The word _faba_ recurs in several of the Aryan languages of Europe, but with modifications which philologists alone can recognize. We must not forget, however, Adolphe Pictet’s very just remark,[1594] that in the cases of the seeds of cereals and leguminous plants the names of one species are often transferred to another, or that certain names were sometimes specific and sometimes generic. Several seeds of like form were called _kuamos_ by the Greeks; several different kinds of haricot bean (_Phaseolus_, _Dolichos_) bear the same name in Sanskrit, and _faba_ in ancient Slav, _bobu_ in ancient Prussian, _babo_ in Armorican, _fav_, etc., may very well have been used for peas, haricot beans, etc. In our own day the phrase coffee-_bean_ is used in the trade. It has been rightly supposed that when Pliny speaks of _fabariæ_ islands, where beans were found in abundance, he alludes to a species of wild pea called botanically _Pisum maritimum_.
The ancient inhabitants of Switzerland and of Italy in the age of bronze cultivated a small-fruited variety of _Faba vulgaris_.[1595] Heer calls it _Celtica nana_, because it is only six to nine millimetres long, whereas our modern field bean is ten to twelve millimetres. He has compared the specimens from Montelier on Lake Morat, and St. Peter’s Islands on Lake Bienne, with others of the same epoch from Parma. Mortellet found, in the contemporary lake-dwellings on the Lake Bourget, the same small bean, which is, he says, very like a variety cultivated in Spain at the present day.[1596]
The bean was cultivated by the ancient Egyptians.[1597] It is true that hitherto no beans have been found in the sarcophagi, or drawings of the plant seen on the monuments. The reason is said to be that the plant was reckoned unclean.[1598] Herodotus[1599] says, “The Egyptians never sow the bean in their land, and if it grows they do not eat it either cooked or raw. The priests cannot even endure the sight of it; they imagine that this vegetable is unclean.” The bean existed then in Egypt, and probably in cultivated places, for the soil which would suit it was as a rule under cultivation. Perhaps the poor population and that of certain districts did not share the prejudices of the priests; we know that the superstitions varied with the _nomes_. Plutarch and Diodorus Siculus mention the cultivation of the bean in Egypt, but they wrote five hundred years later than Herodotus.