Black Pepper

Black pepper is the dried, unripe fruit of Piper nigrum, a flowering vine native exclusively to the Malabar Coast of southwestern India, in what is now the state of Kerala. Dravidian farmers there developed distinctive cultivation methods, training the vines up rough-barked trees such as jackfruit, with specialized cultivation practices attested from around 2000 BCE onward. Long before firm documentary evidence of pepper cultivation elsewhere, black pepper was already moving along ancient trade networks: peppercorns were found packed into the nostrils of the mummified Pharaoh Ramesses II as part of the embalming ritual, a find dated to 1213 BCE that stands as the oldest solid archaeological proof of long distance trade between the Malabar Coast and the Mediterranean world, three thousand miles away. In the three thousand years since, black pepper has remained among the most widely traded spices in the world. Black pepper is unrelated to chili pepper, a New World nightshade in the genus Capsicum; the shared English word is a coincidence of naming by early European traders, not a botanical relationship.