Chickpeas were named for looking like a ram's head
The chickpea's Latin species name, arietinum, comes from the seed's resemblance to a ram's head, a likeness noted by Theophrastus, Columella and Pliny. Domesticated around 10,000 years ago alongside wheat and lentils, it is one of the oldest cultivated legumes. Today India grows three-quarters of the world's crop.
Cicer arietinum is an annual legume standing 20 to 50 cm tall, with feathery leaves and white flowers veined blue, violet or pink; each pod holds two or three seeds. Its wild ancestor, Cicer reticulatum, grows in a small area of southeastern Turkey and neighbouring Syria and can still interbreed with the crop. Carl Linnaeus gave the plant its binomial name in 1753, borrowing it from Joseph Pitton de Tournefort's 1694 botany, which itself repeated names used since antiquity.
Syrian sites such as Tell El-Kerkh and Tell Abu Hureyra preserve chickpeas from the 8th millennium BCE, and Çayönü in Turkey has remains from 7500 to 6800 BCE. From there cultivation spread west to Greece by the late Neolithic and to Crete and upper Egypt in the Bronze Age, with specimens from around 1400 BCE at Deir el-Medina. Farmers selected for big, tasty seeds without dormancy, pods that release seeds easily and fields that ripen together. A key shift was sowing in spring: wild relatives grow through the wet winter, which exposed crops to Ascochyta blight, and by Roman times summer cropping was established.
Two main types dominate. Desi, or Bengal gram, has small dark seeds with rough coats and is favoured in South Asia, Ethiopia, Mexico and Iran; hulled and split, it becomes chana dal. Kabuli is larger, tan and smooth, common around the Mediterranean and Middle East, and reached India from Afghanistan in the 18th century. A consortium of 20 organisations led by ICRISAT sequenced a kabuli variety and identified more than 28,000 genes.
Names reveal migrations. Latin cicer, around 700 BCE, led to French pois chiche and eventually the English chickpea. A separate Indo-European root produced Greek erebinthos, mentioned in the Iliad, and ultimately Spanish garbanzo, used in American English by 1759. Protein-rich chickpeas star in hummus, falafel and countless Indian curries.
Source: Chickpea
