This vegetable was unknown to the Greeks and Romans.[424] It was new to Europe in the sixteenth century,[425] and it has been a matter of dispute whether it should be called _spanacha_, as coming from Spain, or _spinacia_, from its prickly fruit.[426] It was afterwards shown that the name comes from the Arabic _isfânâdsch_, _esbanach_, or _sepanach_, according to different authors.[427] The Persian name is _ispany_, or _ispanaj_,[428] and the Hindu _isfany_, or _palak_, according to Piddington, and also _pinnis_, according to the same and to Roxburgh. The absence of any Sanskrit name shows a cultivation of no great antiquity in these regions. Loureiro saw the spinach cultivated at Canton, and Maximowicz in Mantschuria;[429] but Bretschneider tells us that the Chinese name signifies _herb of Persia_, and that Western vegetables were commonly introduced into China a century before the Christian era.[430] It is therefore probable that the cultivation of this plant began in Persia from the time of the Græco-Roman civilization, or that it did not quickly spread either to the east or to the west of its Persian origin. No Hebrew name is known, so that the Arabs must have received both plant and name from the Persians. Nothing leads us to suppose that they carried this vegetable into Spain. Ebn Baithar, who was living in 1235, was of Malaga; but the Arabic works he quotes do not say where the plant was cultivated, except one of them, which says that its cultivation was common at Nineveh and Babylon. Herrera’s work on Spanish agriculture does not mention the species, although it is inserted in a supplement of recent date, whence it is probable that the edition of 1513 did not speak of it; so that the European cultivation must have come from the East about the fifteenth century. Some popular works repeat that spinach is a native of Northern Asia, but there is nothing to confirm this supposition. It evidently comes from the empire of the ancient Medes and Persians. According to Bosc,[431] the traveller, Olivier brought back some seeds of it, found in the East in the open country. This would be a positive proof, if the produce of these seeds had been examined by a botanist in order to ascertain the species and the variety. In the present state of our knowledge it must be owned that spinach has not yet been found in a wild state, unless it be a cultivated modification of _Spinacia tetandra_, Steven, which is wild to the south of the Caucasus, in Turkestan, in Persia, and in Afghanistan, and which is used as a vegetable under the name of _schamum_.[432]