Pesto, a Philippine island and a cannon all take their names from grinding tools
The mortar and pestle is among humanity's oldest tools, and its vocabulary has spread everywhere. Italian pesto means made with the pestle. Luzon, the largest island in the Philippines, is named after lusong, a rice mortar. Even the stubby artillery piece called a mortar got its name because early versions looked like giant metal grinding bowls.
Archaeologists have found mortars and pestles in Southwest Asia dating back roughly to 35000 BC. Grinding made hard grains easier to cook and digest, and a deep bowl kept the material from spilling the way it did on flat grinding stones. Around 10000 BC, Late Natufian people in Israel's Raqefet Cave used natural hollows in the cave floor as mortars, pounding cereals with long wooden pestles, apparently to brew beer.
Materials changed with purpose. From the fourteenth century bronze mortars became popular with alchemists because they were hard and easily cast with handles and spouts, though they corroded when acids touched them. Glazed porcelain took over in the late seventeenth century because chemicals could not damage it and it cleaned easily. The pharmacy standard, a porcelain bowl and pestle head on a wooden handle, is called a Wedgwood mortar and dates from 1759.
The tool became a badge of healing. The Roman poet Juvenal used the Latin words for mortar and pestle for drug-making equipment, pharmacists and doctors were sometimes commemorated with mortars on their gravestones from medieval times, and German pharmacies still use it as a logo. Folklore adopted it too: the Russian witch Baba Yaga flies through the forest standing in a giant wooden mortar, steering with her pestle, and in several Asian traditions the rabbit in the Moon pounds an elixir of life.
Kitchens around the world still rely on it. Mexico's basalt molcajete descends from Aztec and Maya tools, Japanese cooks use a suribachi, and Indonesians grind fresh sambal in a shallow cobek. When enslaved West Africans were carried to the Americas, they brought their skill with wooden rice mortars, and hand-pounding remained the main way of milling rice there until mechanical mills spread in the mid-1700s.
Source: Mortar and pestle
