PLANTS CULTIVATED FOR THEIR SEEDS. 337 



the Italians also took the Arab name currabo, carubio, 

 whence the French caroubier. It seems that it must 

 have been introduced after the Roman epoch by the 

 Arabs of the Middle Ages, when there was another name 

 for it. These details are all in favour of Bianca's 

 theory of a more southern origin than Sicily. Pliny 

 says the species belonged to Syria, Ionia, Cnidos, and 

 Rhodes, but he does not say whether it was wild or 

 cultivated in these places. Pliny also says that the 

 carob tree did not exist in Egypt. Yet it has been 

 recognized in monuments belonging to a much earlier 

 epoch than that of Pliny, and Egyptologists even 

 attribute two Egyptian names to it, kontrates or jiri. 1 

 Lepsius gives a drawing of a pod which appears to 

 him to be certainly a carob, and the botanist Kotschy 

 made certain by microscopic investigation that a stick 

 taken from a sarcophagus was made from the wood of 

 the carob tree. 2 There is no known Hebrew name for 

 the species, which is not mentioned in the Old Testament. 

 The New Testament speaks of it by the Greek name in 

 the parable of the prodigal son. It is a tradition of the 

 Christians in the East that St. John Baptist fed upon 

 the fruit of the carob in the desert, and hence came 

 the names given to it in the Middle Ages bread of 

 St. John, and Johannis brodbaum. 



Evidently this tree became important at the beginning 

 of the Christian era, and it spread, especially through 

 the agency of the Arabs, towards the West. If it had 

 previously existed in Algeria, among the Berbers, and in 

 Spain, older names would have persisted, and the species 

 would probably have been introduced into the Canaries 

 by the Phoenicians. 



The information gained on the subject may be 

 summed up as follows : 



The carob grew wild in the Levant, probably on the 

 southern coast of Anatolia and in Syria, perhaps also in 



1 Lexicon Oxon., quoted by Pickering, Chron. Hist, of Plants, p. 141. 



2 The drawing is reproduced in Unger's Pflanzen des Alien JEgyptens, 

 fig. 22. The observation which he quotes from Kotschy needs confirma- 

 tion by a special anatomist. 



Z 



