The Origins of Chypre - II

My fools for senses,

We saw in the first part of our article that chypre in perfumery owes its origin to the appearance of a bird-like perfume burner in European courts around the 14th century. However, it is not uncommon to read nowadays that chypre derives from Cyperus esculentus, the Latin name of the scented nutsedge, a theory far from being new but also, as we shall see, not necessarily far from being true. After exploring the origins of the chypre at those of its history, let us discover together the chypre at the origins of its name, at the heart of what remains one of the greatest ethnobotanical mysteries of our time...

Before getting into the thick of a subject as gnarled as this one, we feel the need to set up the decor.

The idea that the chypre we know comes from the cyperus esculentus, as well as recent -Septimus Piesse mentions it in the 19th century- is absolutely false. In fact, if the filiation between our chypre and its medieval ancestor is clear upon reading historical formulae, that between our chypre and the nutsedge is non-existent, the latter being too rarely used in chypre derivatives to be anything but anecdotal. This confusion between the cyprus birdie and the cyperus could have very quickly been resolved by reading Rimmel who in 1870 says that “the cyprus is the shrub the Arabs call henna” killing in the bud any attempt to see in our chypre a relative of the nutsedge.

We can nevertheless ask ourselves the question of the proximity and the difference thereof between cypre and cyperus, propelling us into a debate that goes back more than 2000 years: that of their natures and etymologies.

When Rimmel says that cyprus is the henné of the Arabs, he is not mistaken but takes up the conclusions of Fée for whom Pliny’s cypro clearly refers to the lawsonia inermis - the henna plant. This form, henné, is attested in French around the 16th century so, much later than cypre. Before that, and since the 12th century, henné had been called various names, often alkane or alcanet, from the Latin alchanna, itself derived from the Arabic al-hinna which Indo-European root can be traced to the pahlavi ndwg which we must compare to the Khotanese dva- and the Sanskrit उद्वृत् meaning oppression, from which application, smearing and anoiting. However, it was only around the 8th century that henna appeared in the Iranian and Arabic languages and Pliny the Elder tells us about cypro seven centuries prior. Thus, long before being al-hinna or alchanna, henna was called cypros.

Lawsonia Inermis

 When Pliny speaks of cypros, it is in the context of a recipe for cyprinum, a perfume famous during the Antiquity named after the flower from which it was made. In that he is quoting Theophrastus who three centuries earlier mentioned kypros for the first time in ancient Greek, not to describe the flower but the perfume as a whole, betraying his ignorance of a plant imported from overseas. That is where the plot thickens because in addition to cypros/kypros, Pliny mentions a cyperos, specifying that is is customarily confused with cypiros, a distinction that he probably inherited from Herodotus who, for no apparent reason, first differentiatied kypeiron and kyperos. It is therefore easy to understand how the Greeks and the Romans confused kypros/cypros and kyperos/cyperus, one designating the henna, the other designating the nutsedge.

As far as kypros is concerned, it appears in Greek with Theophrastus in the 3rd century BC and comes from the Hebrew koper which we find several times in the Bible where it takes the meanings of henna (Ct. 1,14) or expiatory ransom (Is. 43,3), a polysemy easily explained by looking at its Akkadian etymon kaparu meaning "to coat, to anoint, to smear” and that ultimately gave us the Hebrew kippur and the Arabic takfir. All these terms share a common root, the kpr triliter which also comes up at roughly the same time in the Vienna Papyrus 6257. Later, a Meroitic inscription from the 1st century BC mentions a Nubian named Kpr, attesting to its use as a male anthroponym – until this discovery, we only knew kpr to be a female anthroponym, the most notable of which being Herod’s mother’s name, Kupros. Though these cases seem isolated, there is no reason to believe that they were. Most of all they prove that the kpr flower enjoyed a certain aura on both sides of the Red Sea. All these elements -a common Semitic root, an almost simultaneous appearance in several cultural and geographical zones, anthroponyms spread alongs Nabatean trade routes- lead us to believe that the kpr was not indigenous to any of them and did not come from the East -else it would bear an indoeuropean root like that of henna- but from the South. From Africa.

However, it is still impossible to say where the kpr triliter comes from or what it meant before it became associated with the kopher/kypros/cypros/cypre. The anthroponymic trail presents two solutions. One, that kpr was borrowed from a Sudarabic language which cultural area was located between the Levant and Upper Egypt and in which kpr designated the henna shrub. The other and this is a much more interesting possibility, is that the name never had anything to do with the thing and that the shift from anthroponym to phytonym was based on a famous leader whose people was known for harvesting and trading henna. In other words, kpr didn’t refer to a plant in particular but to someone’s plant : Kpr’s flower. As if frankincense had never referred to any particular incense but to “Frank’s incense”.

If the history of cypros/henna apparently ends here, on the borders of Ancient Egypt, we must however return to the history of the cyperos/nutsedge.

We left it with Herodotus in the 5th century BC according to whom the Scythians used it in their embalming rituals. Around the same time, Pherecrates describes the Elysian Fields and includes the kyperos, elsewhere Hippocrates advises it to women and two centuries before them, Alkman wrote in Dorian about the pyleon made of helichrysum and “kypairon” that the Lacedemonians ceremoniously offered to Hera, goddess of fertility. In the 8th century BC at last, we read the Homeric form “kypeiros” probably borrowed from the Mycenaean “kuparo” which in the tablets of Pylos and Knossos sometimes meant a condiment, horse fodder or a plant used to make perfumes. We could therefore stop here and say that the history of the cyperus/kyperos began with the Mycenaeans but the case of kuparo deserves more investigation because, just like kypros in Theophrastus, it is a loanword which raises the question again of its etymology and origin. This is of particular interest to us because, depending on them, the kuparo either meant nutsedge or henna and it if meant the latter, it would push our knowledge of the flower well before the middle of the 1st millennium BC. 

Cyperus esculentus

Now the first theory, backed by Astour and Lewy, sees in kuparo a loanword from the Hebrew koper, which seems unlikely from a historical point of view. Nevertheless, Akkadian and Ugaritic both provide us with two more plausible candidates: kapparu and its Ugaritic form kpr -there it is again- attested since the 14th century BC. If that were so, then henna would have been known and used in perfumery since at least the 14th century BC which wouldn’t explain why it took almost a millennium to find it in levantine literature. We would here like to briefly mention Palmer’s thesis, completed by Merrillees’s, for whom the Greek name of Cyprus, Kupros, comes from kpr by way of Mycenaean kupirijo thus associating the colour of copper, abundant in Cyprus, with that of henna and meaning that it was indeed known to the Mycenaeans.

The second theory concerning kuparo refutes the semantic origin of the name, concluding on the one hand : that the difference in meaning between kapparu/smear and kuparo/nutsedge is too great to see in the former the etymon of the latter, ignoring the similar meanings in Sanskrit and Middle Persian; and on the other hand that henna and nutsedge being two fundamentally different plants, they couldn’t bear the same name, making kuparo the remains of an Aegean substrate.

The third would have kuparo be a loanword from Akkadian kibirru designating a kind of rush, to be compared to giparu designating a landscape of plain or pasture, where rush were probably abundant.

What does that say of our chypre? Was it henna? Was it nutsedge? In fact in was both...and neither.

As far as henna is concerned, we know that Theophrastus' kypros, which gace Pliny's cyprinum, was a famous perfume made from henna flowers which harvest is attested since at least the 1st millennium BC, but as it is currently impossible for us to trace the origin of the kpr triliter, we cannot say where the perfume was first made.

As for the nutsedge, we think that the same way cyprinum was the perfume of cypro, the Mycenaean kuparowe was the perfume of kuparo and that it referred to the nutsedge in this case. Indeed, Cyprus was known for its perfumes as early as the Bronze Age as evidenced by the remains of a perfume factory discovered in Pyrgos and dated to the beginning of the 2nd millennium BC. About 500 years later, when the Hittite king Tutaliya IV subdued Alashiya - the ancient name of Cyprus - he collected a copper tribute but also a certain amount of oil of gayatum, an Akkadian term unknown to Hittites suggesting a loan and which we must link to the Egyptian gjw designating... the nutsedge -in the Ebers Papyrus for instance.

We thus think that sometime during the rich trade history of the Mediterranean, the kuparowe was lost and replaced with the kypros/cyprinum. The nutsedge kept appearing in incense and embalming traditions -as we see it in 18th century French embalming rituals- but never was it seen in perfumes again, sticking to a medicinal role.

As we can see here, Cyprus is at the crossroads of many different cultural influences

 Our chypre is the fruit of chance and mystery. Levantine by essence, it is mobile, travelling. Like kpr, that uprooted wanderwort, our chypre itself doesn’t known where it comes from. Whether it is kuparowe, the scent of nutsedge, or kypros, the scent of henna, none can say whence they came nor when they were first crafted. Surprisingly, almost 1500 years later, the Crusades happened to bring another perfume from Cyprus to Western Europe, in all ways different than the kypros and kuparowe but from Cyprus still, which was exotic enough for the Latin nobility.

One thing is certain however, that during its 4000 years of history shared between Pelasgians, Anatolians, Cypro-Minoans, Mycenaeans, Akkadians, Nubians, Libyans, Nilotics, Greeks, Egyptians, Hittites and Latins; between Byzantines and Franks, between French and Italians, between London and Paris, Venice and Montpellier; if not born there, the chypre did go through Cyprus.

If that was even the island’s real name.

But that, my dears, is a whole other story...