Search Results: Spice advice wisdom history saltiness

Clove, nutmeg, and mace are native to only a handful of tiny islands in the middle of the vast Indonesian archipelago – cloves on five Maluku Islands (the Moluccas) about 1250 km (778 mi) west of New Guinea, and nutmeg on the ten Banda Islands...

One of the major motivating factors in the European Age of Exploration was the search for direct access to the highly lucrative Eastern spice trade. In the 15th century, spices came to Europe via the Middle East land and sea routes, and spices...

Perfection of Wisdom is the foundational text of the Mahayana Buddhist school, a kind of anthology of works, thematically linked, composed between c. 50 BCE - c. 600 CE in India by Mahayana Buddhist scribes. It is comprised of 38 sutras (defined...

A Supervisor's Advice to a Young Scribe is a Sumerian composition relating a dialogue between an elder scribe and a young graduate from his school. The piece is dated to the Old Babylonian Period (c. 2000-1600 BCE) and, although originally...

As the 15th century ended, Europeans were still mostly in the dark about the Eastern world. Early travelers like Marco Polo had given the West tidbits of information, but these accounts were too highly colored and fragmentary to provide a...

Ferdinand Magellan, or Fernão de Magalhães (c. 1480-1521), was a Portuguese mariner whose expedition was the first to circumnavigate the globe in 1519-22 in the service of Spain. Magellan was killed on the voyage in what is today the Philippines...

The spices clove, nutmeg, and mace originated on only a handful of tiny islands in the Indonesian archipelago but came to have a dramatic, far-reaching impact on world trade. In antiquity, they became popular in the medicines of India and...

The Dutch East India Company (VOC) was formed in 1602 by the Staten-Generaal (States General) of the then Republic of the Seven United Netherlands. The company was granted a 21-year charter with rights to trade exclusively in Asia and to...

The Portuguese colonised Malacca (modern Melaka) on the southwest coast of the Malay peninsula from 1511 and kept it until 1641 when the Dutch took over. The port controlled the Malay Straits which lead from the Indian Ocean (the Andaman...

Cochin, located on the southwest coast of India, was a Portuguese colony from 1503 to 1663. Known to the Portuguese as Cochim, it was one of several important cities on India’s Malabar Coast and a great trade centre for spices like pepper...