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Artichoke

The artichoke is a domesticated variety of the wild cardoon (Cynara cardunculus),^[9] which is native to the Mediterranean area.^[1] There was debate over whether the artichoke was a food among the ancient Greeks and Romans, or whether that cultivar was developed later, with Classical sources referring instead to the wild cardoon.^[10][11] The cardoon is mentioned as a garden plant in the 8th century BCE by Homer and Hesiod. Pliny the Elder mentioned growing of ‘carduus’ in Carthage and Cordoba.^[12] In North Africa, where it is still found in the wild state, the seeds of artichokes, probably cultivated, were found during the excavation of Roman-period Mons Claudianus in Egypt.^[13] Varieties of artichokes were cultivated in Sicily beginning in the classical period of the ancient Greeks; the Greeks calling them kaktos. In that period, the Greeks ate the leaves and flower heads, which cultivation had already improved from the wild form. The Romans called the vegetable carduus (hence the name cardoon). Further improvement in the cultivated form appears to have taken place in the medieval period in Muslim Spain and the Maghreb, although the evidence is inferential only.^[14] By the twelfth century, it was being mentioned in the compendious guide to farming composed by Ibn al-‘Awwam in Seville (though it does not appear in earlier major Andalusian Arabic works on agriculture), and in Germany by Hildegard von Bingen.^[15]