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was an important crop throughout India and the warmer parts of Cen- tral Asia. Our author shows us that the oil was exported from the Gulf of Cambay to both Arabia and Africa, whence doubtless it was reshipped to the Roman world.
According to the statistics given by Watt (op. cit., 982) the area under cultivation in India in 1904-5 was over 4,000,000 acres, of which about 700,000 was in the Cambay states.
In modern India the oil is largely used for culinary purposes, in anointing the body, in soap manufacture, and as a lamp-oil. It is also used as an adulterant of ghi or clarified butter.
It is a yellow oil, without smell, and not liable to become rancid. In many properties it closely resembles olive oil, and is similarly used where the olive oil is not cultivated. It is extracted by simple ex- pression in mills. Strabo (XVI, i, 20) refers to the ancient custom in Mesopotamia of anointing the body with sesame oil.
41. Clarified Butter, — The text is boutyron (see also under § 14). This is not fresh butter made from cream, but rather the Indian ghi , an oil reduced from butter. Fabricius says that it could not have been transported from India to Africa under the tropical sun, and would read bosmoros , an Indian grain; but ghi stands long journeys to-day and might very likely have been in demand in the 1st century on the African coast, which produced no oil except from the cocoanut palm. According to Watt (op. cit., 478) ghi is an oil de- canted after heating the butter about twelve hours, during which the moisture is driven off and the residue (casein, etc.) is deposited as a sediment. The butter thus loses about 25 per cent of its bulk. It is made from buffalo’s milk rather than cow’s.
Ghi is mentioned in some of the most ancient of the Hindu classics.
If carefully enclosed in leather skins or earthen pots, while still hot, it may be preserved for many years without requiring the aid of salt or other preservatives. Fryer, in 1672-81, speaks of tanks of ghi in the Deccan, 400 years old, of great value medicinally, and high price.
This word boutyron has been variously emended by the commen- tators, all of whom had fresh butter in mind, although Lassen should have been familiar with the durability of clarified butter, and with the probability of its export from the rich agricultural region of Gujarat.
Lassen, Oppert and others, following a mention of boutyros by Theophrastus, identify it with asafoetida, by way of the Sanscrit bhutari ( the enemy of evil spirits”). But asafoetida was a product of Af- ghanistan and would have been brought to the Indus mouth rather than
