Onions: History and Origins

Table of Contents

1. A Plant with No Wild Home
2. Why the Archaeology Is So Thin
3. Mesopotamia and the First Written Onions
4. Egypt: Offerings, Mummies, and the Sacred Onion
5. Herodotus and the Pyramid Onions
6. The Bible, Greece, and Rome
7. The Medieval European Staple
8. Ships, Storage, and the Kitchen Garden
9. The Onion Crosses the Atlantic
10. Folk Medicine — and the War-Wounds Story
11. Cultivars, Sweetness, and the Modern Crop
12. The Onion as a Political Commodity
13. Legends, Sorted
14. Research Papers and References
15. Connections
16. Featured Videos

A Plant with No Wild Home

Start with the strangest fact about onions: Allium cepa does not exist in the wild. There is no population of wild bulb onions growing anywhere, no natural habitat, no ancestral range you can visit. Every onion on earth is a cultivated plant maintained by human hands, and has been for so long that its wild progenitor has either gone extinct or diverged past recognition.

Fritsch and Friesen's treatment of the evolution, domestication and taxonomy of Allium sets out what can be said. The genus is large — several hundred species — and its centre of diversity sits in the mountainous belt of Central and South-West Asia: modern Iran, Afghanistan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan and northern Pakistan. Several wild species from that region are morphologically and genetically close to the cultivated onion, notably Allium vavilovii and Allium asarense, and the current consensus places the origin of the domesticated onion somewhere in that highland zone.

The Central Asian mountains are a plausible cradle for a reason that has nothing to do with cuisine. That environment has hot dry summers and cold winters, which is exactly the climate that rewards a biennial storage strategy: grow, store everything in a bulb, go dormant, then flower. The bulb that makes an onion useful to a cook is the same organ that makes it fit for a continental mountain climate.

What we cannot say is when. Domestication dates for onions circulate freely — 5,000 years, 7,000 years — and none of them rest on a dated excavation of a domesticated onion. They are inferences from the plant's ubiquity in the earliest written records of several separate civilisations, which implies it was already old by then. Brewster's standard monograph on onions and other vegetable alliums treats the question with appropriate caution, and so should anyone repeating a number.

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Why the Archaeology Is So Thin

Archaeobotany depends on the parts of plants that survive burial. Cereal grains carbonise and last for millennia. Olive pits, date stones, grape pips, nutshells and legume seeds are all hard, durable and diagnostic. Wheat and barley have detailed archaeological histories because their remains are recoverable.

An onion has none of that. The bulb is soft, wet, mostly water, and rots completely under ordinary burial conditions. Its seeds are small and rarely preserved in identifiable form. Even where an onion was certainly present, it usually left nothing to find.

Three consequences follow, and they explain the shape of everything below:

1. The onion's history is textual and iconographic, not excavated. Cuneiform lists, Egyptian tomb paintings, temple offering records, Greek and Roman agricultural writers — these are the evidence.
2. Absence of remains proves nothing. The onion was almost certainly cultivated for a long time before the first written mention, and there is no way to measure how long.
3. Egypt is the exception, and that is why Egypt dominates the story. Egypt's dry climate and its practice of placing food in tombs preserved organic material that would have vanished anywhere else. The onion looks like an Egyptian plant in the historical record largely because Egypt is where such things survive.

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Mesopotamia and the First Written Onions

Some of the earliest unambiguous documentation of onions comes from Mesopotamian cuneiform. Sumerian and Akkadian administrative texts list onions among rations and temple supplies, and onions appear alongside garlic and leeks in the vocabularies and agricultural texts of the region.

The most vivid source is a small group of Old Babylonian clay tablets held at Yale, dating to roughly the eighteenth century BC, which contain what are recognisably recipes — the oldest written recipes known. They describe stews and broths built on a base that any modern cook would find familiar, and onion, leek and garlic appear repeatedly in them. Whatever else changed in four thousand years, the practice of starting a savoury dish with alliums did not.

Two things are worth noticing about this. First, the onion appears in these texts as a completely unremarkable everyday ingredient, not as a novelty or a luxury — which is itself evidence that it was long established. Second, it appears in the administrative record as something grown, stored, counted and distributed, meaning it was a managed crop within an organised agricultural economy, not a gathered plant.

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Egypt: Offerings, Mummies, and the Sacred Onion

Egypt gives the richest surviving material, and it is a genuinely unusual body of evidence: onions appear not only as food but as religious and funerary objects.

In tombs. Onions have been recovered from Egyptian burials, placed among the food offerings intended to sustain the dead. They appear in tomb paintings on offering tables and in the hands of priests in ritual scenes. The tomb of Tutankhamun contained plant remains including onion material among its provisions.

On mummies. Egyptologists have documented onions or onion fragments placed on and within mummified bodies — in the chest cavity, over the eyes, in the ears, or bound into wrappings. The most frequently repeated example concerns the mummy of Ramesses IV, described in the older literature as having small onions placed in the eye sockets. Reports of this kind should be read as what they are: observations recorded during nineteenth- and early twentieth-century examinations, not modern controlled analyses. The broader practice of including onions in mummification is nevertheless well attested across multiple burials.

Why an onion? The usual explanations are that its concentric rings suggested eternity or the layered structure of the cosmos, that its powerful smell was thought capable of stimulating breath in the dead, and that its pungency had an apotropaic function — warding off harm. These are reasonable readings of the symbolism, and they are reconstructions by modern scholars rather than statements the Egyptians left about their own reasoning.

As food. Onions were an ordinary staple, eaten by all classes, cheap and storable. That combination — sacred object and peasant food at once — is not a contradiction; it is exactly what happens to a plant that is both everywhere and strongly symbolic.

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Herodotus and the Pyramid Onions

This is the single most quoted claim about onions in history, and it needs handling carefully because it is almost always quoted without its qualifications.

In Book II of the Histories, written around the middle of the fifth century BC, Herodotus describes the Great Pyramid and reports an inscription on it. In A. D. Godley's translation, the passage runs: "There is an inscription in Egyptian characters on the pyramid which records the amount spent on radishes and onions and garlic for the workmen; and I well remember that the interpreter who read the writing to me said that 1600 talents of silver had been paid." Other translations render the first vegetable as leeks rather than radishes; the Greek term is uncertain.

Now the qualifications, all of which Herodotus's own sentence contains:

1. He did not read it himself. He says explicitly that an interpreter read it to him. Herodotus could not read hieroglyphs; almost nobody could by his period, and the ability was lost entirely soon after.
2. He is quoting from memory. "I well remember that the interpreter … said" is not a transcription.
3. He is writing roughly two thousand years after the fact. The Great Pyramid was built in the twenty-sixth century BC. Herodotus visited in the fifth century BC. The gap between him and the pyramid builders is greater than the gap between us and Herodotus.
4. No such inscription has ever been found, and the casing stones that carried whatever inscriptions the pyramid bore were largely stripped in the medieval period.
5. The sum is implausible on its face. Sixteen hundred talents of silver is an enormous amount, and Herodotus is reporting a figure he was told about a monument that was already ancient and mythologised in his own day.

So: a single, late, second-hand, remembered report of an inscription nobody has seen since. That is a weak foundation for the confident modern claim that the pyramid workers were "paid in onions" — a claim that in any case misreads Herodotus, who describes money spent on food for the workmen, not vegetables handed out as wages.

What the modern evidence shows instead. Excavation of the workers' settlement at Giza and, since 2013, the papyri recovered from the Red Sea harbour at Wadi al-Jarf — including the logbook of an official named Merer, recording the transport of limestone to Giza — have transformed the picture. The pyramid workforce was organised, housed, administered and fed, with substantial provision of bread, beer and meat from cattle, sheep and goats. Onions were very likely part of their diet, as they were part of everyone's diet. They were not the payroll.

Herodotus remains worth quoting. He is the earliest surviving outside description of Egypt by a Greek observer, he is often right, and the onion detail tells us something real — that in the fifth century BC, onions were so obviously a labourer's food that a story about feeding a vast workforce naturally took that shape. That is a genuine historical datum. It is simply not a fact about the twenty-sixth century BC.

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The Bible, Greece, and Rome

The Hebrew Bible gives the onion one of its most human moments. In Numbers 11:5, the Israelites in the wilderness complain about the monotony of manna and remember Egypt: "We remember the fish, which we did eat in Egypt freely; the cucumbers, and the melons, and the leeks, and the onions, and the garlick." Whatever one makes of the narrative, the passage is evidence of the same thing the Egyptian record shows: onions were an everyday food that people missed when it was gone.

Greece. Onions appear in Homer and in the Greek medical and agricultural tradition. They were associated with strength and with athletic training — there are ancient reports of athletes consuming quantities of onion before competition — and they belonged to the ordinary diet of ordinary people. Greek writers also treated the allium family as medicinal, a theme continued and expanded by Rome.

Rome. The Romans grew onions extensively and wrote about them practically. Pliny the Elder discusses onions and their varieties in the Natural History, attributes a long list of medicinal properties to them, and distinguishes types by shape and pungency. Columella covers their cultivation. Apicius uses them in recipes. Roman soldiers and colonists carried the crop across the empire, and it is largely through Roman agriculture that the onion became established throughout Western Europe.

The Roman medical claims are worth reading in the right spirit. Pliny attributes to onions a remarkable range of effects — on vision, on sleep, on wounds, on dog bites. Some of it reflects genuine observation of a pungent, mildly antimicrobial plant; much of it is the humoral theorising of the period. It is the beginning of a folk-medical tradition that runs unbroken into the twentieth century.

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The Medieval European Staple

In medieval Europe the onion became something close to universal, and for reasons that are entirely practical.

1. It stores. A well-cured onion keeps for months in a cool dry place without processing, salting or preserving. In a food system where the winter was a real problem, that mattered more than almost any other property.
2. It grows almost anywhere. Onions tolerate poor soil, cool summers and short seasons, and a small plot yields a usable crop.
3. It makes dull food edible. A diet built on bread, porridge and pottage needs flavour, and onions supplied it cheaply where spices were unaffordable.
4. Everyone could have it. Onions, leeks and cabbage were the vegetables of the poor, and they were also on the tables of the rich. Few foods crossed the whole social range like that.

Onions appear in medieval household accounts, in monastic garden plans, in market regulations, and in the medical writing of the period, where the allium family occupies a large place. They were sometimes used as a medium of exchange — small rents and payments recorded in quantities of onions — which tells you both that they were valuable and that they were universally understood as a unit of worth.

The medieval kitchen garden — the hortus of monastic plans, and the cottage plot of the peasant household — had onions in it essentially by default, alongside leeks, garlic, cabbage, beans and pot herbs. That combination is the ancestor of most European soup traditions.

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Ships, Storage, and the Kitchen Garden

The onion's keeping quality made it a natural ship's provision, and it was carried on long voyages throughout the age of sail alongside salt meat, ship's biscuit, dried peas and beer.

Here an honest correction is needed, because the claim is often inflated. Onions were not the cure for scurvy. They contain a modest amount of vitamin C when fresh, considerably less than citrus, and the amount declines during storage. The onion earned its place aboard ship because it kept for months without spoiling and made monotonous rations palatable — both genuinely important on a long voyage — not because it prevented scurvy. The foods that solved scurvy were citrus juice and, in some navies, sauerkraut. Where onions contributed anything on that front it was marginal.

What is true is that a barrel of onions was a rational cargo: cheap, dense, durable, and useful every day. The same logic put onions into military supply chains, prison and workhouse diets, and the provisioning of remote settlements. Wherever people needed food that would still be food in three months, onions were part of the answer.

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The Onion Crosses the Atlantic

The cultivated onion is an Old World plant, and it reached the Americas with European colonisation from the late fifteenth century onward. Spanish expeditions carried onions to the Caribbean and thence to the mainland; later English, French and Dutch settlers brought their own stock to North America. Onions were among the first crops planted in European settlements, for the same storage and hardiness reasons that made them a European staple.

But the Americas were not without alliums. Wild onion species were native and widely used by Indigenous peoples across North America — Allium tricoccum (ramps or wild leek) in the eastern woodlands, Allium cernuum (nodding onion) across a wide range, and many others. These were gathered, eaten fresh and dried, and used medicinally.

One trace of that survives in a place name millions of people say every day. Chicago derives from a Miami-Illinois word, rendered in early French sources in forms such as shikaakwa or Checagou, referring to a pungent wild allium that grew abundantly in the marshy ground at the mouth of the river — usually identified as ramps or a wild onion. The city is, in a real sense, named after the smell of wild onions.

Cultivated onions and native wild alliums have continued side by side. Ramps in particular have gone from a foraged spring food of Appalachia to a sought-after restaurant ingredient, with the predictable consequence that some wild populations are now under harvesting pressure.

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Folk Medicine — and the War-Wounds Story

The onion carries one of the longest continuous folk-medical traditions of any food plant. Poultices for boils and chest complaints, syrups for coughs, juice for earache, cut onions placed by the bed for fever, raw onion for insect stings — these practices are documented across Europe, the Middle East, South Asia and East Asia, and many of them survived into living memory.

The wartime story deserves a careful telling, because it is one of the most inflated claims attached to the allium family.

What is true. Allium preparations were genuinely used on wounds, and this was not purely superstition. Onion and garlic thiosulfinates have real antibacterial activity in the laboratory, as covered on the organosulfur compounds page. In the First World War, before antibiotics existed and when wound infection was killing enormous numbers of men, armies used what was available — antiseptic solutions, sphagnum moss dressings, and in some documented instances allium preparations. Britain purchased substantial quantities of garlic during the war for use as an antiseptic. Garlic acquired the nickname "Russian penicillin" in connection with Soviet use in the Second World War.

What is overstated. The claim that onion or garlic dressings "saved thousands of lives" or functioned as an effective substitute for antibiotics does not survive scrutiny. There were no controlled trials. The preparations were used alongside other measures, so any effect cannot be separated out. Their antibacterial compounds are chemically unstable and degrade quickly, which is a serious problem for a wound dressing. And the moment sulfonamides arrived in the late 1930s, and penicillin in the 1940s, allium preparations disappeared from military medicine immediately and permanently — which is the clearest possible verdict from the people who had actually used them.

The fair summary. Allium preparations were a reasonable improvisation with a real, weak pharmacological basis, deployed at a moment when the alternative was nothing. They were not a lost miracle cure, they were not suppressed, and nobody should treat a wound with an onion today.

The one folk use with a defensible modern basis is dietary rather than topical: onions in broth for someone unwell is warm fluid plus flavour plus a food that is easy to eat, which is genuinely helpful and requires no special claims.

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Cultivars, Sweetness, and the Modern Crop

For most of its history the onion was a landrace crop — regionally adapted populations maintained by farmers saving their own seed, differing from valley to valley. Systematic breeding is recent.

Day length is the master variable. Onions bulb in response to photoperiod, and a cultivar is classified as short-day, intermediate-day or long-day according to how much daylight it needs before it stops making leaves and starts making a bulb. This is why an onion variety that thrives in Texas fails in Scotland and vice versa — it is not soil or temperature but the length of the day. Every regional onion industry is built around cultivars matched to its latitude.

Sweet onions are the most commercially visible modern development, and their sweetness is largely a matter of what they lack. Low pungency means low sulfur compound content, which unmasks the sugars that every onion contains. Soil chemistry matters as much as genetics: low-sulfur soils produce milder onions from the same seed. The famous named sweet onions are therefore protected by geography as much as by variety — the Vidalia onion of Georgia, grown in a defined production area in the state's low-sulfur soils since the 1930s, is the standard example, and the Walla Walla of Washington State is another. Sweet onions are also poor keepers, for the same reason: the sulfur chemistry that makes an onion pungent also helps it resist rot in storage.

Hybrid seed. The development of usable male-sterile lines in the mid-twentieth century made large-scale F1 hybrid onion breeding practical, and modern commercial onions are overwhelmingly hybrids selected for yield, uniformity, storage life, disease resistance and skin colour. Flavour and flavonoid content have historically been secondary breeding targets, which is one reason quercetin content varies so widely between cultivars — as documented by Lombard and colleagues' cultivar survey, and by Slimestad and colleagues' review of onion flavonoids.

Scale. The onion is now among the most widely produced vegetables in the world, grown on every inhabited continent, with China and India the largest producers by a wide margin. It is cheap, it travels, and it stores — the same three properties that made it a medieval staple, now operating globally.

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The Onion as a Political Commodity

Very few vegetables have political consequences. The onion does, and the reason is structural rather than symbolic.

In India, the onion is a daily necessity across almost every household and cuisine, it is grown by a very large number of smallholders, and its price is volatile because the crop is exposed to monsoon failure, unseasonal rain at harvest, and storage losses. That combination — universal consumption, fragmented supply, high volatility — makes the retail onion price an unusually visible indicator of the cost of living. Onion price spikes have repeatedly become national political issues, prompting export bans, import decisions, stockpile releases and raids on hoarders, and they are widely discussed in Indian political commentary as having contributed to electoral outcomes. Governments there manage onion supply with a seriousness normally reserved for fuel.

Similar dynamics appear elsewhere — onion price shocks have caused public anger in Pakistan, Bangladesh, the Philippines and parts of Central Asia, and export restrictions by major producers ripple through importing countries quickly.

This is a modern chapter of an old story. The onion is politically sensitive for exactly the reason it was historically valuable: everyone eats it, every day, and there is no substitute that people accept.

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Legends, Sorted

A short, plain list of the persistent claims and what the evidence says.

1. "The pyramid workers were paid in onions." Misreading of a weak source. Herodotus reports money spent on food for the workmen, second-hand, two millennia later, from an inscription nobody has ever found. Modern excavation shows a fed, organised, housed workforce.
2. "Onions were worshipped in Egypt." Overstated. They were used in funerary and religious contexts and carried symbolic weight. That is not the same as being objects of worship.
3. "A cut onion in the room absorbs illness." Folklore, no mechanism. Volatile compounds diffuse out of an onion; nothing diffuses in. This belief is old and geographically widespread, which makes it interesting but not true.
4. "A leftover cut onion becomes poisonous overnight." Also false, and the mirror image of the previous one. Refrigerate it covered and use it within a few days like any cut vegetable.
5. "Onions cured wound infections in the world wars." Real basis, inflated claim. Allium preparations were used, they have genuine laboratory antibacterial activity, and they were abandoned instantly when antibiotics arrived. See the section above.
6. "Onions prevented scurvy at sea." No. They kept well and improved dull rations. Citrus solved scurvy.
7. "Holding a spoon in your mouth stops the tears." No. The tear compound reaches your eye through the air. Chilling the onion first does work, and the organosulfur page sorts the rest of these by mechanism.
8. "Onions are the oldest cultivated vegetable." Plausible, unprovable. Onions are certainly among the oldest, and the archaeology cannot rank them, because the bulb does not survive burial.

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Research Papers and References

1. Fritsch RM, Friesen N. Evolution, domestication and taxonomy. In: Allium Crop Science: Recent Advances. CABI; 2002:5-30. — doi:10.1079/9780851995106.0005
2. Brewster JL. Onions and Other Vegetable Alliums. 2nd ed. CABI; 2008. — doi:10.1079/9781845933999.0000
3. Brewster JL. The structure of edible alliums. In: Onions and Other Vegetable Alliums. CABI; 2008:27-49. — doi:10.1079/9781845933999.0027
4. Block E. Garlic and Other Alliums: The Lore and the Science. Royal Society of Chemistry; 2009. — doi:10.1039/9781839168369
5. Griffiths G, Trueman L, Crowther T, Thomas B, Smith B. Onions — a global benefit to health. Phytotherapy Research. 2002;16(7):603-615. — doi:10.1002/ptr.1222
6. Lanzotti V. The analysis of onion and garlic. Journal of Chromatography A. 2006;1112(1-2):3-22. — doi:10.1016/j.chroma.2005.12.016
7. Slimestad R, Fossen T, Vågen IM. Onions: a source of unique dietary flavonoids. Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry. 2007;55(25):10067-10080. — doi:10.1021/jf0712503
8. Lombard KA, Geoffriau E, Peffley E. Total quercetin content in onion: survey of cultivars grown at various locations. HortTechnology. 2004;14(4):628-630. — doi:10.21273/HORTTECH.14.4.0628
9. Imai S, Tsuge N, Tomotake M, et al. An onion enzyme that makes the eyes water. Nature. 2002;419(6908):685. — doi:10.1038/419685a
10. Borlinghaus J, Albrecht F, Gruhlke MCH, Nwachukwu ID, Slusarenko AJ. Allicin: chemistry and biological properties. Molecules. 2014;19(8):12591-12618. — doi:10.3390/molecules190812591
11. Herodotus. The Histories, Book II. Translated by A. D. Godley (Loeb Classical Library, 1920). The pyramid passage is at II.125. — Perseus Digital Library: Herodotus II.125
12. Zohary D, Hopf M, Weiss E. Domestication of Plants in the Old World. 4th ed. Oxford University Press; 2012. Standard reference for Old World crop origins; treats Allium among the vegetable crops. (Cited as plain text — no verified DOI.)
13. Bottéro J. The Oldest Cuisine in the World: Cooking in Mesopotamia. University of Chicago Press; 2004. The standard account of the Yale Babylonian culinary tablets. (Cited as plain text — no verified DOI.)
14. Tallet P. Les papyrus de la mer Rouge (the Wadi al-Jarf papyri, including the logbook of Merer). Institut français d'archéologie orientale. The primary publication of the Fourth Dynasty papyri bearing on the Giza workforce. (Cited as plain text — no verified DOI.)

Live PubMed and Reference Searches

1. PubMed: Allium cepa domestication and phylogeny
2. PubMed: onion cultivar flavonoid surveys
3. FAOSTAT — global onion production statistics by country and year
4. Perseus Digital Library — Greek and Latin sources including Herodotus and Pliny

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Connections

• Onions — the main topic page
• Onions — Benefits Deep Dive
• Onion Quercetin and Heart Health
• Onion Organosulfur Compounds and the Tear Factor
• Onion Prebiotic Fructans and Gut Bacteria
• Onions, FODMAPs, and IBS
• Garlic
• Leeks
• Asparagus
• Fermented Foods
• Quercetin
• Sulfur
• Vitamin C — and why onions did not solve scurvy
• All Food Topics

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