xii ETYMOLOGY OF THE WORDS CROCUS AND SAFFRON. 



Latest of all are our authorities, for the Arabic kurkum and the Sanskrit kuhkuma. 

 Although Saffron is mentioned in Arabic literature before the time of Muhammed, 

 the poet Nabiga DhubyanI, speaking of sa'feran as an article of female toilet, a 

 perfumed dye or ointment for the whole body, it is only in the medical literature of 

 the centuries subsequent to the date of the Hegira (622 a.d.) that the word kurkum 

 is met with. It is really upon the Arabian use of this word to signify Turmeric more 

 commonly than Saffron, and upon the ambiguity of the Aramaic names, that is based 

 the suspicion that the karkom of the Song of Solomon means Turmeric. It has just 

 been pointed out that this very ambiguity of the Aramaic words, so far as they are 

 concerned, leaves the question absolutely open, or argues, if at all, in favour of Saffron ; 

 and the quotations from Ibn Baitar given above show that the Arabic meant Saffron 

 before it meant Turmeric. But let us put them aside, and simply ask why the 

 ambiguous Arabic representative of karkom should be more decisive of its meaning 

 than the Greek representative, which is just as clearly the same word, whose use to 

 translate karkom is 750 years, and whose earliest use is at least more that 1,000 

 years older, and which has the advantage of never being ambiguous, of always 

 signifying Crocus, never Curcuma?* 



We are now in a position to consider the statement that karkom was borrowed 

 from the Sanskrit kuhkuma, the word having come from India. It must already be 

 clear that this is only possible if karkom means Saffron, that being the only meaning 

 of kuiikuma. Now that we have disposed of the imagination that the Saffron drug or 

 plant was introduced from India, there remains no ground for supposing karkom to 

 have come from kuhkuma, rather than kuhkuma from karkom, beyond the fact that 

 Sanskrit is a very old language. But the word kuhkuma has not been found in very old 

 Sanskrit ; it does not occur in Vedic literature, a silence which would be a little 

 surprising as to the name of so noble and almost sacred a drug, had it been used there 

 so early as to have been exported to Palestine before the time of Solomon, and to 

 Greece before the date of the Homeric poems. 



The passages where the word kuiikuma occurs are collected in the St. Petersburg 

 Sanskrit Lexicon, ii, 307, under ^j'fi^T. They are numerous, but are all cited from 

 writings which, although of uncertain date, are undoubtedly far later than the Christian 

 era, perhaps all more than 1,000 years later. 



Therefore we may conclude with some probability that the word karkom signified 

 Saffron and not Turmeric, and with some certainty that it had its origin, not in 

 Sanskrit, but in one of the languages, whether Semitic or not, of the region in which 



* That the Greek poets and botanists may have used the word Kpoicos of other species of the genus Crocus 

 besides Crocus sativus, does not affect this argument. 



