Ashwagandha

The berries on the gold coffin

Valley of the Kings, October 1925. Howard Carter's team has just lifted the lid of Tutankhamun's second coffin.¹

Inside lies a third. A close-fitting reddish linen shroud hides most of it. The burnished gold face is bare. Over the neck and breast lies a collar of flowers and beads, sewn onto a backing of papyrus.¹

Carter lifts the collar away, and an astounding fact appears. The third coffin is solid gold. No wonder the nest of coffins was so heavy. Even with the outer coffin gone, it takes eight strong men to lift the rest.¹

Carter's thoughts ran to the gold, and to the tomb robbers it must once have tempted. The collar was so brittle it broke the instant it was touched.¹ What was left of the king's flowers went to the Egyptologist Percy Newberry. He soaked the brittle leaves in lukewarm water for a few hours. Two or three flowers fell into dust at his touch.²

Slowly the collar gave up its plants. Nine rows on a half-moon of papyrus. Olive and willow leaves, cornflowers, petals of the blue water-lily. Eleven mandrake fruits, sliced in half and sewn on. And row after row of blue glass beads strung on strips of date-palm leaf, twenty or so beads, then four small berries, then beads again.²

To Newberry the collar was a rare thing. Craftsmen of the time made collars of faience beads shaped like leaves, flowers and fruit. Here were the real plants they copied.² Others like it had already turned up. In 1907 the American Theodore Davis had found several floral collars from the king's funeral elsewhere in the Valley, and they had gone to New York.^{2, 3}

Newberry called the berries woody nightshade.² Botanists today read them as something else. Withania. The ashwagandha genus.³ Its fruit is a red berry the size of a pea, wrapped in a papery husk.⁴ Some 3,300 years ago, a royal florist threaded them into a king's funeral collar.^{2, 3}

A sleeping root that grows on tombs

About a thousand years after that funeral, the Greek philosopher Theophrastus described a plant with the same bright fruit.⁵

Its root is white when you dig it up, he wrote, and turns blood red as it dries. The fruit is "a deeper orange than saffron." People bruised the bark of the root, soaked it in neat wine and drank it, "and it induces sleep."⁵

Then a detail Carter would have liked. "It grows in water-courses and on tombs."⁵

Theophrastus called it the sleep-bringing strychnos, and set it beside a cousin that drove men mad.⁵ Three centuries later the physician Dioscorides agreed about the sleep. He called the root bark in wine a sleeping draught, milder than poppy juice. Boiled in wine and held in the mouth, it eased toothache.⁶

Theophrastus was writing in the years after Alexander the Great's army came back from India. Two historians of medicine have asked whether the sleepy root's use travelled west with it.⁶ Nobody has proved it either way.

Smelling like a horse

In India the plant had a crowd of names. Ashvagandha and Turagigandha both mean smelling like a horse or a mare. Varahakarni means boar-eared.⁷ The horse is no figure of speech. In 1891 the authors of Pharmacographia Indica, a great survey of India's plant drugs, described the plant's smell as "pungent and disagreeable like horse's urine."⁷

The great Sanskrit medical book that carries the name of Charaka was put together about two thousand years ago.⁸ It sorts its medicines into fifty groups of ten. Ashwagandha sits in two of them, the strength-promoters and the roborants, the medicines that build a body up. Its English translators of 1949 called it winter cherry.⁹

That was its job for centuries. It was counted among the rasayanas, the rejuvenating tonics prized above almost every other medicine.¹⁰ One old text promised that a fortnight of ashwagandha, taken with milk, ghee, oil or warm water, would fill out a wasted body "as rains do for younger crops."¹⁰ People used it in the Punjab too, and in southern Africa the Southern Sotho boiled the root for colds and chills.¹⁰

Two names and a fossil hunter

European botanists took a long time to see one plant where there was one. In 1753 Carl Linnaeus named it Physalis somnifera, the sleep-bringing physalis, and listed it from Mexico, Crete and Spain.¹¹ To him it looked so like a Spanish cousin of deadly nightshade that the two could hardly be kept in separate genera.^{6, 11} India did not make his list.

In southern India, a doctor named Whitelaw Ainslie filed the Indian root under a different Linnaean name, Physalis flexuosa.¹² His Materia Indica of 1826 gives it in Tamil, Hindustani, Telugu and Sanskrit. In the bazaars the dried root looked rather like gentian, he wrote, but had "little sensible taste or smell." So much for the horse. Tamil doctors gave it as a brew. Its leaves, warmed in castor oil, went on boils. Anyone who wanted to see the plant could find it growing in the botanic garden at Calcutta.¹²

The name it carries now came from Paris. In 1825 a young Paris doctor, Charles Pauquy, wrote his thesis on deadly nightshade and created a new genus, Withania.¹³ He named it after Henry Witham, born Henry Silvertop in Northumberland, who had taken his wife's family name.^{13, 14} Witham studied fossil trees. In Edinburgh he met William Nicol, whose way of slicing fossils thin enough to see through a microscope transformed the study of fossil plants.¹⁴ Witham also became the first Roman Catholic high sheriff of County Durham.¹⁴

In 1852 the Montpellier botanist Michel Félix Dunal moved Linnaeus's sleepy physalis into Witham's genus. It has been Withania somnifera ever since.^{13, 15}

Curdled milk and a sleeping alkaloid

By the 1880s, doctors wanted to know what was in the root. In 1886 Dr Trabut, working on the same plant from the Mediterranean, reported an alkaloid that brought sleep without widening the pupils. He called it somniferine.¹⁶ A few years later the Civil Hospital in Algiers was using the plant as a sedative.¹⁶

Meanwhile William Dymock, a retired brigade-surgeon and once the government's chief medical storekeeper, was writing the plant up with two colleagues for Pharmacographia Indica.⁷ Its close cousin curdles milk and stands in for rennet in Sind and Afghanistan. The Bombay Flora said ashwagandha's seeds were used the same way. So one of the authors tested it. "I have tried the experiment and find them to have some coagulating power."¹⁶

The dog that stayed awake

London, 1911. At the Wellcome Chemical Research Laboratories, the chemists Frederick Belding Power and Arthur Henry Salway took apart a whole plant sent straight from South Africa.¹⁷

They found sugars, fatty acids, a whiff of essential oil and new substances they named withaniol, somnirol and somnitol. Of Trabut's somniferine, they wrote, "nothing of a definite nature" had ever been recorded.¹⁷

Then came the real test. At the Wellcome Physiological Research Laboratories, Henry Dale and Patrick Laidlaw gave extracts of the root, leaves and stems to a dog. "No perceptible effect." They injected the alkaloid from the root. "No symptom of narcosis."¹⁷

Twenty-five years later Dale won a Nobel Prize for showing how nerves pass on their signals.¹⁸ The dog had stayed awake.

The chemists find withaferin

The plant's modern chemistry began in 1962. That year the chemists Asher Yarden and David Lavie published the first of a long run of papers on its constituents, starting with a compound they called withaferin.¹⁹ By 1965 Lavie and his colleagues had worked out its structure.¹⁹ What the modern trials found is in the Research tab.

The horse and the three thousand years

Ashwagandha means "smell of a horse". Supplement sites everywhere say that is because it gives you a horse's strength, and one promises the strength of a thousand horses. The same sites say it has been used for three thousand years.²⁰

Take the horse first. The Sanskrit names are about smell, and the authors of Pharmacographia Indica confirmed it with their noses.⁷ An American herbal monograph from 2000 quotes Charaka promising, from rejuvenating tonics, "strength of a horse".¹⁰ But in the 1949 English translation, those lines promise long life, memory, youth, lustre and "optimum strength of body and senses". The stallion turns up in the next passage, on virility remedies in general, and ashwagandha is not named there.²¹ The horse's strength was borrowed from a different page.

Now the three thousand years. The same monograph dates ashwagandha's use to 3,000 to 4,000 years ago and to the teachings of a sage, Punarvasu Atreya. It cites a 1961 paper.¹⁰ The Charaka book, one of the oldest medical texts to name the plant, is closer to two thousand years old.⁸

There is a twist. The ashwagandha genus really was in human hands more than three thousand years ago. It just comes from Egypt, and it was a decoration on a funeral collar.^{2, 3}

Still growing on tombs

In 2011 the European Medicines Agency set out to write an official European monograph on ashwagandha root. In 2013 it gave up. It could not find adequate evidence of at least thirty years of medicinal use, fifteen of them in the European Union, and could not describe the preparations well enough.²² A plant known to Theophrastus could not prove fifteen years of medicinal use in Europe.

Every age has found its own use for it. A funeral bead. A sleeping draught. A builder of thin bodies. A curdler of milk. A test that left a dog wide awake.

Ashwagandha still grows wild on dry, stony ground from Spain to China.²³ And in New York, the collars Davis found are in the Metropolitan Museum, nightshade berries and all.³