"This is a diverse and sprawling history spanning several millennia, beginning with a handful of cloves found in a charred ceramic vessel beneath the Syrian desert, where, in a small town in the banks of the Euphrates River, an individual by the name of Puzurum lost his house to a devastating fire. In cosmic terms, this was a minor event: a new house was built over the ruins of the old, and then another, and many others after that; life went on, and on, and on. In due course a team of archaeologists came to the dusty village that now stands atop the ruins where, from the packed and burned earth that had once been Puzurum's home, they extracted an archive of inscribed clay tablets. By a happy accident (for the archaeologists, if not for Puzurum), the blaze that destroyed the house had fired the friable clay tablets as hard as though they had been baked in a kiln, thereby ensuring their survival over thousands of years. A second fluke was a reference on one of the tablets to a local ruler known from other sources, one King Yadihk-Abu. His name dates the blaze, and the cloves, to within a few years of 1721 B.C."
--Jack Turner, _Spice: The History of a Temptation_ (NY: Alfred A. Knopf, 2004), xv.
chained_bear commented on the word Puzurum
"This is a diverse and sprawling history spanning several millennia, beginning with a handful of cloves found in a charred ceramic vessel beneath the Syrian desert, where, in a small town in the banks of the Euphrates River, an individual by the name of Puzurum lost his house to a devastating fire. In cosmic terms, this was a minor event: a new house was built over the ruins of the old, and then another, and many others after that; life went on, and on, and on. In due course a team of archaeologists came to the dusty village that now stands atop the ruins where, from the packed and burned earth that had once been Puzurum's home, they extracted an archive of inscribed clay tablets. By a happy accident (for the archaeologists, if not for Puzurum), the blaze that destroyed the house had fired the friable clay tablets as hard as though they had been baked in a kiln, thereby ensuring their survival over thousands of years. A second fluke was a reference on one of the tablets to a local ruler known from other sources, one King Yadihk-Abu. His name dates the blaze, and the cloves, to within a few years of 1721 B.C."
--Jack Turner, _Spice: The History of a Temptation_ (NY: Alfred A. Knopf, 2004), xv.
November 26, 2016