šamaššammū

The sesame plant (Sesamum indicum) was domesticated somewhere in the Indian subcontinent or the African savannas, but it was in Mesopotamia that it became a civilizational crop. Akkadian scribes writing on clay tablets around 2000 BCE recorded it as šamaššammū — a compound noun whose exact etymology remains debated, possibly linking to the Akkadian šamnu (oil) and šammū (plants, herbs). Cuneiform tablets from the palace archives at Nippur and Ebla record sesame oil as a commodity of immense value: traded by the jar, used for cooking, lighting, medicine, and anointing. The Code of Hammurabi (c. 1754 BCE) regulated the price of sesame oil alongside silver and barley — the three great standards of Babylonian commerce. It was not simply food; it was currency in edible form.

The word migrated westward through the ancient Near East's overlapping trade languages. Akkadian šamaššammū contracted and shifted as it passed through Aramaic into the form šumšum, then into Greek as sēsamon (σήσαμον), where Herodotus mentions sesame-oil lamps burning in Babylon's temples. The Greek form gave Latin sesamum, and medieval English inherited sesame in the 14th century from Latin through Old French. Each transmission squeezed the long Akkadian compound tighter, dropping syllables at every border, until the four-syllable Akkadian word became the three-syllable English one. The seed survived every border unchanged; only the name compressed.

The phrase 'Open Sesame' from the Arabian Nights (in Arabic iftaḥ yā simsim — 'open, O sesame') likely refers to the sesame plant's seed pods, which split open explosively when ripe with a sharp crack. The image of a sealed door bursting open at a magic word echoes the real botany of the plant that Mesopotamian farmers had cultivated for three millennia. The Arabian Nights compiler, writing in Arabic around the 9th–14th centuries CE, chose a word still recognizable across the Near East as an emblem of abundance suddenly revealed.

Today, sesame is cultivated on more than 10 million hectares worldwide — in Africa, India, China, and the Americas — producing over 6 million tonnes of seed and oil annually. The name has stayed remarkably stable for four thousand years. A Babylonian temple scribe pricing sesame oil in 1800 BCE and a baker applying a seed wash to a modern bun are connected by an unbroken linguistic thread, the Akkadian compound still audible beneath the English. Few words carry the DNA of ancient Mesopotamian agriculture so directly into a contemporary kitchen.