Lost in translation.
DIES VENERIS PRID. NON. MART. MMDCCLII A.U.C. | IV
Photographer: Krissie lynnea Finchum
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To illustrate, Herodotus of Halicarnassus reports on the procurement of cinnamon:
They cannot say where it comes from & what land produces it originally, except that some of them try to argue from probability that it sprouts in the lands where Dionysos grew up. At any rate, it is said that huge birds carry the stalks, which we have learned from the Phœnicians to call cinnamon, to nests of clay that they have built hanging from steep mountains completely inaccessible to men. But the Arabians have surmounted this problem rather cleverly. They cut up the limbs of dead cattle, donkeys & other beasts of burden into pieces as large as they can carry, scatter them in the area under the nests & then move out of the way. The birds swoop down for the limbs of the beasts & take them back to their nests, but the nests cannot bear the weight & so crash to the ground, where the men then collect the cinnamon that comes down along with them. That is how they obtain the cinnamon which eventually reaches other lands. ¹
You can see how the story might have gotten lost in translation & oh, maybe embellished, just a little.
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¹ Herodotus, The Landmark Herodotus: The Histories, ed. Robert B. Strassler, trans. Andrea L. Purvis (New York: Pantheon Books, 2007), 260.
Image used with kind permission & manipulated in GIMP.
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2012-Feb-04