ETYMOLOGY OF THE WORDS CROCUS AND SAFFRON. 



VII 



Materia Medica, to whom Yemen was a distant and rather mysterious land, confused 

 it with other roots which give a yellow dye, very possibly with other species of 

 Curcuma, e.g., Curcuma zedoaria, Roscoe. 



Confusion between the three drugs just discussed was most natural to those 

 who only knew them, or some of them, as drugs or dyes. It would be impossible 

 where all three plants were cultivated. And in practice the Arabians never seem 

 to have confounded the Safflower, so largely grown in Egypt, with any other plant. 

 It is round the foreign Turmeric that their difficulties collected ; but in Europe, 

 where Safflower is only very sparingly grown in the Mediterranean region, and 

 Turmeric not at all, we find the confusion indicated by the very names Saffron, 

 Safflower, Saflor, Indian Saffron, bastard Saffron. 



In India the names seem to have been kept pretty clear, both Safflower and 

 Turmeric being commonly grown there. The name kuukuma and its conveners are 

 never used of either of them, but confined to the true Saffron ; on the other hand 

 a large number of Sanskrit words, adjectival in form, are applied to all three plants' 

 or to some two of them alike ; but on examination these prove to be not strictly 

 plant names, but rather titles descriptive of the colour, brilliancy or excellence of 

 the dye or drug. 



There is little doubt that crocus and curcuma, krokos and kurkum, are variants 

 of the same word, and both descendants of the Hebrew karkam, 03^3, * or of some 

 similar but now lost word in the language of the Phoenicians, which may well 

 have been of some such form as krokhom, t&H3, as Dr. Furst assumes to have 

 been the case.t Yet it is well to remember that the actual use of such a form 

 among the Phoenicians is no more than probable ; no such word has as yet been 

 found among the scanty remains of their speech which have been preserved to us 

 If indeed such a form as krokhom was actually in the mouths of the merchants and 

 sailors who brought Saffron to the West, it is difficult not to suppose that the 

 Latin crocum\ was that very form repeated by those whose ears heard its sound 

 whereas the commoner crocus, which alone occurs in the poets, came indirectly 

 through the Greek krokos, and was preferred by the scholarly writers through 

 whose works we know classical Latin. 



* Song of Solomon, iv, 14. 



t H*n» and Chaldee Lexicon, sub voce. In the Hebrew kartom, the tone is on the second syllable ■ in 

 the Greek krokos on the first. In Davidson's Furst the Phoenician form is assumed to have been Kh3 

 g.ven m Lat.n letters as croccn ; this transliteration involves the further assumption that in the Phoenician 

 word the tone was on the first syllable, otherwise the vowel in the second must be a, and not o. 



% Pliny, xxi, 6-17; Sallust, H, i, 80; Celsius v, n. 



