Figs: History and Origins

Table of Contents

1. A Flower Turned Inside Out: The Wild Fig and Its Wasp
2. Gilgal I and the "First Domesticated Plant" Debate
3. What the Genes Say
4. The Name, and the Sycophant Story
5. Egypt, the Bible and the Qur’an
6. Greece: Aristotle’s Wasps and Theophrastus’ Farmers
7. Rome: The Ruminal Fig and Cato’s Carthaginian Fig
8. Drying, Smyrna and the Dried-Fig Trade
9. California: The Mission Fig and the Wasp of 1899
10. The Fig as Medicine: Poultice, Syrup and the Trials
11. The Fig Today
12. Key Research Papers
13. Connections
14. Featured Videos

A Flower Turned Inside Out: The Wild Fig and Its Wasp

Everything about the fig’s history follows from its botany. What we call a fig is a syconium: a fleshy, hollow receptacle lined inside with hundreds of tiny flowers. The "seeds" that crunch between your teeth are the individual fruits of those flowers. The only way in is a narrow pore at the tip, the ostiole. Ficus carica is the type species of a genus of more than 800 mostly tropical trees, and the one that made it into the temperate orchards of the Mediterranean.

The common fig is dioecious in function, which means the species comes as two kinds of tree. One kind, the caprifig (from the Latin for "goat fig"), is the wild or male form: its syconia hold both pollen-bearing male flowers and short-styled female flowers, and its fruit is inedible. The other kind is the edible female fig, whose long-styled flowers can be pollinated but cannot house a wasp. Between the two shuttles Blastophaga psenes, the fig wasp, a species Linnaeus named in 1758. A pollen-dusted female squeezes through the ostiole of a young fig. In a caprifig she lays her eggs in the short-styled flowers, which swell into galls; the wingless males hatch first, mate, and chew an exit; the winged females emerge, pick up pollen, and fly off to repeat the cycle within a lifespan of days. In an edible fig the same female finds flowers too long-styled to lay in, pollinates them by accident, and dies inside. It is one of the classic mutualisms in biology, and how F. carica and its wasp keep the arrangement stable was worked out in a study in Evolution in 1987.

Here is the twist that made domestication possible. Some fig trees carry a mutation for parthenocarpy — the ability to swell a sweet, seedless fig with no pollination at all. Horticulturists sort cultivated figs into four types: Common figs (which ripen without any wasp, and are the ones most gardens grow), Smyrna figs (which drop every fruit unless a wasp pollinates it), San Pedro figs (a first crop that needs no wasp, a second that does) and the caprifig itself. A tree that fruits without a wasp can be planted anywhere, but it can only be reproduced by cuttings, because a seedless fig has nothing to sow. That fact — that the best figs are clones — is what the oldest fig find in the world turns on.

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Gilgal I and the "First Domesticated Plant" Debate

Gilgal I is a small Pre-Pottery Neolithic A village in the Lower Jordan Valley, about 13 kilometres north of Jericho. Tamar Noy began excavating it in 1979; later seasons were run by Ofer Bar-Yosef of Harvard with the archaeobotanists Mordechai Kislev and Anat Hartmann of Bar-Ilan University. In June 2006 Kislev, Hartmann and Bar-Yosef reported in Science what one of its houses held: nine carbonised fig fruits and hundreds of loose drupelets, in a settlement radiocarbon-dated to between 11,400 and 11,200 years ago. The figs were of a parthenocarpic type — the drupelets held no embryos, so the fruit had ripened without pollination. Because a seedless fig cannot reproduce itself, the authors argued, trees like these could only have persisted if people were deliberately planting branches, and that would make the fig the first domesticated plant of the Neolithic Revolution, cultivated roughly a thousand years before wheat and barley. Until then the accepted date for fig domestication had been about 6,500 years ago.

The rebuttal came in the same journal that December. Simcha Lev-Yadun, Gidi Ne’eman, Shahal Abbo and Moshe Flaishman — the last a fig geneticist — pointed out that parthenocarpic fig trees exist in wild populations, that such trees naturally bear both seeded and seedless fruit, and that they are perfectly capable of reproducing on their own. Neolithic people could simply have gathered seedless figs from wild parthenocarpic trees. The finds therefore do not necessarily indicate cultivation, let alone orchards older than grain. Kislev and his colleagues replied in the same issue, holding to their interpretation. Both papers are listed below; the popular version — "the fig was the first crop" — is the first paper’s hypothesis, not a settled finding.

What is not in dispute is the older picture drawn by Daniel Zohary and Pinhas Spiegel-Roy in a landmark 1975 review, also in Science: that olive, grape, date and fig were the first fruit trees added to Near Eastern grain farming, most likely domesticated in the fourth and third millennia BC and firmly established as foods by the Early Bronze Age. All four, they noted, share one trait: they can be propagated by simple cuttings, suckers or basal knobs. Fruit-tree domestication was less a matter of selecting seeds than of learning to copy a good tree. Whether the fig came before the cereals or a few thousand years after them is exactly the question Gilgal left open.

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What the Genes Say

Molecular work has confirmed the fig’s clonal history rather than overturned it. In 2010 Mallikarjuna Aradhya and USDA colleagues typed 194 fig accessions of all four types at 15 microsatellite markers (short repeated DNA sequences that vary between individuals and serve as genetic fingerprints). The collection was highly polymorphic but only weakly structured: most variation sat within groups rather than between them, and the analysis found 32 cases of synonymy — the same clone travelling under different names in different countries. That is the signature of a crop moved around by cuttings for thousands of years. The only geographic outliers were accessions from Turkmenistan, which stood somewhat apart from the Mediterranean and Caucasian figs. The authors’ dry conclusion was that a long history of dispersal "with many synonyms" has left fig cultivar identification in a state of considerable confusion.

The fig’s own genome followed. A Japanese team led by Kenta Mori published a whole-genome sequence in 2017 and used it to identify a candidate sex-determining gene, an orthologue of RAN1, which lies behind the caprifig-versus-edible-fig split described above. In 2020 an Italian group led by Gabriele Usai released a haplotype-phased assembly — the two parental sets of chromosomes resolved separately — with a map of its epigenetic marks. Neither study pins a single centre of origin to the map the way the wild apple of the Tian Shan has been pinned. The honest summary is that the fig’s wild ancestor is the caprifig of the eastern Mediterranean and western Asia, that cultivated figs were drawn repeatedly from that wild pool and still exchange genes with it through the wasp, and that the genetics point to a broad region rather than a single valley.

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The Name, and the Sycophant Story

English fig came through Old French figue and Occitan figa from the Latin ficus, which named both the tree and the genus. Latin ficus, Greek sykon (Boeotian tukon) and Armenian t’uz do not descend regularly from one another in the way cognate words usually do; the current view is that all three were borrowed separately from a lost Mediterranean source, perhaps a Semitic language — which would make the word, like the tree, an import from the east. Arabic tīn gives the Qur’anic surah its name (below); Turkish incir is the word on every box of dried figs shipped from the Aegean.

The Greek word survives in an English insult. A sycophant was, in classical Athens, a malicious informer; the word is transparently sykon, "fig", plus phainein, "to show" — a "fig-revealer". Plutarch was apparently the first to suggest that Athens banned the export of figs and that sycophants denounced the smugglers; other guesses invoke an obscene fig-hand gesture or shaking a tree so the hidden fruit shows. Scholars generally treat all of these as inventions made long after the original sense was lost. The fig-smuggler tale is repeated on countless food websites as fact; it is a folk etymology, and it is told here as one.

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Egypt, the Bible and the Qur’an

Ancient Egypt had two figs, and it matters which is meant. The sycamore fig (Ficus sycomorus) was the great native tree of the Nile valley — Zohary and Hopf regarded Egypt as the principal centre of its development — cultivated there for millennia even though its own pollinating wasp is now extinct in Egypt. The common fig arrived from the Levant and was grown alongside it. Among the Middle Kingdom rock-cut tombs at Beni Hasan, the decoration of tomb 3, belonging to the nomarch Khnumhotep II, includes a scene of fig gathering beside the famous procession of Asiatic visitors. In the Levant, excavations at Tel Beit Shemesh have turned up pressed figs stored in jars.

The Hebrew Bible mentions the fig from its third chapter: Adam and Eve "sewed fig leaves together and made coverings for themselves" (Genesis 3:7). The fig’s political meaning is peace and security: under Solomon "Judah and Israel, from Dan to Beersheba, lived in safety, everyone under their own vine and under their own fig tree" (1 Kings 4:25), and Micah’s vision of the last days repeats the image, "and no one will make them afraid" (Micah 4:4). And the fig is the Bible’s one recorded topical drug: when King Hezekiah lay dying of a boil, "Isaiah said, ‘Prepare a poultice of figs.’ They did so and applied it to the boil, and he recovered" (2 Kings 20:7; the same episode is told in Isaiah 38:21). Whether a fig poultice does anything for an abscess is not something the text or any trial establishes; what it tells us is that around 700 BC figs were already an ordinary household remedy.

The Qur’an gives the fig a surah of its own. Surah 95, At-Tīn ("The Fig"), a short Meccan chapter, opens with the oath "By the fig and the olive" before naming Mount Sinai and "this secure city". Commentators have read the two trees as emblems of the lands of the earlier prophets; they are also, simply, the two fruit trees every Mediterranean hillside has carried since the Bronze Age.

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Greece: Aristotle’s Wasps and Theophrastus’ Farmers

Figs were everywhere in classical Greece — fresh in late summer, dried through the winter — and it was Greek naturalists who first wrote down how the tree actually works. Aristotle, in the History of Animals, recorded that the fruits of the wild fig contain psenes (the word is still the wasp’s species name): they begin as grubs, and the adult splits its skin, flies out of the wild fig, and enters a cultivated fig, "saving it from dropping". He also noticed that, as with animals, figs come in two kinds, one that bears fruit and one that helps the other to bear. That is a remarkably accurate account of caprification written more than two thousand years before anyone understood pollination.

His pupil Theophrastus, the founder of botany, described the practice from the farmer’s side. In the Enquiry into Plants he sets three things side by side: date-palm growers in the East who shake "dust" from male flowers onto female ones, the male fish shedding milt over the female’s eggs, and Greek farmers who tie strings of wild figs into the branches of their cultivated trees so the insects can cross over. He did not have the word "pollen", but he had grasped that all three were the same kind of thing. The practice he described is caprification, and it is still done by hand in Smyrna-fig orchards today.

Two popular Greek fig stories are left out of this page on purpose. The claim that Attic figs were so prized that their export was banned rests on the sycophant folk etymology above, and the frequently repeated line that Plato was nicknamed a fig-lover, or that Olympic athletes trained on figs, could not be traced to a reliable ancient source in preparing this article.

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Rome: The Ruminal Fig and Cato’s Carthaginian Fig

Rome put a fig tree at the centre of its founding myth. The Ficus Ruminalis was a wild fig at the foot of the Palatine, beside the Lupercal cave, where legend said the basket carrying Romulus and Remus came to rest and the she-wolf suckled them until the shepherd Faustulus found them. In 296 BC the aediles Gnaeus and Quintus Ogulnius set up bronze images of the infants beside it; Livy says the tree still stood in his day, Ovid saw only traces. A successor fig in the Forum, the Ficus Navia, withered in AD 58 — a dreadful omen, Tacitus records — and then put out new shoots.

Cato the Elder’s De Agri Cultura, written about 160 BC, lists the strains a landowner should plant: the Mariscan, the African, the Herculanean, the Saguntine and the black Tellanian. Two centuries later Pliny the Elder devoted a stretch of Book 15 of his Natural History to the fig, cataloguing about thirty varieties and giving caprification a chapter of its own.

The most famous Roman fig anecdote is Cato’s, and it is worth telling from the sources because they disagree in an interesting way. Plutarch, in his Life of Cato the Elder (chapter 27), says that Cato — who ended every speech by declaring that Carthage must be destroyed — "contrived to drop a Libyan fig in the Senate, as he shook out the folds of his toga, and then, as the senators admired its size and beauty, said that the country where it grew was only three days’ sail from Rome". Pliny tells it with more theatre and a shorter voyage: Cato holds up a ripe fig, asks the senators when they think it was picked, and when they agree it must be fresh, answers that it was "plucked at Carthage but the day before yesterday — so near is the enemy to our walls". Both writers were working two to three centuries after the event, and the fig’s freshness is doing rhetorical work in each version. The story is told here as the tradition it is. So is Cassius Dio’s report that Livia poisoned Augustus by smearing the figs on the tree he liked to pick from himself — rumour then, rumour now.

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Drying, Smyrna and the Dried-Fig Trade

A ripe fresh fig is one of the most perishable things in a market; it bruises at a touch and ferments within days. A dried fig keeps for a year. That difference shaped the whole economic history of the fruit: for most of the last three thousand years the fig that travelled was the dried one, and the great fig regions were the ones with the hot, dry late summer that lets figs cure on the tree and on drying trays. Around the Mediterranean the fig went wherever the olive went, tended on the same terraces and written up in the same manuals, from Cato to the twelfth-century Andalusian agronomist Ibn al-‘Awwām, whose Kitāb al-Filāḥa treats dozens of fruit trees one by one.

By the nineteenth century one place dominated the trade. The dried figs of the Aegean hinterland were cured inland and shipped from the port of Smyrna — modern İzmir — and so the world came to call them "Smyrna figs", although the fruit was traditionally grown in the neighbouring province of Aydın, where the town of Germencik still has the reputation for the best. When Gustav Eisen compiled his history of the fig for the USDA in 1901 he tabulated ten years of American imports, broken out by the share supplied by "Turkey in Asia"; his tables also record that California had begun shipping its own figs east by rail — more than 500 carloads in 1899. Aydın’s primacy has not changed: by Turkish figures, almost all of the country’s dried-fig output, on the order of tens of thousands of tonnes a year, still comes from that one province, and Smyrna-type figs remain the standard for drying because wasp-pollinated fruit has the seeds, and the nutty flavour, that a Common fig lacks.

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California: The Mission Fig and the Wasp of 1899

Spain carried the fig to the New World early — the variety later called Mission is said to have been planted in Mexico around 1520 — and it moved north with the missions. Figs were planted at Mission San Diego de Alcálá, founded by the Franciscans in 1769, and then at each mission up the coast; the fig historian Gustav Eisen wrote that "the early padres and missionaries in the Pacific Coast States cultivated no other variety of fig". That dark-purple Spanish variety is the Mission or Black Mission fig, still one of California’s main cultivars. It is a Common-type fig: it needs no wasp, which is precisely why it succeeded in a land that had none.

The Smyrna fig was another matter. After the Gold Rush, growers realised that the Central Valley shared a latitude and a climate with the Aegean, and that the world market wanted Smyrna-type dried figs. Cuttings of the true Smyrna fig were imported between 1880 and 1882 — G. P. Rixford is credited with the first. The trees grew beautifully and then, every June, dropped every fig they set. The reason was the one Aristotle had written down: without Blastophaga there was no pollination, and a Smyrna fig will not ripen unpollinated.

The fix took two decades and a government entomologist. The Fresno nurseryman George C. Roeding planted caprifigs and imported the wasps repeatedly through the 1890s, but the insects failed to establish. In 1899 Walter T. Swingle of the US Department of Agriculture published a paper in Science on the fig’s dioecism and its bearing on caprification, and the Department shipped wasp-bearing caprifigs from Algiers to California. According to Eisen’s 1901 account, the fig wasps that emerged in the Roeding orchard in the spring of 1899 came from one of those Algerian trees, established themselves at Fresno and at Niles, and are the ancestors of every fig wasp in California. Commercial Smyrna-fig culture followed almost at once — the Purdue horticultural reference dates it to 1900 — and Roeding published his own account, The Smyrna Fig at Home and Abroad, in 1903. The cultivar the industry settled on was the Turkish Lob Injir, renamed Calimyrna — California plus Smyrna — and for much of the twentieth century it was the American dried fig. Calimyrna growers still keep caprifig trees and hang their wasp-laden fruit in the branches each June, much as Theophrastus described.

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The Fig as Medicine: Poultice, Syrup and the Trials

The fig’s reputation as a gentle laxative is as old as any food tradition on record, and for once tradition and trial point the same way — with the caveat that a tradition proves people believed something, not that it works. Hezekiah’s poultice (above) is the earliest written medical use; Mediterranean folk practice also used the tree’s milky latex on calluses and warts, one of a long inventory of traditional uses catalogued in a 2013 pharmacology review of Ficus carica. From the late nineteenth century "syrup of figs", usually a fig extract combined with senna, became a household laxative in Britain and America; the senna, a stimulant laxative, did most of the work, but the fig gave the product its name and its reassuring, food-like image.

Modern evidence is modest in volume but consistent. The key study is a randomised, double-blind, placebo-controlled trial published in 2016 by Hyang-Im Baek and colleagues at Chonbuk National University in Korea: 80 adults with functional constipation took either a fig paste or a placebo daily for eight weeks. The fig group showed a significant fall in colon transit time (the primary outcome), better stool type and less abdominal discomfort, with blood and organ-toxicity markers staying normal. A single 80-person trial is not a body of evidence, and the site’s own prunes page explains why prunes carry a stronger record; but the fig’s mechanism is not mysterious. Dried figs are roughly a tenth fibre by weight, a mix of soluble and insoluble types that add bulk and hold water; the traditional advice to soak them overnight and eat them with the water is, in effect, a fibre-and-fluid prescription. For the practical side see the main Figs page, Constipation and Natural Constipation Relief.

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The Fig Today

The fig remains a Mediterranean and Middle Eastern crop grown mostly where it always was. By FAO statistics for 2024, as compiled from the FAOSTAT database, the world produced roughly 1.3 million tonnes of figs, and Turkey alone grew about 28 per cent of them — some 375,000 tonnes — with Egypt, Algeria and Morocco the next three and the four together accounting for about three-fifths of the total. (These are the only production numbers on this page drawn from a single compiled source; they should be read as orders of magnitude and checked against FAOSTAT directly, linked below.) California is still essentially the whole American crop.

Beneath those figures the fig has changed less than almost any other fruit in this section. Ira Condit’s Fig Varieties of 1955, more than two hundred pages of Hilgardia, catalogued hundreds of named cultivars, most of them local and many the same clone under several names, as the microsatellite study half a century later confirmed. Breeding programmes exist (the 2007 Horticultural Reviews chapter by Flaishman, Rodov and Stover surveys them), but the tree in a Turkish, Greek or Californian orchard is a cutting of a cutting of a cutting, reaching back through Cato’s named strains toward the parthenocarpic mutants somebody in the Jordan Valley thought worth keeping. Whether that somebody lived 11,400 years ago or 6,500, the fig is a living link to the moment people first decided that a tree, and not only a field, could be a crop.

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Key Research Papers

The Gilgal I report and its published rebuttal; the classic review of Old World fruit-tree domestication; the fig’s population genetics and phased genome; the biology and horticulture of caprification, including the 1899 paper that preceded the wasp’s establishment in California; the standard variety monograph; and the controlled trial of fig paste for constipation.

1. Kislev ME, Hartmann A, Bar-Yosef O (2006). Early Domesticated Fig in the Jordan Valley. Science. — doi:10.1126/science.1125910
2. Lev-Yadun S, Ne’eman G, Abbo S, Flaishman MA (2006). Comment on "Early Domesticated Fig in the Jordan Valley". Science. — doi:10.1126/science.1132636
3. Zohary D, Spiegel-Roy P (1975). Beginnings of Fruit Growing in the Old World. Science. — doi:10.1126/science.187.4174.319
4. Aradhya MK, Stover E, Velasco D, Koehmstedt A (2010). Genetic structure and differentiation in cultivated fig (Ficus carica L.). Genetica. — doi:10.1007/s10709-010-9442-3
5. Usai G, Mascagni F, Giordani T, Vangelisti A, Bosi E, Zuccolo A, et al. (2020). Epigenetic patterns within the haplotype phased fig (Ficus carica L.) genome. The Plant Journal. — doi:10.1111/tpj.14635
6. Kjellberg F, Gouyon PH, Ibrahim M, Raymond M, Valdeyron G (1987). The stability of the symbiosis between dioecious figs and their pollinators: a study of Ficus carica L. and Blastophaga psenes L. Evolution. — PubMed PMID: 28564365
7. Swingle WT (1899). The Diœcism of the Fig in Its Bearing Upon Caprification. Science. — doi:10.1126/science.10.251.570
8. Condit IJ (1955). Fig varieties: a monograph. Hilgardia. — doi:10.3733/hilg.v23n11p323
9. Flaishman MA, Rodov V, Stover E (2007). The Fig: Botany, Horticulture, and Breeding. Horticultural Reviews. — doi:10.1002/9780470380147.ch2
10. Baek HI, Ha KC, Kim HM, Choi EK, Park EO, Park BH, et al. (2016). Randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled trial of Ficus carica paste for the management of functional constipation. Asia Pacific Journal of Clinical Nutrition. — PubMed PMID: 27440682

PubMed Topic Searches

1. PubMed: Fig domestication and origin
2. PubMed: Fig archaeobotany
3. PubMed: Fig and fig-wasp pollination
4. PubMed: Fig and constipation trials

External Authoritative Resources

• Eisen G (1901). The Fig: Its History, Culture, and Curing — USDA Division of Pomology Bulletin 9, Internet Archive
• Purdue University NewCROP — Fig (Morton, Fruits of Warm Climates)
• Pliny the Elder, Natural History 15.20–21 (Bostock translation) — Perseus Digital Library
• Plutarch, Life of Cato the Elder (Loeb translation) — LacusCurtius
• FAOSTAT — Crops and livestock products (figs, production by country)

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Connections

• All Food
• Figs Hub
• Figs Nutrient Profile
• Dates: History and Origins
• Olive Oil: History
• Grapes: History and Origins
• Pomegranate: History and Origins
• Apples: History and Origins
• Prunes
• Constipation
• Natural Constipation Relief
• Calcium

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