Of crow-flowers, nettles, daisies, and long purples,
That liberal shepherds give a grosser name,
But our cold maids do dead men’s fingers call them.
With the roots of the wake-robin the Italian ladies made a wash, which, under the name of gersa, renders their skin fair and shining.[[2523]] Numerous other medicines, plants, and substances, were exported from Syria, among which were the cyperus comosus,[[2524]] mountain spikenard,[[2525]] cardamums from the district of Comagena,[[2526]] and aspalathos,[[2527]] used in thickening unguents; crocomagma, a species of perfume,[[2528]] elæomel,[[2529]] a sweet oil distilled from the trunk of a tree near Palmyra, gum-styrax, produced particularly in the neighbourhood of Gabala and Marathos, from which was prepared a costly ointment, used in medicine, and called styracinon,[[2530]] terebinth-berries,[[2531]] pistachio-nuts,[[2532]] gingidion,[[2533]] southernwood,[[2534]] the root of the anchusa,[[2535]] sison, a kind of spice,[[2536]] silphion,[[2537]] the magadaris,[[2538]] papaver spinosum,[[2539]] of which the leaves were dried in a half-cold oven and then pounded to extract the juice; the most fragrant kind of lilies,[[2540]] the androsaces, a remedy against gout,[[2541]] madder from Galilee,[[2542]] and the berries of the wild vine, which were kept in unglazed jars.[[2543]]
The calamus and sweet rush, found in many other countries, appear to have been most fragrant in Palestine, where they grew in stagnant waters among the marshes bordering on Lake Gennesareth.[[2544]] These marshes, in summer dry, occupied a space of about four miles in length, which seems of old to have been thick with reeds and rushes. From the green plants no perfume exhaled, but when they were cut down and laid to dry in the sun there issued from them a delicate fragrance which impregnated the whole air, and, as some fabulously pretended, could be detected by mariners approaching the shore at a distance of more than a hundred and fifty stadia.[[2545]]
The cucumbers of Antioch were celebrated.[[2546]] From Syria was obtained the best terebinth-wood blacker than ebony, used in making dagger-handles, and turned into cups,[[2547]] together with an artificial kind of gypsum made by burning parget stones.[[2548]] Near Seleucia there were mines of an earth called ampelitis,[[2549]] of which the black was the most excellent, resembling pitch; fine charcoal used, mixed with oil, for blackening the eyebrows and dyeing the hair. People likewise smeared with it the stems of vines to protect them against the depredations of insects.
The best bitumen[[2550]] was obtained from the environs of the Dead Sea, in Palestine, and sometimes adulterated with pitch.[[2551]] In Judæa also was found the singular stone called by Pliny and the Greek physicians leucolithos, in magnitude about the size of an acorn, of a milk-white colour and marked with a number of parallel bands, regular as if produced by the turning lathe. Reduced to powder it was exhibited as a medicine.[[2552]]
The articles of merchandise supplied to commerce by the peninsula of Arabia,[[2553]] were rather curious and valuable than numerous.[[2554]] Of these one of the most extraordinary was that white and transparent gem, in search of which they went forth into the desert at midnight, when the stone was discovered by its brightness reflecting amid palm-trees and sand hillocks the refulgence of the moon, whose several phases it was supposed to imitate in form, being circular at times and at times semicircular. For this reason it obtained the name of aphroselenon or moonstone.[[2555]] From a belief in its hidden virtues women wore it about their necks as an amulet against enchantment. It was likewise suspended upon trees to augment their bearing. Eagle-stones[[2556]] were also a production of Arabia, together with certain fine white stones which when calcined were used as a dentrifice.[[2557]]
Hence too was obtained a beautiful diaphanous marble resembling the phengites, which, when sawed into thin laminæ, served instead of glass for window-panes.[[2558]] Near certain islands on the coast of Arabia, in the Persian gulf, was a pearl-fishery which, though inferior in value and celebrity to that of Serendib, still furnished Greece and the whole western world with a large quantity of pearls.[[2559]]
The plains of the Arabian wastes have in all ages been covered at intervals with forests of palm-trees. Dates, therefore, from the earliest times, have been among the exports of the peninsula. The manner of climbing the trees in the fruit season was much the same in antiquity as at present. The person about to ascend made with a cord a loop inclosing both his own body and the tree, which warping up as he mounted enabled him to rest at intervals.[[2560]]