Saffron: History and Traditional Use

Table of Contents

1. A Flower That Cannot Seed Itself: Botany, Origins and the Name
2. Painted Before It Was Written: Thera, Knossos and the Near East
3. Greece and Rome: Homer, Theophrastus, Dioscorides and Pliny
4. Persia and Islam: al-Razi, Ibn Sina and az-Za'farān
5. Kashmir, India and China: Kong and the "Foreign Red Flower"
6. Medieval Europe: Plague, the Safranschou and a Saffron War
7. From Polychroit to Crocin: The Chemistry (1811–1934)
8. Pharmacopoeias, Commission E and the First Mood Trials
9. Saffron Today: An Ancient Spice and an Honest Ledger
10. Key Research Papers
11. Connections
12. Featured Videos

A Flower That Cannot Seed Itself: Botany, Origins and the Name

Saffron comes from Crocus sativus L., a small lilac-flowered member of the iris family (Iridaceae) that blooms in autumn. Each flower carries three long red stigmas — the thread-like arms of the female part of the flower that catch pollen — and those threads, hand-picked and dried, are the spice. About 150 flowers yield a single gram, which is why it has always been costly.

One botanical fact shapes the whole history. Crocus sativus is a sterile triploid: it carries three sets of chromosomes instead of the usual two, so it sets no viable seed. It can be multiplied only by dividing its corms, the swollen underground stems, and replanting them. Every saffron field on earth is therefore a set of cuttings from ancient plants, carried from country to country by human hands. The plant does not exist in the wild; it is a cultigen, a species made by cultivation.

Where that happened was argued over for a century. Two independent genetic studies in 2019, from Gatersleben and Dresden, settled the main question: the wild parent is Crocus cartwrightianus, a crocus of southern Greece and the Aegean islands, and saffron arose when two genetically different plants of that one species combined into a triploid; the wild population most like cultivated saffron grows in Attica, south of Athens. A 2022 paper by the same researchers noted that this fits the oldest pictures of the plant, which are Aegean, and argued for domestication in Bronze Age Greece.

The names carry the trade history. English saffron comes through Old French safran and medieval Latin safranum from Arabic az-za'farān, of uncertain origin (a Persian zarparān, "golden threads", is proposed, not proven). Crocus is the Greek krokos, itself probably borrowed from a Semitic word that survives as Hebrew karkom and Arabic kurkum — which in Arabic came to mean turmeric. Sanskrit called it kunkuma. Three unrelated plants borrow its name: meadow saffron (Colchicum autumnale), a poisonous lily-relative whose danger Theophrastus already recorded; safflower (Carthamus tinctorius), the "bastard saffron" that has been the commonest adulterant for two thousand years; and turmeric, sold as "Indian saffron".

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Painted Before It Was Written: Thera, Knossos and the Near East

The oldest evidence for saffron is not a text but a wall. At Knossos on Crete, a fresco of about 1700 BCE shows a crocus-picker that Sir Arthur Evans's restorers gave a boy's head and named the "Saffron Gatherer"; in 1947 Nikolaos Platon re-restored it, blue skin and tail fragment and all, as what it is — a blue monkey in a field of crocuses.

Far richer are the frescoes of Xeste 3 at Akrotiri on Thera (Santorini), sealed under ash by the eruption of the seventeenth or sixteenth century BCE: girls in elaborate dress gather crocus blooms on a rocky hillside and carry baskets of stigmas to a seated goddess attended by a griffin. Scholars agree that saffron mattered ritually to the Therans and disagree about what the scene means. In 2004 the art historian Susan Ferrence and the physician Gordon Bendersky read it as a goddess of healing with her medicine, counting some ninety complaints saffron has been used for since antiquity; others see a coming-of-age ceremony; the 2022 genetics paper suggests it may commemorate domestication itself. Even the species is debated (cultivated saffron or its wild parent). Not in doubt: these are the earliest botanically recognisable pictures of the plant anywhere.

The written record begins later and is thinner than popular histories suggest. Standard accounts state that saffron appears in a seventh-century BCE Assyrian botanical compilation made under King Ashurbanipal; but this rests on the reading of cuneiform plant names, which is always provisional. Saffron is likewise often said to be among the remedies of the Egyptian Ebers Papyrus (about 1550 BCE); the identification is uncertain, and there is no evidence that Egypt grew the crocus, so any saffron there was imported. The one Hebrew Bible mention is secure: karkom appears once, in the Song of Songs (4:14), among luxuries beside nard, calamus and cinnamon.

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Greece and Rome: Homer, Theophrastus, Dioscorides and Pliny

In Homer's Iliad the dawn goddess Eos is krokopeplos, "saffron-robed", an epithet Homer gives no one else: the colour of the spice was already the colour of sunrise. The medical writings gathered under the name of Hippocrates (fifth to fourth century BCE) use saffron often; the historian of pharmacy Alain Touwaide counts twenty uses, fourteen of them gynaecological — disorders of the womb, fertility, provoking abortion.

The first description of saffron farming is by Theophrastus, Aristotle's pupil, in his Enquiry into Plants (about 300 BCE). The saffron-crocus, he writes, has hair-like leaves, "blooms after the rising of the Pleiad and only for a few days", has "a large and fleshy" root, "loves even to be trodden on and grows fairer when the root is crushed into the ground by the foot: wherefore it is fairest along the roads" — and "is propagated from the root." That last clause is the sterile triploid, observed without genetics. He names Cyrene in North Africa for the finest scent and lists saffron among the perfumers' plants.

Dioscorides, whose De Materia Medica (first century CE) governed European pharmacy for 1,500 years, opens his entry on krokos with a buyer's guide. The best is Corycian, from Mount Corycus in Cilicia (southern Turkey): fresh, well coloured, hard to break, colouring the hands, "alluring in scent"; the Cyrenaican and Sicilian kinds are "the weakest" and were bought for dye. He lists the frauds — saffron dregs, grape must, and litharge (lead oxide) "to make it weigh more" — and the medicine: "digestive, softening, somewhat astringent and diuretic", taken in raisin wine "against overindulgence", applied with breast milk for discharges of the eyes, and used in suppositories and poultices for the womb. Galen, a century later, added astringent and warming.

Pliny the Elder's Natural History (Book 21, about 77 CE) repeats the ranking — Corycus first, then Mount Olympus in Lycia, then Centuripe in Sicily — and adds the sentence every later writer quotes: adulteratur nihil aeque, "nothing is adulterated as much as saffron." His test still works: genuine saffron crackles under the hand as if brittle, because adulterated saffron has been dampened for weight. He adds that saffron flavoured wine and perfume and was scattered, ground, to scent the theatres of Rome.

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Persia and Islam: al-Razi, Ibn Sina and az-Za'farān

The Persian and Arabic-speaking world gave saffron the name most of the planet now uses, and its most systematic early medicine. Greek pharmacology passed into Arabic in ninth-century Baghdad, and the Persian physicians who inherited it enlarged the list. Touwaide notes that al-Razi (Rhazes, ninth to tenth century) extended saffron's uses to the chest, the liver and the mind. Ibn Sina (Avicenna, about 980–1037) gave it a full monograph in Book II of his Canon of Medicine; a 2013 review by pharmacologists at Mashhad lists what he claimed for it: a lifter of mood, a sleep-inducer, an anti-inflammatory, a protector of the liver, an opener of the airways, an aphrodisiac, an inducer of labour and a promoter of menstruation. These are the claims of an eleventh-century physician working within the Greek theory of the four humours, recorded as history — but the first item is the one modern trials returned to nine centuries later.

Arab agriculture carried the crop westward: the Spanish word azafrán is simply az-za'farān, and saffron farming took root in al-Andalus in the centuries after the eighth-century conquest; La Mancha has held a European Protected Designation of Origin since 2001. The Persian heartland never stopped growing it. Iran now produces roughly 85–90 per cent or more of the world's saffron, mostly in the Khorasan provinces of the north-east, where in Gonabad the fields are still watered by qanats — hand-dug underground channels some 2,500 years old; the UN Food and Agriculture Organization named Gonabad's qanat-fed saffron farming a Globally Important Agricultural Heritage System in 2018.

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Kashmir, India and China: Kong and the "Foreign Red Flower"

Kashmir is the other ancient home of saffron, and its written record is older than the legend visitors are told. Local tradition credits two Sufi saints, Khwaja Masood Wali and Sheikh Sharif-ud-din Wali, with bringing the first corm in the eleventh or twelfth century; their shrine stands at Pampore, which still grows about nine-tenths of India's crop. But Sanskrit sources place saffron in Kashmir long before. The Nilamata Purana, a text of the valley's own customs usually dated between the sixth and eighth centuries CE, lists kunkuma among foods and temple offerings; and the twelfth-century chronicler Kalhana, in his Rajatarangini, counts it among the glories of the land. A passage attributed to the third-century Chinese writer Wan Zhen is quoted as saying that saffron grew in Kashmir, raised chiefly to offer to the Buddha. Kashmiris call it kong; the crop received India's Geographical Indication registration in 2020.

China knew saffron only as an import, and its names say so: fan hong hua, "foreign red flower", xi hong hua, "western red flower", zang hong hua, "Tibetan red flower", after its usual route. A 2021 review of the Chinese sources traces the first medical record to Chen Cangqi's Tang-dynasty Ben Cao Shi Yi ("Supplement to the Materia Medica", about 739–741 CE). Li Shizhen included it in his Bencao Gangmu (compiled 1578) as a calming remedy for fright and palpitations — while confusing it with safflower, the cheap local dye plant, which shows how rarely the real thing was seen. Chinese medicine went on to class it, in its own categories, as a mover of "blood stasis".

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Medieval Europe: Plague, the Safranschou and a Saffron War

Saffron reached medieval Europe as an Eastern luxury, traded through Venice, Genoa and the German merchant cities, wanted as dye, luxury kitchen colouring and medicine. Demand is said to have surged with the Black Death of 1347–1350, when it was sought as a plague remedy, and the trade grew valuable enough to police and even fight over. In 1358 Nuremberg enacted the Safranschou ("saffron inspection"), one of Europe's earliest food laws, with inspectors to examine every consignment. Adulterators — the tricks were the old ones: saffron soaked in honey or oil for weight, bulked with marigold or safflower petals, or kept damp in cellars — were fined, imprisoned and, the chronicles report, sometimes burned or buried alive with their goods. Popular histories add a fourteen-week "Saffron War" of 1374 over an 800-pound shipment seized on its way to Basel — passed on here as reported.

Europe also learned to grow its own. In Abruzzo, tradition holds that a Dominican friar of the Santucci family of Navelli brought corms from Spain in the thirteenth century and began the cultivation L'Aquila is still known for; unverifiable, though the crop is real and has held a Protected Designation of Origin since 2005. In England, saffron is recorded as first planted at Walden in Essex under Edward III (1327–1377), probably to dye the cloth of the wool trade; a story set down by Richard Hakluyt in the sixteenth century has a pilgrim smuggling a single corm home from the Levant in the hollow of his staff — a legend, and a good one. Cultivation spread across the Essex chalk, and by the 1540s Chipping Walden had become Saffron Walden. The industry peaked around 1500 and then slowly died — hand harvest was brutally expensive, imports grew cheaper, and a run of poor summers finished it. By 1726 Littlebury was the only village still growing it; by 1790 saffron had disappeared from the district.

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From Polychroit to Crocin: The Chemistry (1811–1934)

No one knew what saffron was made of until the nineteenth century, and the story is usually told too simply. The first chemists to extract the colouring matter — Bouillon-Lagrange and Vogel in 1811, Aschoff in 1818 — called it polychroit, "many-coloured", because it changed colour with acids and alkalis. Quadrat obtained it pure in 1851, and only in 1862 did Rochleder and Mayer name it crocin, showing it to be a glycoside (a sugar-bound compound) identical to the yellow pigment of the gardenia fruit. In 1884 R. Kayser published a study of "the substances present in saffron" in the journal of the German Chemical Society, describing the bitter glycoside that became known as picrocrocin (Greek pikros, bitter). By 1898 an American dispensatory listed crocin, picrocrocin and a volatile oil already called safranal as its three characteristic constituents.

Their structures were worked out by two founders of carotenoid chemistry. In 1928 Paul Karrer and Harry Salomon in Zurich published a series of papers on "the saffron pigments" in Helvetica Chimica Acta, part of the work that established crocetin — the orange carotenoid backbone to which crocin's sugars are attached — and for which Karrer shared the 1937 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. In 1933–34 Richard Kuhn and Alfred Winterstein in Heidelberg determined the structure of picrocrocin and showed the connection between the three: when the bitter glycoside breaks down it releases one molecule of glucose and one of safranal, so the taste of saffron is the parent of its aroma, and both are kin to its colour. Kuhn received the 1938 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his work on carotenoids and vitamins.

That chemistry finally answered Pliny. The international standard ISO 3632 grades saffron not by appearance but by measuring, with a spectrophotometer, exactly those three substances: crocin for colouring strength, picrocrocin for taste and safranal for aroma — the buyer's tests of Dioscorides, made numerical.

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Pharmacopoeias, Commission E and the First Mood Trials

Saffron remained an official drug in Western pharmacopoeias into the twentieth century. King's American Dispensatory of 1898 lists "Crocus (U.S.P.)" as an emmenagogue and diaphoretic — a promoter of menstruation and of sweating — for "amenorrhoea, dysmenorrhoea, chlorosis, hysteria" — the Hippocratic uses almost unchanged; but it admits that "saffron is not the important drug it was at one time." The British Pharmaceutical Codex of 1911, under "Crocus, B.P.", is blunter: it "is used almost entirely for its colouring and flavouring properties." The old gynaecological reputation had a dark side. Saffron in gram quantities was used to procure abortion, and the traditional toxicology figures — toxic effects from about 5 grams, abortion at about 10 grams with a high risk to the mother's life, death at about 20 grams — are still quoted in modern reviews. They are a thousand times today's trial doses, and they are why concentrated saffron is avoided in pregnancy.

When Germany's Commission E reviewed the herbal literature in the late twentieth century it placed saffron among its unapproved herbs: the traditional claims, for cramps and asthma among them, were judged undocumented. The mood claim went untested until a group at Tehran University of Medical Sciences took it up. In 2004 Shahin Akhondzadeh and colleagues published a six-week pilot trial in thirty adults with mild-to-moderate depression, comparing 30 mg a day of saffron extract with the antidepressant imipramine; the two performed similarly. In 2005 the same group added a placebo-controlled trial and a comparison with fluoxetine, both favouring saffron. Those three small studies opened a literature of dozens of trials and several meta-analyses, examined in the companion Mood and Depression article along with the reviewers' standing caveats: the trials are small, short and drawn overwhelmingly from one country. A 2007 German review put the historical point neatly: through saffron's recorded history, uses against "depressive mood" recur, and those are what modern research has found most worth pursuing.

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Saffron Today: An Ancient Spice and an Honest Ledger

The plant in the field has not changed since the Therans painted it, because it cannot: every corm is a division of a division of the triploid that arose in Bronze Age Attica. What has changed is the map. Iran grows the great bulk of the crop; Kashmir, Spain, Greece, Italy and Morocco grow prized smaller harvests; and hand-picking still sets the price everywhere. Fraud has not changed either: dyed safflower, marigold, corn silk and synthetic colourants turn up in modern surveys as litharge and grape must did in Dioscorides, which is why our Fake Food section treats saffron as the type case of a costly food that invites fraud — and why whole threads from a seller who tests to ISO 3632 are the modern Pliny's crackle.

The honest ledger reads like this. Tradition asked a great deal of saffron — Hippocratic gynaecology, Dioscorides' eye washes, Avicenna's lifted spirits, Li Shizhen's calmed heart. Modern evidence supports a narrow slice of it: a consistent but still modest body of trials for mild-to-moderate low mood, and early signals for premenstrual symptoms and the retina, summarised on the Saffron Benefits pages. It supports none of the old gram-dose or abortion uses, which toxicology now forbids. A history this long proves nothing by itself; it is a very old list of questions, and the answers are still coming in. The truthful way to honour saffron's 3,500 years is to keep both halves in view — the extraordinary continuity of the plant and its uses, and the ordinary scientific caution a pinch of the world's most expensive spice deserves.

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Key Research Papers

The list covers saffron's genetic origin, the Bronze Age evidence, the standard ethnobotanical reviews, the two chemistry landmarks, the Avicenna comparison and the first controlled mood trial; historical primary texts are named in the article, not cited here.

1. Ferrence SC, Bendersky G (2004). Therapy with Saffron and the Goddess at Thera. Perspectives in Biology and Medicine. — PubMed PMID: 15259204
2. Nemati Z, Harpke D, Gemicioglu A, Kerndorff H, Blattner FR (2019). Saffron (Crocus sativus) is an autotriploid that evolved in Attica (Greece) from wild Crocus cartwrightianus. Molecular Phylogenetics and Evolution. — doi:10.1016/j.ympev.2019.03.022
3. Kazemi-Shahandashti S-S, Mann L, El-nagish A, Harpke D, Nemati Z, et al. (2022). Ancient Artworks and Crocus Genetics Both Support Saffron's Origin in Early Greece. Frontiers in Plant Science. — doi:10.3389/fpls.2022.834416
4. Basker D, Negbi M (1983). Uses of saffron. Economic Botany. — doi:10.1007/BF02858789
5. Winterhalter P, Straubinger M (2000). Saffron — renewed interest in an ancient spice. Food Reviews International. — doi:10.1081/FRI-100100281
6. Kayser R (1884). Ueber im Safran vorhandene Substanzen. Berichte der deutschen chemischen Gesellschaft. — doi:10.1002/cber.188401702129
7. Kuhn R, Winterstein A (1934). Über die Konstitution des Pikro-crocins und seine Beziehung zu den Carotin-Farbstoffen des Safrans. Berichte der deutschen chemischen Gesellschaft. — doi:10.1002/cber.19340670239
8. Hosseinzadeh H, Nassiri-Asl M (2013). Avicenna's (Ibn Sina) the Canon of Medicine and saffron (Crocus sativus): a review. Phytotherapy Research. — PubMed PMID: 22815242
9. Akhondzadeh S, Fallah-Pour H, Afkham K, Jamshidi A-H, Khalighi-Cigaroudi F (2004). Comparison of Crocus sativus L. and imipramine in the treatment of mild to moderate depression: a pilot double-blind randomized trial. BMC Complementary and Alternative Medicine. — doi:10.1186/1472-6882-4-12
10. Dai R-C, Nabil WNN, Xu H-X (2021). The History of Saffron in China: From Its Origin to Applications. Chinese Medicine and Culture. — doi:10.4103/cmac.cmac_38_21

PubMed Topic Searches

1. PubMed: Saffron ethnobotany and traditional use
2. PubMed: Saffron history of pharmacology

External Authoritative Resources

• Kew POWO — Crocus sativus L.
• Theophrastus, Enquiry into Plants (saffron-crocus at 6.6.9)
• Pliny, Natural History 21.17 — Saffron (Perseus Digital Library)
• AHPA Herbs in History — Saffron (Touwaide & Appetiti, 2022)
• King's American Dispensatory (1898) — Crocus (U.S.P.)
• FAO GIAHS — Gonabad qanat saffron system

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Connections

• All Herbs
• Saffron Hub
• Saffron Benefits
• Saffron for Mood and Depression
• Turmeric History
• Carotenoids
• Depression
• Age-Related Macular Degeneration
• Fake Food

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