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ABSTRACT This paper presents a new interpretation of a unique Bronze Age (c. 3000-1100 BCE) Aegean wall painting in the building of Xeste 3 at Akrotiri, Thera. Crocus cartwrightianus and its active principle, saffron, are the primary subjects at Xeste 3. Several lines of evidence suggest that the meaning of these frescoes concerns saffron and healing: (1) the unusual degree of visual attention given to the crocus, including the variety of methods for display of the stigmas; (2) the painted depiction of the line of saffron production from plucking blooms to the collection of stigmas; and (3) the sheer number (ninety) of medical indications for which saffron has been used from the Bronze Age to the present. The Xeste 3 frescoes appear to portray a divinity of healing associated with her phytotherapy, saffron. Cultural and commercial interconnections between the Therans, the Aegean world, and their neighboring civilizations in the early 2nd millennium BCE indicate a close network of thematic exchange, but there is no evidence that Akrotiri borrowed any of these medicinal (or iconographie) representations. The complex production line, the monumental illustration of a goddess of medicine with her saffron attribute, and this earliest botanically accurate image of an herbal medication are all Theran innovations.
Dawn in her saffron robe rose from the River of Ocean to bring daylight to the immortals and to men.
-Homer, Iliad 19.9
EIGHTY PERCENT OF THE WORLD'S POPULATION today relies almost exclusively on natural phytotherapy as a chief source of symptom prevention or disease treatment (Zava, Dollbaum, and Bien 1998). Through thousands of years of human experimentation, specific herbs have been recognized for treating a remarkable variety of symptoms as well as sex-related ailments. Frescoes at Akrotiri, Greece, suggest that the Therans of ancient Akrotiri developed saffron as a versatile medicine more than 3,600 years ago.
At approximately the mid-17th century BCE, the town of Akrotiri on the Greek island of Thera was destroyed by the devastating eruption of the island's volcano, which buried the two-, three-, and four-story buildings with all their contents under a vast layer of pumice and ash.1 This prehistoric archaeological site resembles the much later Roman city of Pompeii in having very high levels of preservation resulting from the volcanic burial. Akrotiri lies...