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Ancient Cyrenaica cultivated and sold a plant that only grew in this region: silphium. This plant, which has now disappeared, was highly appreciated in the whole ancient world: it was used as medication, perfume and condiment.
Silphium was a plant with a thick, hollow stem, thick roots covered in black bark, thin leaves, and yellow flowers. A silphium stem could be up to 3 meters high.
The cities of Cyrenaica exported silphium everywhere in the ancient world. This plant was highly valuable: a silphium stem was sold for its weight in gold. Because of its value, silphium played a crucial role in the region’s economy, and many coins from Cyrene and the neighboring cities show a silphium stem.
The value of silphium came from its resin, called laserpicium in Latin. Through an incision in the stem, the resin flowed out with a pleasant fragrance. Incisions in the roots produced a translucent resin, that was more pure and more highly concentrated, making it even more valuable.
Silphium had both medical and culinary uses. It was considered an universal remedy, to cure cough, sore throat, fever, indigestion, warts, gut, and all kinds of ailments. It was also used as an aphrodisiac and a contraceptive, to reduce female fertility.
In cooking, silphium was used as seasoning for many dishes. Silphium leaves were fed to sheep: they have their meet a particularly delicious taste.
Finally, silphium was used as a burnt perfume.
Silphium grew only in Eastern Libya, from around Derna to the Gulf of Sirte. The Greek poet Pindar described Cyrenaica as a “garden of flowers”. Silphium was a wild plant, impossible to cultivate. All attempts to grow it outside its natural environment failed.
What kind of plant was it? Did it look like any other plant that still exists today? Silphium probably was a variety of ferule, a type of plant of which several species can still be found today in the Mediterranean world. Ferula drudeana, a ferule native to central Turkey, produces a similar kind of resin; but there is no known link between this species and Libya. Some specialists also suggested that silphium might have been a hybrid between various species of ferules. This might explain why it was so hard to grow: hybrid plants often have amazing qualities in the first generation, but they are sterile, and cannot be reproduced through grain, but only asexually, through roots.
Silphium disappeared at the beginning of the Roman era. The Roman author Pliny the Elder wrote in his Natural History that the last silphium stem found in Cyrenaica was offered to Emperor Nero, as a curiosity. It was long believed that silphium disappeared because of over-exploitation, but the desertification of its native region is actually a more likely cause of its disappearance. At the beginning of the 5th Century, Synesius of Cyrene mentions silphium in a letter, as a plant that no longer existed in his lifetime. He says that its disappearance is one of the reasons of the decline of his native Cyrenaica.
