Clove (Syzygium aromaticum): History and Traditional Use

Few spices have shaped world history as dramatically as the humble clove — the dried, nail-shaped flower bud of a single tropical tree, Syzygium aromaticum, that for most of recorded history grew on only a handful of tiny volcanic islands in eastern Indonesia. From an aromatic prized in ancient China and Rome, to a commodity worth fortunes that launched European fleets, brutal monopolies, and a daring act of seedling-smuggling, to the source of eugenol, the molecule still tucked into your dentist’s toolkit, clove’s story stretches across more than two thousand years and nearly every continent. This article traces what the historical record actually shows, separates well-documented fact from oft-repeated tradition, and explains how a kitchen spice became one of the most studied antibacterial plants in modern science.

Table of Contents

  1. The Spice and Its Name
  2. Origins in the Maluku Islands
  3. The Ancient Spice Trade and the Terqa Find
  4. Clove in Ancient China
  5. Greece, Rome, and the Classical World
  6. The Medieval and Arab Trade
  7. The European Spice Wars and the Dutch Monopoly
  8. Clove in Traditional Medicine and Dentistry
  9. From Folk Spice to Modern Science
  10. Research Papers and References
  11. Connections
  12. Featured Videos

The Spice and Its Name

The clove of commerce is not a seed, root, or leaf but a flower bud — specifically the dried, unopened bud of Syzygium aromaticum, an evergreen tree of the myrtle family (Myrtaceae) that can grow to roughly eight to twelve metres tall. The buds are picked while still green to pink, just before they open, and dried in the sun until they harden into the familiar reddish-brown nail shape. That shape gives the spice its English name: “clove” descends, through Old French clou, from the Latin clavus, meaning “nail.” The same idea recurs across languages, and the German Nelke and the older botanical association with the nail-like bud reflect how universally people saw a tiny tack in the dried spice.

The older botanical name Eugenia caryophyllata (and the related Eugenia caryophyllus) is still encountered in commerce, in older literature, and in many research papers, even though Syzygium aromaticum is the currently accepted scientific name. The species epithet and the spice’s classical names share the Greek root karyophyllon, and this very word, as we will see, is the term the Roman writer Pliny the Elder used in the first century CE. Names matter in clove’s history because the spice was so valuable and so remote that, for centuries, sellers deliberately obscured where it came from — so the trail of names is one of the few threads historians can follow back to its origin.

What made this particular bud worth pursuing across oceans is its remarkable concentration of aromatic oil. Clove buds are unusually rich in essential oil — on the order of fifteen to twenty percent by weight — and that oil is dominated by a single pungent compound, eugenol. It is eugenol that gives clove its warm, sweet, intensely spicy aroma, its numbing effect on a sore tooth, and most of its preservative and antibacterial power. Almost every chapter of clove’s long human story — flavour, medicine, perfume, embalming, and trade — traces back to that one extraordinarily potent molecule packed into a bud the size of a fingernail.

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Origins in the Maluku Islands

For almost all of recorded history, clove came from one place on Earth: the Maluku Islands (historically the Moluccas, and romantically the “Spice Islands”), a scattering of small volcanic islands in eastern Indonesia. More precisely, the original clove trees grew on only a few of these islands — among them Ternate, Tidore, Moti, Makian, and Bacan — tiny specks of land whose monopoly on the world’s clove supply gave them an importance utterly out of proportion to their size. Until clove cultivation was finally carried elsewhere in the eighteenth century, every clove traded in China, India, Persia, Arabia, and Europe had begun its journey on these few islands.

The earliest movement of cloves out of the Maluku Islands is generally credited to the seafaring Austronesian peoples, whose maritime trade network linked the Indonesian archipelago with mainland and South Asia in antiquity. Long before any European had heard of the Spice Islands, Austronesian sailors are thought to have carried cloves westward across the Indian Ocean toward South Asia and, eventually, the markets of the ancient Near East. From those hubs the spice was passed hand to hand along trade routes, each merchant adding a markup and, often, a tall tale about its origin, so that by the time cloves reached the Mediterranean their true source was a closely held secret.

Because the trees were confined to so small an area and the voyage to reach them was so long and dangerous, cloves were extraordinarily expensive throughout the ancient and medieval periods — a luxury reserved for the wealthy, and frequently described in popular histories as having been worth their weight in gold. That concentration of supply in one remote archipelago is the single fact that explains nearly everything dramatic that followed: the secrecy of the early trade, the staggering prices, and the violent contest among European powers to seize control of the islands.

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The Ancient Spice Trade and the Terqa Find

Just how early cloves were traded over long distances is a question that archaeology has pushed surprisingly far back. The most famous — and most debated — piece of evidence comes from Terqa, an ancient site on the Euphrates in modern Syria. There, the archaeologist Giorgio Buccellati and his team reported finding charred cloves in a small overturned jar in the pantry of a burned house, which clay tablets dated to around 1700 BCE. If the identification is correct, it would mean cloves had travelled all the way from the islands of eastern Indonesia to the Near East nearly three and a half thousand years ago — an astonishing reach for a Bronze Age trade route. The find was first reported in the late 1970s and is still widely cited as the earliest known clove outside its homeland.

It is only honest to add that this Terqa identification is not universally accepted. Some specialists have questioned whether the charred plant material was truly Syzygium aromaticum rather than some look-alike, and the find is best described as the commonly cited — but disputed — earliest evidence rather than as settled fact. More recent archaeobotanical work elsewhere, including reported clove finds at sites in Sri Lanka, has added to the picture of an early Indian Ocean spice trade, though here too dating and identification invite caution. What the record supports with confidence is the broader point: cloves were moving westward along maritime and overland routes from a very early date, and the spice was known in the ancient world long before it was understood where it actually grew.

This blend of solid and shaky evidence is typical of clove’s deep history. Because the spice was light, durable, and immensely valuable, it travelled far and left scattered traces, but because its source was deliberately hidden and its early traders kept no surviving ledgers, much of what we can say about the first millennia of the clove trade must be stated carefully, marking the difference between a charred bud in a dated jar and the legends that grew up around it.

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Clove in Ancient China

Some of the oldest reasonably firm references to clove use come from China, where the spice was imported from the south and valued both as an aromatic and as a medicine. Clove is known in Chinese as ding xiang (“nail aromatic”), again echoing the nail-shaped bud, and Chinese physicians long used it for toothache, for digestive complaints, and to sweeten the breath. The use of clove in classical Chinese medicine for warming the digestion and easing stomach upset and nausea is well attested in the later herbal literature and survives in traditional practice to this day.

One charming story is repeated in almost every popular account of clove: that during the Han dynasty (roughly 206 BCE to 220 CE), officials and courtiers were required to hold cloves in their mouths to sweeten their breath before addressing the emperor. The custom is traditionally traced to a text on official etiquette and is often dated to around 200 BCE. It is a wonderful detail — but it deserves a note of caution. The early Chinese aromatic sometimes rendered as “chicken-tongue spice” (jishexiang), which is frequently equated with clove in these breath-freshening anecdotes, has been questioned by scholars who argue the term may not always have referred to clove at all. The breath-before-the-emperor tradition is therefore best presented as exactly that — a long-repeated tradition — rather than as a securely documented fact, even though clove’s broader role as a Chinese breath freshener and medicine is genuine.

What is not in doubt is that China was one of the great early markets for clove, that the spice reached it by sea and overland from Southeast Asia, and that Chinese medical writers incorporated it into a sophisticated system of remedies. The dual identity visible here — clove as both a fragrant luxury and a practical medicine for the mouth and stomach — runs through the spice’s entire history and reappears in nearly every culture that adopted it.

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Greece, Rome, and the Classical World

Cloves reached the classical Mediterranean by the first century CE, carried along the same long chains of Indian Ocean and Red Sea trade that brought pepper, cinnamon, and other Eastern spices to Rome. The earliest clear Western reference is usually attributed to the Roman naturalist Pliny the Elder, who in his encyclopaedic Natural History (written around 77 CE) described a fragrant grain from “India” that resembled pepper but was larger and more brittle, which he called caryophyllon. Pliny noted that it was imported purely for the sake of its aroma. Because the true origin of the spice was hidden behind layers of middlemen, Pliny — like everyone else in the Roman world — placed its source vaguely in “India” rather than in the distant Indonesian islands where it actually grew. Pliny’s Natural History is named here as a historical primary source rather than as a modern citation.

That single word, caryophyllon, is one of the most important threads in clove’s documentary history. It links the Greek and Roman aromatic directly to the spice we know, and it survives in the old botanical name caryophyllata and in the modern chemical name for clove’s essential-oil compounds. To the Romans, clove was one of many exotic and costly Eastern luxuries that flowed into the empire and out again as silver and gold — part of the celebrated and much-lamented Roman trade in spices and perfumes that ancient writers complained was draining the treasury eastward.

What the classical record does not clearly show is heavy Greek or Roman medicinal use of clove on the scale seen in China or, later, in the Arab and European traditions. In the Mediterranean world of antiquity, clove appears chiefly as a rare and prized aromatic and flavouring rather than as a staple drug. Its great medical career in the West would come later, through the medieval Arab physicians and the European herbalists who inherited and expanded their knowledge.

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The Medieval and Arab Trade

Through the medieval centuries, the long-distance trade in clove and the other fine spices was dominated by Arab and other Muslim merchants, who controlled the maritime and caravan routes linking the Indian Ocean to the markets of the Middle East and, through intermediaries such as the Venetians, on to Europe. These traders are famous for guarding the secret of the spices’ true origins, the better to protect their profits, so that for a long time Europeans knew clove only as a fabulously expensive commodity arriving from somewhere far to the east, by way of Alexandria, the Levant, and the Italian city-states.

In this period clove became firmly established in the medical traditions of the Islamic world and, through them, in Europe. Clove was incorporated into the materia medica of medieval physicians as a warming, digestive, and pain-relieving aromatic, used for toothache, for strengthening the stomach, and to sweeten the breath — uses strikingly consistent with those recorded much earlier in China and continued long afterward in Europe. The remarkable convergence of independent cultures on clove for the very same handful of complaints — the painful tooth, the upset stomach, the foul breath — is one of the most striking patterns in the spice’s history, and it reflects the simple fact that eugenol genuinely numbs, genuinely soothes the gut, and genuinely fights the bacteria behind bad breath and decay.

By the late medieval and early Renaissance period, clove was among the most coveted of all the spices reaching Europe, where it was used in cooking, in costly perfumed and medicinal preparations, and as a status symbol at the tables of the wealthy. The astonishing prices that clove and its neighbours nutmeg and mace commanded in European markets — and the realisation that whoever controlled the source islands could control that wealth — set the stage for the violent age of exploration and conquest that followed.

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The European Spice Wars and the Dutch Monopoly

The drive to reach the Spice Islands directly — and so to cut out the Arab and Venetian middlemen who had grown rich on clove and pepper — was one of the great engines of the European age of exploration. After Vasco da Gama opened the sea route around Africa to the Indian Ocean, the Portuguese pressed eastward and reached the Maluku Islands in 1512, becoming the first Europeans to arrive at the source of clove. They were soon contending with the Spanish, whose westward voyages — including the survivors of Magellan’s circumnavigation — were likewise aimed at the Spice Islands. For the first time, the islands whose location had been a guarded secret were on European maps and in European sights.

It was the Dutch, however, acting through the Dutch East India Company (the Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie, or VOC), who in the seventeenth century imposed the most ruthless control over the clove trade. To guarantee their monopoly and keep prices high, the VOC restricted clove cultivation to territory they controlled — centred on the island of Ambon — and undertook to destroy clove trees growing elsewhere in the archipelago, periodically uprooting plantations and policing the islands to prevent unauthorised growing. This deliberate destruction of trees to control supply is one of the most notorious episodes in the history of the spice trade, and it caused real hardship for the islanders whose livelihoods and traditions were bound up with the clove groves.

The Dutch monopoly was eventually broken not by a rival empire but, famously, by smuggling. In the second half of the eighteenth century the French administrator and horticulturist Pierre Poivre — aptly, his surname means “pepper” — organised expeditions that obtained clove (and nutmeg) seedlings and seeds from the Spice Islands and brought them out to French-controlled territory in the Indian Ocean. Around 1770, living clove plants were successfully established on the Isle de France (now Mauritius) and on Bourbon (now Réunion), ending the centuries-old confinement of the clove tree to its native islands. From these French plantings, clove cultivation spread to other tropical territories — most consequentially to Zanzibar and Pemba off the East African coast, which in the nineteenth century became the world’s leading clove producers. Today clove is grown across the tropics, with Indonesia, Madagascar, Tanzania, and several other countries among the major producers, and the single-island monopoly that once shaped world history is gone for good.

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Clove in Traditional Medicine and Dentistry

Alongside its career as a luxury commodity, clove built an equally long career as a medicine, and the through-line of that history is the mouth. Across China, the Arab world, the Indian Ayurvedic tradition, and medieval and early-modern Europe, clove and clove oil were reached for again and again to relieve toothache and to freshen the breath. The traditional method was as simple as it was effective: a whole clove pressed against an aching tooth, or a drop of clove oil on a scrap of cloth or cotton held to the painful spot. Generations of people, long before anyone could explain why, learned that clove deadened the pain of a bad tooth.

This is one of the places where traditional use and modern science line up almost perfectly. We now know that eugenol, clove’s dominant compound, both numbs nerve endings and kills many of the bacteria involved in dental decay and infection — which is exactly why eugenol remains a genuine part of modern dentistry. Zinc oxide–eugenol cements and dressings, used for temporary fillings and to soothe inflamed dental pulp, carry this ancient remedy straight into the twenty-first-century dental office. The clove on your grandmother’s toothache remedy and the eugenol in a dentist’s temporary filling are, chemically, the same idea.

Clove’s traditional medicinal reputation extended well beyond the teeth. As a warming, aromatic spice it was widely used to settle the stomach, relieve nausea and indigestion, and ease wind and gripe — the digestive uses especially prominent in Chinese and Ayurvedic practice. It was valued as an antiseptic and was applied to support wound care, and its powerful aroma made it a natural choice for masking odours and, in some traditions, for embalming and for warding off the “bad airs” once blamed for disease. It is worth being clear, as a public-health note, that these are traditional uses: clove is a genuinely useful spice with real soothing and antibacterial properties, but it is a complement to proper medical and dental care, never a replacement for it, and concentrated clove oil is potent enough to require respect and caution. The detailed evidence for clove’s benefits, with dosing and safety, is covered in the companion Clove Benefits articles and on the main Clove page.

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From Folk Spice to Modern Science

The bridge from clove the folk remedy to clove the subject of laboratory science runs through its essential oil and, above all, through eugenol. As nineteenth-century chemistry matured, researchers turned their attention to the pungent oil of cloves and worked out that a single phenolic compound was responsible for most of its character and activity. That compound took its name directly from the plant: eugenol is named after Eugenia caryophyllata, the older botanical name for the clove tree, so that the very word carries clove’s history inside it. (Sources differ on the precise dates and chemists involved in the early isolation and naming of eugenol, so this page does not attach a single name or year to that milestone; what is uncontested is that the compound and its name derive from clove and were established by nineteenth-century chemistry.)

Identifying eugenol transformed clove from a mysterious aromatic into something a chemist could measure, purify, and study. Modern analysis confirms that eugenol typically makes up the great majority of clove bud oil, accompanied by smaller amounts of compounds such as eugenyl acetate and beta-caryophyllene, and a substantial body of phytochemical and pharmacological research has since documented antibacterial, antifungal, antiviral, anti-inflammatory, antioxidant, and analgesic activities that plausibly underlie clove’s traditional uses. The remarkable continuity of clove’s story — the same spice used for the same toothache and the same upset stomach across China, Arabia, and Europe, and now explained by the action of one well-characterised molecule — is what makes its history more than a tale of trade and conquest.

That continuity is also why clove remains a live research subject rather than a historical curiosity. As resistance to conventional antibiotics has grown, scientists have returned to potent natural antibacterials such as eugenol, studying how clove oil disrupts bacterial membranes, interferes with biofilms, and even restores the effectiveness of some conventional drugs. Tradition raised the questions — why does this little bud soothe a tooth, preserve a food, sweeten a breath? — and modern research is now supplying the answers. The detailed chemistry, mechanisms, and clinical evidence are taken up on the main Clove page and in the Clove Benefits deep-dive articles.

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Research Papers and References

The list below combines peer-reviewed reviews of Syzygium aromaticum that document its history, traditional uses, and chemistry with curated PubMed topic-search links into the broader literature. Historical primary texts (Pliny’s Natural History and the classical and traditional medical writings referred to above) are named in the article as historical sources rather than as modern citations. Author names, titles, and journals are given as plain text; only stable DOI and PubMed links are hyperlinked, and each opens in a new tab.

  1. Kamatou GP, Vermaak I, Viljoen AM. Eugenol — from the remote Maluku Islands to the international market place: a review of a remarkable and versatile molecule. Molecules. 2012;17(6):6953-6981. — doi:10.3390/molecules17066953 · PMID 22728369
  2. Cortés-Rojas DF, de Souza CRF, Oliveira WP. Clove (Syzygium aromaticum): a precious spice. Asian Pacific Journal of Tropical Biomedicine. 2014;4(2):90-96. — doi:10.1016/S2221-1691(14)60215-X · PMID 25182278
  3. Batiha GE, Alkazmi LM, Wasef LG, Beshbishy AM, Nadwa EH, Rashwan EK. Syzygium aromaticum L. (Myrtaceae): traditional uses, bioactive chemical constituents, pharmacological and toxicological activities. Biomolecules. 2020;10(2):202. — doi:10.3390/biom10020202 · PMID 32019140
  4. Chaieb K, Hajlaoui H, Zmantar T, Kahla-Nakbi AB, Rouabhia M, Mahdouani K, Bakhrouf A. The chemical composition and biological activity of clove essential oil, Eugenia caryophyllata (Syzigium aromaticum L. Myrtaceae): a short review. Phytotherapy Research. 2007;21(6):501-506. — doi:10.1002/ptr.2124 · PMID 17380552
  5. Syzygium aromaticum / clove history and traditional use — PubMed: clove history and traditional use
  6. Eugenol pharmacology and history of the molecule — PubMed: eugenol clove pharmacology

External Authoritative Resources

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Connections

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