes western knowledge of 
the fruit back to the 3rd or 4th Century BCE.  Whether or not these writers 
had direct contact with the fruit is another question, but the probability 
that they encountered the fruit personally is greater after Alexander's 
conquests in northern India around 325 BCE.

I've found some references to lemons being grown in Libya and imported into 
Rome during Trajan's reign, but I have yet to find the source for that 
statement.

Just for fun, here's a piece discussing the origin and spread of citrus 
fruits with a bit more on the various arguments for and against lemons:

http://lib.ucr.edu/agnic/webber/Vol1/Chapter1.htm

Bear

> There is a mosaic in Pompeii which depicts a lemon.
> There are lemon-shaped earrings found in the Indus Valley dating back to 
> 2500 BC
> Crusaders returning to Europe from Palestine were said to have carried 
> lemons back with them.
>
> "    The first clear literary evidence of the lemon tree in any language 
> dates from the early
> tenth-century Arabic work by Qustus al-Rumi in his book on farming.3 At 
> the end of the twelfth
> century, Ibn Jami', the personal physician to the great Muslim leader 
> Saladin, wrote a treatise on
> the lemon, after which it is mentioned with greater frequency in the 
> Mediterranean"
>
> The above citation is from an online article written by Clifford A Wright.
> http://www.cliffordawright.com/history/lemonade.html
>
> I have also heard that the Greeks may well have been cultivating lemons 
> within our early period of
> interest.
>
>
> William de Grandfort