An attentive reader caught an error in my book on The Scientist in the Early Roman Empire (which was based on my Columbia university dissertation). It actually involves a Weird Fruit Mystery. So this article will serve as a corrective footnote, and a solution to the mystery!
In my book I have a whole chapter on progress in the Roman Empire, which includes a lengthy section listing all the things invented during the Greco-Roman era (it’s hundreds of things), every one breadcrumbed by footnote to the scholarship and sources so you can explore the evidence for it. One subsection of that is “Techniques as Technologies” whereby procedures actually count as inventions, so we shouldn’t neglect them. Obvious examples in history at large include language, urban planning, and agriculture: all are tools we invented by which we accomplish things, every much as an axe or the wheel. An obvious example from the Romans is the Julian calendar (which received a minor Christian tweak into the Gregorian 1600 years later, once they realized Jesus fucked up and they needed to keep a calendar going for thousands of years—just kidding, they just needed to get Easter right—but also, they gave in and admitted they needed to keep a calendar going for thousands of years).
In the midst of this I listed some agricultural advances that fall into that subcategory (p. 197):
Agriculturally, even Peter Green [who once laughably claimed the ancients only invented thirteen things] acknowledges the Greeks introduced “double or even triple crop rotation,” adopted the cultivation of cotton and sugar for the luxury market and the domestication of the peach, cherry, and apricot, and invented a new fast-growing wheat that could produce a double harvest. The cultivation of melons, lemons, mangos, and pineapples also spread under Roman tenure.
I’m leaving the footnotes out (you can find them in the book) and instead I put some Wikipedia or other links here (starting new breadcrumbs). One minor correction needed here is that, contra Green, whether the Romans “cultivated” sugar is less certain, but it was certainly by then imported, even from as far away as India, and Greco-Roman botanists were familiar with the sugarcane plant’s properties and cultivation. Sugarcane was cultivated as near as Arabia, parts of which were Roman by the 2nd century, but its cultivation may have been a bit further south (in Yemen). Cotton was mostly imported but some studies indicate cultivation was beginning in North Africa, which was less arid then.
The bigger error (?) is “mangos, and pineapples.” Mango cultivation is at least plausible, because it was an Old World product (it was a huge industry in India), but there is no (good) evidence it was known or cultivated further West until much later, and the artwork that has been claimed to depict a mango might simply be depicting apples or pears, from before modern efforts to grow “correctly shaped” fruit for a wider consumer market standardized the look and shape of pears and apples. An ancient wonky pear or apple is not surprising. But Pineapples seem impossible. They were a New World fruit, spread into Atlantic isles, but, so far as we know, not as far as the Western continents (Africa or Europe), until the Age of Exploration or even later. See Julius Lloyd Collins, The Pineapple: Botany, Cultivation, and Utilization (1960), pp. 18–20, and Jashemski & Meyer, The Natural History of Pompeii, p. 81, who critique this claim of pineapples in Pompeii.
I had cited for this Jürgen Renn’s 2002 study “Introduction: On the Trail of Knowledge from a Sunken City,” pp. 11–24 in Renn & Castagnetti’s volume Homo Faber: Studies on Nature, Technology, and Science at the Time of Pompeii. Renn claims that “evidence of the existence in pompeii of mangos, pineapples, and even cloth made from pineapple fibers suggests extensive trade with Africa.” They cite a presentation based on archaeology (recovered art and materials) that was later expanded into a book by Annamaria Ciarallo. But as best I can tell, the claim traces back to a linguistic confusion, and a mosaic (and a painting) recovered at Pompeii.
Here is the mosaic:
What was the artist, in Italy before 79 A.D., seeing in the bowl of fruit he painted before him here? We see (left to right), figs, apples or pears, grapes, pomegranates, and…?
Looking into this I found a blog article in Russian (use your browser to render it into English) that dove into the history of this and found that it began with speculations from this discovery in the 1950’s that this “proved” the Romans discovered the Americas. This then found its way into the Afrocentrism movement of the 1970s (see Jason Colavito, The “Pineapple” of Pompeii). That’s a stretch (if pineapples made it to the ancient Mediterranean, it was more likely by birds and floating trees, the same way they got to islands yet further West). This author prefers the theory that those aren’t pineapples, but “pine cones,” with pine needles (naturally growing from the base of its stem). That seems correct to me. This is not a pine-“apple” but a pine-“cone.” The size (too small for a pineapple), the availability (many sources attest a Roman love of the pine nuts that one extracts from these), and the accuracy of the painting confirm this.
Here is what that weird fruit is, the cone of either the Mediterranean Aleppo Pine or the Stone Pine, also known as the European Umbrella Pine, whose “fruit” would be the nuts enclosed:
The crown in the mosaic is not simply “pine needles,” but more likely a cut stem with needles. The artist was limited in resolution by the diameter of their mosaic tiles, like having to render this in 16-bit game graphics (or would this be 32-bit?). Anyway you can get a picture of what that looks like in nature here:
This also explains the reference to “cloth made from pineapple fibers,” which is a mistake again between “pineapple” and just “pine,” in this case, referring to an interesting example of cloth made of woven pine needles (itself an invention worthy of note), documented by Cirafici et al., “Pompeii and the Renewed Thread: Antique Textures and Contemporary Narratives,” in Textiles, Identity and Innovation (2020), p. 42. So all of this may just be some kind of translation error into English, although Renn’s inference that this indicated “trade with Africa” suggests not: Renn mistook modern African pineapple cultivation for ancient (there is a lot of evidence for trade between Pompeii and Africa, from pottery to papyrus to exotic animals and of course even people, just not this: Africa did not yet have pineapples then either). But whatever the case, the error is now corrected.
We have another example that has been used to claim pineapples in Pompeii, a wall painting, which you can see depicted here:
So, definitely a pizza. So that mystery is settled—no tomato sauce yet, but still (the invention of the pizza is explicitly credited to the mythological founder of the Roman people, the Trojan Aeneas, in Virgil’s Aeneid). But what are those pineapples (?) doing there? These are different things, clearly. But alas, not pineapples. Again, too small. And the leaf and long thick stem don’t match. This has also been examined and it’s rightly concluded that that’s probably a garland of arbutus, or madrone berries:
These are small (the size of strawberries), but what’s depicted here is a tight cluster of them:
You can see in the painting the correct kind of attached leaf and stem, even down to the nodules lining the stem.
So, Mystery Fruit solved.
Text corrected.
Some pineapples are small. Like most domesticated food plants, the wild source had much smaller fruits. But, yes, these are recognizably not pineapples for the other reasons stated. The poster child for anomalous propagation of new-world food crops was the adoption in Polynesia of sweet potatoes of Amazon-basin origin, along with its west-coast American name, centuries before European contact.
The 16-bit game graphics remark is confusing. First, it probably refers to 8-bit games, the number being the register size of the CPU executing the game. The low resolution was a product of the high cost per pixel of the memory needed to represent the image, and of how many pixels the 1 MHz-clocked CPU could update at the frame rate.
Correct. That’s how we refer to that colloquially. It refers to graphics capability, which translates to pixel capacity. The monitors (the “actual pixel depth” available) did not change (until long after the era of 32-bit graphics).
This is most amusingly shown in the seasons of IT Crowd, whose opening sequence went each season from 8 to 16 to 32 bit.
Not only that, but you can readily buy mini-pineapples like in the mosaic — here in Europe anyway. They taste even sweeter and you can eat the core without removing it. I believe they’re more seasonal than large pineapples, presumably meaning they aren’t imported from all over the planet.
They are now (pineapple, and mango, production has spread to nearly every continent now). But not then.
Visually the mosaic looks like a pine cone, not like a pineapple. Frankly I don’t think any European would’ve ever interpreted that as an ananas. I’m just concurring that size is likely fairly irrelevant.
PS These are even smaller, but just to give an idea of possible variety in size.
https://northcoastjacarandas.com.au/products/dwarf-pineapple-ananas-comosus-nanus
In “Wren’s London” (1988), Colin Amery suggests that the decorative architectural properties of the pineapple were so obvious that only a few years elapsed from its being brought to the British Isles for the first time, and its application as a decorative element in the neo-classical architecture of the 17th c.
Amongst all the decorations of ancient architecture — acanthus and palm leaves on capitals, “egg and dart”, etc — as far as I know, the pineapple never appears once. If they had known of it, this seems to me somewhat unlikely.
Correct. The theorists propose architectural examples exist, but per the linked discussions here, they are confusing pineapples with pinecones.
Thanks for the interesting article!
I think there may be a typo in the sentence, “Cotton was mostly imported but some studies indicate cultivation was beginning in North Africa, which was led arid then.” Should it be, “…which was less arid then.”?
Good catch. Fixed.
Apologies if you don’t want article-unrelated comments but Dr. Carrier what is your opinion on the “Secret Gospel of Mark?”
It’s a forgery. I suspect Smith was the forger (his colleague, William Harris, was my dissertation adviser at Columbia and he was pretty sure Smith did it, and the arguments against it are naive or propagandistic, and misunderstand how forgers actually operate—Wikipedia has an extensive discussion now); but if not, then it was forged in the Middle Ages or possibly the 18th century (most experts deem the hand it was scribed in was of that century, after a fire damaged manuscripts there and this specimen was copied out to preserve it; or it was fabricated as just a bit of fun).
To be clear, we mean a forgery of a letter of Clement of Alexandria that quotes this supposed heretical Gospel. We don’t have the Gospel. And that letter is nowhere else attested and was not found in any Clementine collection. In fact we are not aware of Clement ever publishing any letters at all (and yet we have extensive discussions of his opus, e.g. in Eusebius, his own writings, other collections). So the entire letter is dubious. And its congruity with Smith’s interests is a weird coincidence (why would that be the guy who found this in a completely unrelated tome that it just so happened he was studying? And then it mysteriously vanishes right before Smith’s death so no one can date it? Etc.).
@Dr Carrier (sorry can’t reply directly) Yes honestly that makes sense. There are just too many red flags about the letter in general to me. Like why would it go missing so conveniently? Why does it end right when Clement is about to offer an explanation of the scandalous-seeming material (like the forger didn’t want to write anything that could explain it away as mundane symbolism)? The whole thing feels like “Salamander Letter” shenanigans to an extent
It does. Granted, each of these things “has an explanation,” but it’s not a fully probable one, and to depend on so many “just so” stories to get it to be authentic lends us evidence it’s not. Really, I think the only debate left is what century it was forged in; and not whether it is a forgery. But even within the “when” debate Smith remains suspect number one.
I think, this is neither a pineapple nor even a pine cone, it’s just an ancient pastry (small savory buns with olives, look like Greek κουρού πιτάκια cookies). There’s also another bun behind it. The green “tail” clearly doesn’t belong to this object; it’s just some greenery, like the one on the left.
That’s an interesting hypothesis but IMO it doesn’t track. The bowl is only fruit (we’d say fruit and nuts, but that wasn’t as strict a distinction then). It represents nature’s bounty, not processed goods (hence the unprepared fish and still-living fowl).
The thing behind it is another cone. And there wouldn’t be any reason to depict mystery floating greenery there (especially something scraggly and unidentifiable). The artist intends that to signal what they are depicting: a pinecone plucked from the tree (this isn’t a painting but a mosaic, it’s thus designed, not drawn from life).
You noticed the baguette among nature’s bounty, didn’t you?
Sometimes all it takes is a shift in perspective or thinking in other generalizing categories (for example, from bottom to top: poultry → fish → desserts).
The greenery extends symmetrically from all four sides of the dish, giving the composition a sense of harmony.
On a higher-resolution image you’ll notice that the “tail” doesn’t actually belong to the main object. The item behind it is darker, mb made of a different type of flour… and has no “tail” too.
That’s not what I see.
Do you have a higher resolution image to share?
(You are aware this is a mosaic and is thus inherently low resolution?)
(And there is no a baguette. I think are confusing the braided gold or bronze base of the fruit bowl.)
Yes, here is a high-resolution photo:
https://photos.app.goo.gl/KzanS5wpB1Uyt6fo7
I must confess, Richard — my earlier comments were based on a hasty impression of the mosaic, and I hadn’t looked into the problem carefully. But after giving it some more attention, I’ve come to the conclusion that the pine cone is the strongest candidate, supported by both historical and archaeological evidence. We can see similar cones in the Pompeian fresco linked below:
https://photos.app.goo.gl/GbYcznZkhCXWDyb49
This case is a great example of how even a respected scholarly authority (in this case, Prof. Casella) can inadvertently give rise to a myth.
P.S. In the context of my current work on the Gospel of Mark, I noticed an interesting connection between the mosaic and the Jewish holidays: chickens for Yom Kippur, fish for Rosh Hashanah, and the top fruit bowl for Sukkot — flanked by myrtle (hadas), willow (aravah), and palm (lulav) branches. The mysterious fruit might be an etrog (citron). The etrog version I’ve seen proposed at some Internet forum as well. Though the pine cone interpretation strikes me as more convincing.
Thanks for finding that high-res image. This is a useful contribution for everyone here.
I came across this article by Dr C K Raju denying Aristotle of Toledo’s existence: https://medium.com/@c_k_raju/aristotle-the-laughable-intellectual-superman-from-stagira-or-pseudo-aristotle-of-toledo-a85892bcefde and stating that Euclid was a Black woman. Your opinions?
Crank.
I found a higher resolution image at https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Mosaic_floor_decorated_with_fruits,_fish_and_fowls,_end_1st_century_BC_-_beginning_1st_century_AD,_Palazzo_Massimo_alle_Terme,_Rome_(24381771821).jpg
I don’t think it changes anything, at least for me.
Which shows the stem and needles coming out of the cone, not some separate unidentifiable relish behind it.
Try to trace the contours with a marker like here:
https://photos.app.goo.gl/kqybMHhdTr4oFFAe7
Oh dear.
First, your marker is literally covering up tiles. So it is destroying rather than illuminating evidence.
Second, you are outlining as tiles what is in fact damage to the mosaic (i.e. missing and broken tiles), which obviously cannot speak to the author’s intention.
The artist outlined each item with black tiles, and only broke that rule when the contour of an object is clearly already marked. Since no black tiles or other contour markers separate the cone from the needles/stem, the needles/stem clearly are intended to emerge from the cone. If you observe it you see five stems, all originating from a common source (the cone) and flaring outward. Two are light green, two (were) dark green, and one is entirely lost (all its tiles are missing so its color cannot be discerned).
This completely contradicts your penmarks.
I could have used a super-fine marker, but that’s not the main thing.
1. The black color means just some shadows, not an outline of the object.
2. The cones are not attached to the branch with a sharp end (and this is an unripe/unopened cone by the way)
3. The plucked cones in reality do not have needles sticking out of them.
4. Greeneries sticks out from all sides of the bowl (not always depicted correctly). Why not there?
5. I’n just trying to show that “green tail” is the main thing that misleads the inattentive viewer to the image of the pineapple.
Shadows are part of the artist’s way of outlining an object.
All the rest of the art uses shadows or contours to show separation of objects (as they have to with a “low res” image like a mosaic). They do not do so in this case. The stems emerge from the cone without any demarcation. They are symmetrical with each other and emerge from the center of the cone. That is 100% proof of the artist’s intention. Denying this is just getting ridiculous at this point and making you look either crazy or a troll.
By contrast, all the other greenery on the bowl is clearly depicted for what it is (grape leaves and pear stems with leaves).
Likewise:
Cones can indeed have stems with needles (needles often emerge from the base of the stem).
That is not “the sharp end.” The shape of this cone is symmetrical. It is as wide at the top as the bottom. The artist did not have the resolution with these mosaic stones to be any more precise.
There is no pineapple.
I’d really like to see an unopened pine cone like the one you imagine: with such edges and needles-stems-whatever sticking out of it. Seriously, not trolling, It’s interesting how differently people see the world.
P.S. Sure, there is no pineapple.
I’ve seen many with needles sticking up from the stem all the way to the attachment. Remember this is a mosaic. There are only five lines emerging from the center of the cone and diverging, with no further resolution. It’s a single pixel width per line for this artist. One is the stem, the other four are needles. They are the same width because of the resolution: all the tiles are the same width. So, yes, it will look weird (needles as thick as stems, and all emerging from the same point), in exactly the same way a pinecone like this will look weird in an eight- or sixteen-bit computer game. But we know abstractly what the artist is attempting to accomplish within these limitations, because the artist uses standard conventions: symmetry entails the two objects go together (the five lines are symmetrically diverging from each other and symmetrically emerging from the same point at the symmetrical center-point of the pinecone’s head). If the artist wanted this to be imagined as something else (whatever that would be), they’d offset it (it would not have this symmetrical relationship to the cone), and they would demarcate it with contour or shadow tiles, like they do every other object (it would thus be obviously distinct).
The counter-argument goes like this: if the artist had wanted these to be pine cones, he would never have added needles/stems sticking out in such an unnatural way. But we don’t know what the artist wanted, because we are not him.
I think a scientist should always have some doubt about things, it keeps his/her mind alive.
Take another nearby example: the pizza of the second picture. “It’s definitely pizza!” Like that top pineapple expert in 1950 in previous case, the pizza expert (forgot his name) confirmed the fact.
Question: why did no one even suggest that this was an ordinary Roman clay plate? (Spoiler: because it doesn’t sell)
I restored the photo a little without touching most of the contents of the plate:
https://photos.app.goo.gl/HbfMN33nP4EmTvQd6
Note the distance from the object to its reflection as well.
And I’d rather read about Judas from Bart Ehrman, it was really a bit unexpected news for me.
There is nothing unnatural here. As I’ve explained, pinecones aplenty can look like this (contrary to your city-boy-sounding insistence otherwise), especially when pixelated as this mosaic is. Pinecone needles can grow all the way up the stem, and when picked and prepped for display can end up exactly like this. You are simply ignoring reality.
And what is depicted here is done exactly within the limits of the low-res mosaic medium. All the standard artistic practices are used (symmetry, offset, bordering). You are simply ignoring standard artistic practice (confirmed across this mosaic).
Just gainsaying reality is not a counter-argument. It’s just abandoning argument altogether.
Meanwhile, bringing in irrelevant examples isn’t a counter-argument either. You obviously have not checked what ancient clay plates look like (spoiler: they don’t have un-flared fat rims), but regardless, a dispute over an unrelated object in an unrelated painting—not even a mosaic—has no relevance to the pinecone case.
I’m aware of the low resolution concept and the use of artistic techniques. I’ve analyzed the specific ones employed by the author in this composition, including the outlining of all depicted objects.
In addition, I’ve examined the botanical characteristics of the pine species whose cone is allegedly represented in the mosaic. The needles of the stone pine (Pinus pinea), measuring 10–15 cm in length, grow in pairs on its long shoots. The cones, which also reach 10–15 cm, develop separately — either on shortened shoots or in the axils of the needles. It is almost impossible to pick a cone of the Italian pine together with the needles. Even if a cone is broken off together with a portion of a long shoot, the nearby needles on that shoot will not be oriented in the direction opposite to the cone.
Based on this analysis, I realized that the likelihood of the green stems being part of the cone is too low to be accepted as fact. Moreover, for a contemporary audience unfamiliar with pineapples, the image could plausibly have been perceived in such terms.
That is my reality now.
I have also attempted to superimpose a Roman plate onto the painting:
https://photos.app.goo.gl/rEHAsGru14FMuNsF7
Though one may argue that it bears little resemblance and has different edging (despite the degradation and stylistic nature of the fresco).
Now there are a questions: Can anyone explain why, for a target viewer unfamiliar with pineapples, the image needs a black outline to separate some stems from a pine cone, but not to separate it from a pomegranate, for example? Сan anyone present a plucked pine cone, which needles protrude directly from it’s body or its peduncle in the manner (especially the angle and the length of the needles) shown in the mosaic with acceptable differences (taking into account low resolution, artistry, etc.)? And what reason to place a piece of shoot with those very strange short needles (low-res indeed, I know it)in a fruit bowl?
Sigh. I am tired of this conversation.
No one said the cone was picked at the root. Obviously the stem was cut not plucked out: the stem is included in the art. That’s the actual branch. The needles extend from the stem. You can’t see this because the mosaic pixelation cannot show a distinction between the exact point where the needles attach to the stem.
You keep doing this: assuming things exist that don’t, that this medium can depict things that it can’t, that universal principles of art shown everywhere else in this piece were abandoned precisely when you need them to have been, and other silly nonsense.
This is not a serious argument anymore. It’s just dumb apologetics and it’s tedious.