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The 5,000-Year Secret History of the Watermelon
Ancient Hebrew texts and Egyptian tomb paintings reveal the origins of our favorite summertime fruit.BYMARK STRAUSSNATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC
PUBLISHED AUGUST 21, 2015
• 9 MIN READ
To taste a watermelon is to know “what the angels eat,” Mark Twain proclaimed.
The angels, however, would have gagged if they had eaten the watermelon’s wild ancestor—a bitter fruit with hard, pale-green flesh. Generations of selective breeding, spanning several countries and cultures, produced the sweet red fruit that’s now a common sight on picnic tables.
Much of this epic history has been lost to antiquity. But Harry Paris, a horticulturalist at the Agricultural Research Organization in Israel, has spent years assembling clues—including ancient Hebrew texts, artifacts in Egyptian tombs, and medieval illustrations—that have enabled him to chronicle the watermelon’s astonishing 5,000-year transformation.
Who’s Your Daddy?
Scientists agree that the watermelon’s progenitor—the ur-watermelon, if you will—was cultivated in Africa before spreading north into Mediterranean countries and, later, to other parts of Europe.But, that’s where the consensus ends. Did the ancestral watermelon originally grow in Western Africa? Southern Africa? Northeastern Africa? The theories are, literally, all over the map.
“The history has been screwed up from the very outset,” says Paris, who places the blame on generations of taxonomists, stretching back to the 18th century, who hopelessly muddled melon classification.
Even the name for the modern watermelon—Citrullus lanatus—is wrong. Lanatus means “hairy” in Latin and was originally the name applied to the fuzz-covered citron melon (Cirtrullus amarus).
The citron melon, which grows in southern Africa, is one popular candidate for the watermelon’s ancient ancestor. But Paris is doubtful. He’s found evidence that the Egyptians began growing watermelon crops around 4,000 years ago, which predates farming in southern Africa.
Contestant number two is the egusi melon from western Africa. Again, Paris is skeptical. Egusis weren’t cultivated for their flesh, but for their edible seeds—the one part of the modern watermelon that nobody wants.
