The Mysterious History of Cinnamon

In this video, we look at the mysterious historical origins of one of the world's favorite spices: Cinnamon.

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The following music performed by Kevin Macleod Available under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license.

Brandenburg Concerto No. 4 in G, Movement I (Allegro), BWV 1049 [orig. by JS Bach]
Heavy Heart
Dhaka
Teller of The Tales
Majestic Hills

These songs provided by the YouTube audio library

Summer Symphony Ball
Desert Caravan

Works Cited

[1] Suriyagoda, Lalith et al. (2021). “Ceylon cinnamon”: Much more than just a spice. Plants, People, Planet. 3. 10.1002/ppp3.10192.

[2] Yule, Henry. "Cathay and the Way Thither." Cambridge University Press, 2010.

[3] Pliny the Elder. The Natural History. Translated by John Bostock, M.D., F.R.S., and H.T. Riley, Esq., B.A., Taylor and Francis, 1855. Accessed through the Perseus Digital Library, Tufts University,

[4] Leech, Joe. "Ceylon vs. Cassia — Not All Cinnamon Is Created Equal." Healthline.

[7] Myspicer. "The History of Cinnamon."

[8] Business Insider. "Why Ceylon Cinnamon is So Expensive." YouTube, Mar 13, 2021.

[9] Bocco, Diana. "How Cinnamon Works." HowStuffWorks.

[10] Stevenson, Emily. "Cinnamon." Eighteenth-Century Literature, University of Warwick.

[11] "Cinnamon." National Center For Complementary and Integrative Health.

[12] Ancientfoods. "Evidence of 3,000-Year-Old Cinnamon Trade Found in Israel." Ancient Foods, Wordpress, 21 Aug. 2013.

[13] Ancientfoods. "Plants and Herbs in Ancient Egypt." Ancient Foods, Wordpress, 16 Dec. 2013

[14] Rosengarten, Frederic. "The Book of Spices." Livingston Pub. Co, 1969

[Fireoflearning]

Just want to reiterate I meant to say "cinnamologus", not "cinnamogolus'.

[meucantogames]

I lived in this big house with a small Cinnamon tree in front of it. The smell is very strong and can spread throughout the entire street. In fact, not only the trunk but the leaves and berries smell strong too

[LouisHansell]

Sri Lanka was called Ceylon, and before that, Serendip. European traders considered the sight of the island as an unexpected and fortunate thing, hence our word 'serendipity.

[Will-shkl]

I knew a guy who told me that he heard cinnamon reduces blood sugar, so he was eating cinnamon doughnuts to reduce his blood sugar. No joke.

[dCash]

I would absolutely love to see an ancient man's face at the amount of cinnamon I put in a cup of hot chocolate...

[Pandaemoni]

He who controls the spice, controls the universe.

[willparker]

Mummy have cinnamon in them? I guess that makes them a cinnamon roll

[MrAnperm]

When I visited Sri Lanka I toured what they called a medicinal garden. In it they had lots of spice plants. It was the first I had even thought about where certain spices came from.
I saw my first cinnamon tree there. Also the tree that cloves come from, the turmeric plant and many other spices we are familiar with.

[sansivian]

How the first person came to harvest and consume cinnamon would probably be the story of a lunatic. It’s fascinating how so many ancient things we take for granted have such a crazy history. Great video, very interesting.

[Pike]

In India, cardamom is the spice that is mostly used in sweets and associated with sweets/ sweet drinks like cardamom milk, lassi, chai etc.
Cinnamon is mostly used to spice up savory dishes and stews, kormas, etc. Cardamom is also used for savory dishes.

[sinjinrancourt]

What I'm hearing here is ground cinnamon is really just sawdust. Pleasant tasting sawdust. I love it. I enjoyed the video and am excited to watch more!

[drinxs]

Learning about the history of food makes you appreciate it more and it even tastes better when you think of all that hard work that went into it before consuming

[sajeewakalamba]

I am from Sri Lanka. Portuguese have never enslaved Sri Lankans. What they did was, encourage people to grow more cinnamon & some times introduced laws (fines) to increase the production.

The reason why Portuguese were not able to push Sri Lankans harder was that the central mountains & vast expanse of northern plateau were under Sinhalese kings. Portuguese had only parts of the coastal belt & the Sri Lankan lived in those areas also considered Sinhalese king who was ruling from Sithawaka & Kandy as their king. Every time Portuguese pushed hard, people revolted with the support of Sinhalese kings. They burnt cinnamon storages & slashed cinnamon plantations to ground.

Therefore, Portuguese were always careful not to push Sri Lankans too much. Repeated attempts by Portuguese to capture Sinhalese kingdom failed handing them heavy losses. In 1559, Portuguese army was defeated in the battle of Mulleriyawa, making the heaviest loss an European army suffered in Asia until the world war II. There 1600, Portuguese soldiers were slain by Prince Tikiri Bandara's (then aged 16 years, later became the king as Rajasinghe I) Sinhalese army.

All three colonials powers who ruled parts of Sri Lanka (finally British took entire country in 1815) approx. 150 years each from 1505 till 1948, never enslaved Sri Lankans. Every time colonial powers push Sri Lankans harder, they revolted violently. Sri Lankans (Sinhalese) never went to work in plantations (tobacco, tea, rubber) under Dutch or British. That is why they bought south Indian Tamils to Sri Lanka to work as plantation workers. Most of the Sri Lankan Tamils (apart from Jaffna) are descendants of those Tamils brought to Sri Lanka by Dutch & British.

[freedem]

I have the true cinnamon growing in my yard. Just as folk use the bay leaf in cooking the fresh or dried cinnamon leaves work very well also without cutting down the tree.

[jamesmmw]

As I found from my own reading of Herodatus, the Greco-Romans considered part of India to be inhabited by a form of Ethiopians. Therefore, it's possible they knew the origins of cinnamon then. (book 3.94)

[Goldninja]

I only ingest cinnamon in its unparalleled form... toast crunch

[skellorelli]

Is it just me, or does the Cinnamogalus sound like the coolest cereal mascot ever?

[sammysoppy]

imagine meeting someone in the afterlife to learn of their untimely early death and ask what happened and they say “I sold some bootleg cinnamon and they executed me.” lol

[kathleenem]

Thank you for an excellent history of one of my favorite spices. I began to investigate different cinnamons in the 90’s when I got into baking. There is absolutely a marked difference between Chinese, Vietnamese, and Ceylon cinnamon. The product on grocery store shelves is more robust in flavor and is usually Cassia. If you want a more gentle form, then Vietnamese is good but the most delicate and nuanced flavor is from Ceylon. It’s more expensive but worth the money if you care about the difference. I’ve been purchasing my cinnamon and vanilla, lemon, and orange extracts from Penzey’s Spices here in the US. for decades. All the products are thoroughly marked and you know exactly what the ingredients are. The catalogs explain the purpose and sometimes offer recipes. I’m not connected to this company- just a long time purchaser.

[Ciubix]

Wow I never knew cinnamon had such fascinating history