Rice as food and medication in ancient and Byzantine medical literature

Abstract

The article discusses rice (ὄρυζα) on the basis of medical writings compiled between the first and seventh centuries, and consists of four parts. The first tries to assess the spread of rice in the Greco-Roman agriculture. The results of the analysis support conclusions present in the literature and confirm the fact that rice was never popular in the Mediterranean in antiquity and later during the period of early and middle Byzantium. A gradual change in its status appeared along with the Arab agricultural revolution. The second chapter of the study is devoted to dietetic characterizations of rice and enlists features attributed to it, which were consistently made use of in medical procedures. The third part of the study tries to retrieve from medical writings main culinary guidelines concerning rice. The authors conclude that the cereal usually was the basis for preparation of cooked dishes and was hardly ever used in baking. The fourth chapter enumerates medical procedures which included rice (cure of intestinal problems, hemorrhages, other ailments resulting in excessive excretion of fluids of the body, gout etc.).

Cities of rice: risiculture and environmental change in the Early Modern Ottoman Balkans

“…Sixteenth-century Ottoman hospices served soups made out of rice (Gökbilgin 1952: 252); rice was also used in soups in Ottoman Egypt in the same period (Lewicka 2011: 153). By contrast, in the Byzantine period, rice seems to have been only or primarily used as medicine (Dalby 2010: 133;Kokoszko et al 2015), or eaten as dessert (Browning 2001: 118;Rautman 2006: 46). Just as the first coffee house was established in mid-16th century Istanbul, rice too was part of the shifting consumption patterns in the eastern Mediterranean.…”