PLANTS CULTIVATED FOR THEIR SEEDS. 421 



also speaks of a sesame wild in Egypt from which oil 

 was extracted, but this was probably the castor-oil plant. 1 

 It is not proved that the ancient Egyptians before the 

 time of Theophrastus cultivated sesame. No drawing or 

 seeds have been found in the monuments. A drawing 

 from the tomb of Rameses III. show the custom of mixing 

 small seeds with flour in making pastry, and in modern 

 times this is done with sesame seeds, but others are also 

 used, and it is not possible to recognize in the drawing 

 those of the sesame in particular. 2 If the Egyptians had 

 known the species at the time of the Exodus, eleven 

 hundred years before Theophrastus, there would probably 

 have been some mention of it in the Hebrew books, 

 because of the various uses of the seed and especially of 

 the oil. Yet commentators have found no trace of it in 

 the Old Testament. The name semsem or simsim is 

 clearly Semitic, but only of the more recent epoch of the 

 Talmud, 8 and of the agricultural treatise of Alawwam, 4 

 compiled after the Christian era began. It was perhaps 

 a Semitic people who introduced the plant and the name 

 semsem (whence the sesam of the Greeks) into Egypt 

 after the epoch of the great monuments and of the 

 Exodus. They may have received it with the name from 

 Babylonia, where Herodotus says 5 that sesame was 

 cultivated. 



An ancient cultivation in the Euphrates valley agrees 

 with the existence of a Sanskrit name, tila, the tilu of 

 the Brahmans (Rheede, Malabar, i., ix., pp. 105-107), a 

 word of which there are traces in several modern 

 languages of India, particularly in Ceylon. 6 Thus we are 

 carried back to India in accordance with the origin of 

 which Pliny speaks, but it is possible that India itself 

 may have received the species from the Sunda Isles before 

 the arrival of the Aryan conquerors. Rumphius gives 



1 Pliny, Hist.y lib. xv. cap. 7. 



2 Wilkinson, Manners and Customs of Ancient Egyptians, vol. ii. ; 

 Unger, Pflanzen des Alien ^Egyptens, p. 45. 



3 Reynier, Econ. Pub. des Arabes et des Juifs, p. 431 ; Low, Aramdeische 

 Pflanzennamen, p. 376. 



4 E. Meyer, Geschichte der BotaniJc, iii. p. 75. 



8 Herodotus, lib. i. cap. 193. ' Thwaites, Enum. , p. 209. 



