Why did Artemisia build the Mausoleum?
By Chelsie Vandaveer
October 31, 2003
killerPlants Tendrils: ~~1~~2~~3~~4~~5~~
Suggested Reading: Click here.
The wormwoods (Artemisia Linnaeus) are bitter aromatic 'herbs' preferring dry, poor soils. They have long symbolized grief and sorrow. The Roman poet Ovid spent the last years of his life (9 to 16 CE) exiled to Tomis on the Black Sea. He wrote of the Pontic wormwood (Artemisia pontica) that grew about the land: "Untilled barren ground the loathsome Wormwood yields, And known it's by the fruit, how bitter are the fields."
Holy wormwood (Artemisia judaica) grows in the Levant, the lands east of the Mediterranean. After the destruction of Jerusalem by the Babylonians, Jeremiah wrote, "He hath filled me with bitterness, he hath made me drunken with wormwood." (Lamentations 3:15, KJV)
The Romans called wormwood, absinthium, taken from the ancient Greek, apsinthion, a name that dates even earlier to the ancient Persians. Linnaeus used the Latin name for a species epithet, the wormwood (Artemisia absinthium) later used by Henri-Louis Pernod to distill absinthe, the bitter, green liqueur.
The name, Artemisia, was also given in ancient times to the wormwoods. It was the name of a queen who ruled Halicarnassus from 352 to 350 BCE after the death of her husband, King Mausolus. Legend says that every day she mixed some of his ashes into a drink and died gradually of grief.
But during her short reign, Artemisia built one of the seven wonders of the ancient world, a monument so that all would remember her beloved Mausolus. This original tribute to grief was known as the Mausoleum. (A Dictionary of Greek and Roman Biography and Mythology, William Smith, DCL, LLD, editor, John Murray, London, 1902)
Gesundheit im Internet has several great photographs of Artemisia absinthium. To view the photographs, click on the link:
http://www.g-netz.de/Health_Center/heilpflanzen/wermut/wermut_bilder.shtml
The Civil and Environmental Engineering Department, College of Engineering, University of South Florida has a page with a brief history and a painting of the Mausoleum at Halicarnassus. To see this beautiful monument and learn of its destruction, click on the link:
http://ce.eng.usf.edu/pharos/wonders/mausoleum.html
killerPlants Tendrils: ~~1~~2~~3~~4~~5~~
Suggested Reading:
How was wormwood used? Herbal Folklore - November 3, 2003
Could dill dull pain? Herbal Folklore - November 17, 2003
What is the Green Fairy? Plants that Changed History - October 28, 2003
What was the Vinegar of Four Thieves? What's in a Name? - July 18, 2003
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