What is the onion of Ashkelon?
By Chelsie Vandaveer
May 21, 2004
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In 1270, the forces of Sultan Bihars (Baybars) laid the city to waste. The port was filled with debris, the city was uninhabitable. Crusaders, now under the command of Louis IX (St. Louis), would never seize the city again. After more than 3000 years, Ascalon passed into obscurity. On the southeastern edge of the Mediterranean, the port had been a prosperous trade center eight hundred years before Athens was founded and twelve hundred years before
Rome grew from the Palatine Hill.
The Canaanites were merchants and traders. Ashkelon was their oldest and largest city--a port with its face on the bluffs over the Mediterranean, its back surrounded by walls 50 feet tall and 70 feet wide at the base. Around 2000 BCE, the city built a gateway, an arch of mudbricks with a plastered vaulted ceiling, as a defensible, yet unique entrance to their world of commerce.
After 1175 BCE, Ashkelon was one of five Philistine cities. The sea people were weavers, dyers, potters, vintners, and, of course, sailors. Their goods traveled the Mediterranean. But the Philistines and Ashkelon were lost. In 640 BCE, the Babylonians overran the city. Nebuchadnezzar took the king, pillaged the wealth, and reduced the city to a tell (mound, hill).
Under the Persian Empire, the Phoenicians (Canaanites) rebuilt Ashkelon. The great city stood between the desert and the sea. Over the centuries, it was occupied by Egypt, Hittites, Hyksos, Greeks who called it Ascalon, Romans, Byzantines, Arabs, and finally Crusaders. King Herod was born in Ascalon. Alexander the Great probably stopped at the port during his conquests. Richard the Lion-hearted fortified Ascalon in 1192.
Romans loved the thin ascalonia or onion of Ascalon. Crusaders enjoyed the mild taste of the escalone. Back in France, the onion was called eschalogne, later shortened to eschalot. In Medieval England, it was scaloun, and later scallion. An early botanical name for the shallot was Allium ascalonicum honoring the city on the sea.
Certainly the citizens of Ascalon grew the onion and made it popular throughout the Mediterranean. Now believed to have originated in Asia Minor or the East, the shallot may have come as a trade good. Members of the bunching onion or Aggregatum group (Allium cepa var. aggregatum G. Don), shallots and true scallions* do not form bulbs and seldom flower or set seeds. The onion is propagated by offshoots. The shallot in the salad is a clone, descended through the millennia. And the vaulted gate of Ashkelon still stands.
The Israel Nature and National Parks Protection Authority has a page about the Ashkelon National Park, a site of on-going archaeological work. To learn more about this park or to plan a visit, click on the link:
http://www.parks.org.il/ParksENG/company_card.php3?CNumber=334568
(Compiled from: "Recent Discoveries at Ashkelon", David Schloen, Oriental Institute, University of Chicago; "Canaan" and "Ashkelon", Wikipedia; "Allium", Hortus Third, Staff L.H. Bailey Hortorium, Cornell University, 1976; Origins, A Short Etymological Dictionary of Modern English, Eric Partridge, Greenwich House, 1983; "Onions and Their Relatives", B. Rosie Lerner, Purdue University Cooperative Extension Service, West Lafayette, IN)
*The name, scallion, has no true horticultural or botanical standing. It is simply a type of shallot, but the name is frequently misapplied to any LGO (little green onion) pulled before the bulb formed.
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