The chickpea, Cicer arietinum, was taken into cultivation from its wild progenitor Cicer reticulatum in the foothills of the Karacadağ mountains of southeastern Turkey, and its origin is amongst the most precisely localised of any major crop plant on earth. Whereas many cultivated species were domesticated independently several times over in different regions, the genetic and archaeological evidence for the chickpea points instead to a single domestication event in this one specific corner of the upper Fertile Crescent, the same volcanic massif from whose slopes the first cultivated einkorn wheat has also been traced. The Neolithic settlements of the region, at Çayönü and Nevali Çori amongst others, have yielded domesticated chickpea remains dating to approximately 7500 BCE, placing the plant amongst the founder crops of Old World agriculture, the small handful of cereals and pulses upon which the whole Neolithic revolution of the Near East was built.
The advantages that recommended the chickpea to those first farmers were immediate and lasting, and they explain why so unassuming a seed should have travelled so far and embedded itself so deeply. Dried, the chickpea will keep for years without spoiling, a dense and portable store of nourishment against the lean season and a provision that could be carried on a journey or a campaign. It is, weight for weight, amongst the most nutritionally complete of all the pulses, exceptionally rich in protein and in the slow-burning starches that sustain hard labour, and it can be ground into a fine, keeping flour of remarkable versatility or soaked overnight and cooked tender within a couple of hours. Like all the legumes it carries, in the nodules of its roots, the bacteria that fix atmospheric nitrogen into the soil, so that a crop of chickpeas leaves the ground richer than it found it and feeds whatever is sown after it.
Two great cultivated forms diverged from this single origin over the millennia of the plant's spread, and they divide the chickpea world to this day. The older type is the desi chickpea, small, angular, dark-coated, and rough, the ancestral form that remained dominant across India, Pakistan, Iran, and Ethiopia and that lends itself to splitting into dal and grinding into flour. The later type is the kabuli chickpea, larger, paler, rounder, and smooth-skinned, a mutation associated with the Kabul region and Afghanistan and named for it, which spread westward to become the standard chickpea of the Mediterranean and Middle Eastern kitchen, the bean of hummus, of the cocido, and of the Greek baked pot. One plant, one origin, two forms, and between them the foundation of the pulse cookery of half the world.
From its single origin in the Karacadağ foothills, the chickpea spread outward through the Fertile Crescent with the first farmers, and its progress can be tracked through the written and excavated record of the earliest civilisations. It appears in the botanical record of Mesopotamia and in the cuneiform tablets of the Tigris and Euphrates valley by around 5000 BCE, amongst the provisions of New Kingdom Egypt and at Predynastic Nile sites by the fourth millennium, and across the breadth of the Indian subcontinent, at the great cities of the Indus Valley Civilisation, by about 3000 BCE, carried east along the overland trade routes that linked the Near East to the plains of the Indus. Wherever it went, the chickpea's keeping qualities and its nitrogen-fixing generosity to the soil recommended it, and it settled into the agriculture of each region it reached.
Along the way the plant diverged into the two great forms that still divide the chickpea world. The desi chickpea, small, dark, angular, and rough-coated, is the older and ancestral type, and it remained dominant across the eastern range of the plant's spread, in India, Pakistan, Iran, and the highlands of Ethiopia, where it is split into dal and ground into flour. The kabuli chickpea, larger, paler, rounder, and smooth-skinned, is a later mutation associated with Afghanistan and the region of Kabul that gives it its name, and it travelled westward to become the standard chickpea of Mediterranean and Middle Eastern cooking, the bean that the Greeks baked, the Romans milled into farinata flour, the Arabs ground into hummus, and the Spanish stewed into cocido.
The spread of the chickpea westward was accomplished above all by two great waves of cultural transmission. The classical world carried it around the Mediterranean: the Greeks ate it roasted in the street and slow-baked in the village oven, and the Romans stamped it into their language and milled it into a chickpea flour whose tradition survives in the farinata of Liguria. The Arab expansion of the medieval centuries then carried it further and bound it more deeply into the cuisines of an enormous arc, westward across North Africa to the harira of Morocco and onward into Spain as the garbanzo, and into the refined kitchens of the Levant where it crystallised into hummus bi tahini and falafel. From Spain it crossed the Atlantic with the colonial agricultural complex into the highland stewing pots of the Andes, and from India the long arm of the indenture trade carried it across the Indian Ocean to the Natal coast of South Africa. Today India alone grows some 65 to 70 percent of the world's chickpeas, yet the bean is fundamental to the cooking of the entire band of the globe that runs from Morocco to Myanmar, the most widely beloved pulse of half the human race.
The chickpea is the world's third most important pulse crop, after the dry bean and the dry pea, and amongst the major legumes it is the most protein-dense of all, a distinction that has only grown in significance as the world has turned, for reasons of health, economy, and climate, towards plant proteins. India dominates the harvest, growing the great majority of the global crop, with Australia, Turkey, Ethiopia, and Myanmar amongst the other leading producers, and the bean has lately found a vast new market in the West as the basis of supermarket hummus, of the roasted snack, and of the gluten-free chickpea flour.
What sets the chickpea apart is the sheer breadth of the cuisines it anchors and the number of forms it takes. In South Asia it is the foundation of an entire culinary edifice: split into chana dal, whole as the dark kala chana and the spiced chana masala, and ground into besan, the chickpea flour that makes pakora, kadhi, bhatura, and a host of sweets. Across the Middle East and North Africa it is hummus and falafel in the Levant, the soup harira that breaks the Ramadan fast in Morocco, and the standard companion to couscous from Marrakech to Tunis. Around the northern Mediterranean it is the Ligurian farinata griddled from its flour, the Greek revithia slow-baked overnight in the village oven, and the garbanzo at the heart of the Spanish cocido. In the highlands of East Africa it is shiro and shimbra, ground and shaped to feed the long fasts of the Ethiopian Orthodox calendar.
This versatility is the key to the chickpea's reach. It can be eaten whole or split, simmered soft or roasted hard, milled to a flour, sprouted, or shaped into a fritter, and in every form it carries a generous load of protein and substance. It is, by any reasonable reckoning, the most versatile pulse in the world's kitchen, a single ancient seed that serves as snack, soup, stew, sauce, bread, batter, and sweet across the breadth of three continents.
Historical Journey of Chickpea
Karacadağ, Southeast Turkey — c. 7500 BCE
In the foothills of the Karacadağ mountains of southeastern Turkey, the chickpea, Cicer arietinum, was taken into cultivation from its wild progenitor Cicer reticulatum, on the same volcanic massif from whose slopes the earliest domesticated einkorn wheat has likewise been traced, making this one upland a true cradle of Old World agriculture. Genetic analysis of the cultivated bean and its wild relatives confirms a single domestication event here, an origin uniquely precise amongst the major crop plants, most of which were brought into the garden independently in several places at once. The Neolithic settlements of the region, at Çayönü and Nevali Çori, have yielded domesticated chickpea remains dating to around 7500 BCE, placing the bean amongst the very founder crops upon which the Neolithic revolution of the Near East was built. The earliest use of the chickpea was almost certainly the simplest: the dried seed roasted over a fire and eaten as a portable, keeping snack. That most ancient of all chickpea preparations survives, scarcely altered, as leblebi, the double-roasted chickpea of Turkish street food, sun-dried and then slowly kiln-roasted until crisp and nutty, sold by the handful at the markets, the bus stations, and the football grounds of Turkey today, a living link to the moment of the plant's domestication nine and a half thousand years ago in these very hills.
Tigris-Euphrates Valley, Mesopotamia — c. 5000 BCE
The chickpea spread south and east from its Anatolian cradle into the Tigris and Euphrates valley, where it appears in the botanical record alongside the rise of the earliest literate civilisations of the world. The Akkadian name for it survives in the cuneiform tablets, and excavations at the early settlements of Jarmo and Tell es-Sawwan document the chickpea as a dietary staple of Mesopotamia by the fifth millennium BCE, grown in the irrigated gardens of the alluvial plain alongside barley, onion, and the date palm. Most remarkable of all are the Yale Babylonian tablets, four cuneiform clay tablets of around 1700 BCE that preserve the oldest written recipes known to humanity; amongst their instructions for rich, layered broths and stews are preparations that call for chickpeas, cooked down with onion, leek, garlic, fat, and meat into the elaborate dishes of a sophisticated court cuisine. The tablets reveal that the Babylonians used the chickpea both whole and ground, as a substantial pulse and as a thickener and protein base for their stews, long ages before the word 'legume' or any botanical category for such plants existed in any language. From this Mesopotamian foundation, the cultivation and the cookery of the chickpea flowed directly onward into the kitchens of Persia, of India, and, much later, of the whole Islamic world, the bean carried along every trade route that radiated from the Fertile Crescent. The Babylonian chickpea stew of the Yale tablets is the earliest recorded ancestor of every chickpea pottage cooked since.
Nile Delta, Ancient Egypt — c. 4000 BCE
Carried down into the Nile valley along the trade routes of the Fertile Crescent, the chickpea appears at Predynastic Egyptian sites and is documented amongst the provisions placed in the tombs of the New Kingdom, set alongside lentils, fava beans, and wheat to form the complete legume complement of the ancient Egyptian diet, the protein of a people whose great labours were fed largely from the pulse pot. The pairing of the chickpea with the fava bean is one of the oldest continuous food traditions in all of human history, and it is eaten still, every morning, across the breadth of Egypt: ful medames, the slow-simmered fava beans, served beside whole chickpeas, both dressed with cumin, lemon, garlic, and good oil, in the breakfast known as ful wa hummus whose lineage the Egyptians trace, with pardonable pride, all the way back to the workforce that raised the pyramids. The Egyptian way with the chickpea differs tellingly from that of the neighbouring Levant. Where the Levantine cook grinds and emulsifies the bean into the smooth hummus bi tahini, the Egyptian tradition leans towards the whole or only roughly crushed chickpea, dressed plainly with cumin and oil and eaten for its own earthy substance, a directness that is itself a relic of great antiquity. In this ancient simplicity, the dual bean breakfast of the modern Cairo street preserves a pattern of eating older than the dynasties.
Gujarat and Indus Valley, India — c. 3000 BCE
Carried eastward along the overland trade routes that linked the Near East to the plains of the Indus, the chickpea reached the Indian subcontinent early, and chickpea remains recovered from the great cities of the Indus Valley Civilisation, Harappa, Mohenjo-daro, and Lothal in Gujarat amongst them, confirm its cultivation across the breadth of early India by the third millennium BCE. Over the following four thousand years India developed the most complex and varied chickpea culture anywhere on earth, and made the bean so thoroughly its own that the plant is now grown more in India than in all the rest of the world together. The ancestral desi chickpea, small, dark, and rough-coated, became the dominant variety, and the Indian kitchen learnt to use it in every conceivable form. Split and hulled, it becomes chana dal, the very foundation of Indian pulse cookery, simmered with turmeric and tempered with mustard seed and curry leaf; ground fine, it becomes besan, the chickpea flour of the pakora fritter, the kadhi gravy, and the puffed bhatura bread; and left whole as the dark kala chana, it is the food of pilgrimage and fasting and the base of chana masala, the robust curry of whole chickpeas stewed with tomato, ginger, garlic, and garam masala that is, of all the chickpea dishes of the world, the one most widely recognised beyond its homeland. India today grows some 65 to 70 percent of the global chickpea crop, and the subcontinent consumes more chickpeas, by any honest measure per head of its people, than any other civilisation in the long history of the bean.
Ethiopian Highlands, Ethiopia — c. 2000 BCE
The chickpea, known in Amharic as shimbra, reached the Ethiopian Highlands by way of the ancient agricultural corridors that run up the Nile valley and across the Red Sea littoral, and it settled into a cuisine already built deeply upon the pulse, for the lentil, the split pea, and the fava bean were all long-established highland staples. In Ethiopia the bean found one of its most ingenious uses anywhere in the world, shaped by the rigours of the religious calendar. The Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church mandates well over two hundred fasting days in the year, during which no animal product of any kind may be eaten, and out of this constraint the highland kitchen made shimbra asa, literally 'chickpea fish': a dough of chickpea flour, water, the spiced clarified butter called niter kibbeh, and the fiery red spice blend berbere is worked, shaped into small forms resembling little fish, and fried or simmered in a rich sauce. It is amongst the most resourceful responses to dietary restriction in the whole history of food, the chickpea's protein, its readiness to absorb fat and spice, and its willingness to take a shape together making it the most convincing of all pre-modern meat substitutes. The same flour underlies the daily staple of the fasting table, shiro wat, in which finely ground chickpea is simmered with onion, garlic, and spice into a thick, smooth, intensely savoury sauce mopped up with injera, eaten across Ethiopia at every level of society from the grandest house to the humblest, the indispensable sustenance of the long Orthodox fasts.
Isfahan, Persia (Iran) — c. 600 BCE
The chickpea, called nakhod in Persian, became fundamental to the cooking of the Iranian plateau across the long succession of the Achaemenid and later the Sassanid empires, carried up from neighbouring Mesopotamia and woven into a cuisine of unusual refinement. Persian culinary technique, expressed above all through the slow, fragrant khoresh, the braised stew ladled over rice, and the dense, herb-laden ash, the thick restorative soup, produced some of the most complex legume preparations in the world, and within them the chickpea plays a central, structural role. Its supreme expression is ash-e reshteh, the great thick soup of the Persian table, in which several legumes including the chickpea are simmered with quantities of fresh green herbs, spinach, and the wheat noodles called reshteh, then finished with deeply fried golden onions, with dried mint bloomed in hot oil, and with kashk, the tangy dried whey trailed over the surface in pale ribbons. By long tradition ash-e reshteh is cooked on the eve of Nowruz, the Persian New Year, and at every moment of transition, departure, vow, and blessing throughout the Persian-speaking world, the very act of pulling the long noodles held to symbolise the unravelling of a good path before one. In this dish the chickpea is no mere supporting player but a load-bearing element, lending the soup the body, the texture, and the protein weight that make it dense enough to stand as a complete and nourishing meal in itself.
Athens, Ancient Greece — c. 500 BCE
The chickpea, which the ancient Greeks called erebinthos, appears throughout the classical texts as a common food of ordinary citizens rather than a delicacy of the symposium, the bean of the marketplace and the street corner. Aristophanes, in his comedies, has chickpeas sold roasted and warm to the crowds at the theatre, the popcorn of the Athenian audience, and the philosopher and botanist Theophrastus catalogues the plant carefully in his History of Plants, describing its cultivation across the Greek world. The Greek chickpea tradition was thus from the first a notably democratic one: these were the food of the agora, hawked hot and dusted with salt, the sustenance of the labourer, the sailor, and the poor, rather than the refined dishes of the wealthy table. That ancient, frugal character survives most robustly to this day in the island cooking of the Aegean, where revithia sto fourno, the baked chickpeas of the village, achieves through extreme simplicity and the patience of long, slow time what no faster method can equal. Whole dried chickpeas, soaked overnight, are set with onion, oil, lemon, and a little water in a covered earthenware pot and left in the falling heat of the wood-fired village oven through the night, traditionally as the bakers' fires died down after the Saturday bread; by morning they have collapsed to a creamy, golden, deeply savoury tenderness, the bean concentrated and made to taste more purely of itself than any quicker cooking allows.
Rome, Roman Empire — c. 100 BCE
The Roman relationship with the chickpea was deep enough to be stamped permanently into the Latin language by the most famous name of the whole Republic. Marcus Tullius Cicero took his family cognomen from cicer, the Latin word for the chickpea, reportedly because some ancestor had borne a wart of that distinctive shape, and the orator wore the homely vegetable name with defiant pride. Beyond the etymology, the chickpea was woven through the everyday food of Rome: vendors sold it fried and roasted, warm in the hand, to the crowds along the Via Sacra, much as the Greeks had at their theatres, and chickpea flour is recorded in the cooking of Roman North Africa by Cato the Elder under the name polenta punica, 'Punic porridge', a Carthaginian inheritance. From this ancient chickpea-flour tradition descends one of the most beloved of all Italian street foods: farinata, the thin pancake of the Ligurian coast in which a loose batter of chickpea flour, water, and olive oil is poured into a wide copper pan and baked in a fierce oven until the edges crisp and blister and the centre sets to a golden, trembling, savoury flatbread, eaten hot with black pepper. Its lineage runs unbroken back to the Roman province of Africa. The legions, meanwhile, carried the chickpea with them as a soldier's ration throughout the empire, and it was through Rome, and through the long Roman presence in Iberia, that the garbanzo first entered the soil and the kitchen of Spain.
Fez, Morocco — c. 900 CE
The chickpea entered the Maghrebi kitchen along the Arab trade networks that bound North Africa to the wider Islamic world, with the great learned city of Fez amongst its principal gateways, and it became indispensable across the cooking of the region. It is the standard legume of the couscous of Morocco and Algeria, heaped golden amongst the vegetables over the steamed grain, and the seksu of the Amazigh south, but its most exalted role is in harira, the soup that breaks the Ramadan fast each evening across the breadth of the Maghreb. Harira is a thick, brick-red soup of tomatoes, lentils, and chickpeas simmered with lamb, fresh coriander, parsley, and celery, perfumed with saffron and ginger, bound to a velvety body with a flour-and-water slurry called tedouira, and sharpened at the last with lemon. It is not an everyday dish but a ritual one, and through the holy month its smell, rising from every kitchen as the light fails, is the very announcement of sunset and of the moment the fast may be broken, eaten with dates and the honeyed pastry chebakia from Casablanca to Marrakech. In this context the chickpea is far more than a protein: it is the substance of religious observance itself, the warm, sustaining heart of the fast-breaking table, the ingredient that lifts harira above a plain tomato soup and makes it the most comforting and most meaningful bowl in all the Muslim West.
Damascus and Cairo, Levant — c. 1200 CE
It is in the medieval Levantine and Egyptian kitchen, in the cities of Damascus and Cairo, that the chickpea attained the form by which the world now knows it best. The earliest surviving written recipe for hummus bi tahini, the purée of chickpeas emulsified with sesame paste, lemon, and garlic, appears in the Kanz al-Fawa'id fi Tanwi' al-Mawa'id, the 'Treasury of Useful Advice for the Composition of a Varied Table', an Egyptian cookbook of the thirteenth century. The dish is plainly older than its first documentation, for the chickpea and sesame paste are both ancient Levantine ingredients and their combination is hinted at obliquely in earlier Arabic culinary writing, but it is in this medieval period that hummus bi tahini crystallised into the distinct cold meze it remains: the smooth, pale purée pooled on a plate, dressed with a slick of olive oil, scattered with paprika, cumin, or sumac, and scooped up with warm flatbread. From the Levant the preparation radiated outward through the whole of the Arab world, and beside it travelled falafel, the fried patty of ground chickpeas, herbs, and spice that became the defining street food of the region. Today hummus stands at once as the most internationally recognised of all chickpea dishes, sold in supermarkets from Sydney to San Francisco, and as the subject of a fierce contest of cultural ownership amongst the Lebanese, Palestinian, Syrian, and Israeli kitchens, a modern geopolitical quarrel mapped, improbably, onto a humble bowl of ground beans.
Madrid, Castile, Spain — c. 1400 CE
The chickpea, known in Spanish as the garbanzo from a word generally traced to the Basque garbantzu, had been seeded in Iberia in Roman times, but it was the agricultural flowering of Moorish Spain in the medieval centuries that fixed it firmly in the peninsula's soil, for the bean adapts to the dry, baking summers of the high Castilian plateau more successfully than almost any other legume. When the Reconquista absorbed the agricultural learning of Al-Andalus even as it rejected the religion that had carried it, the garbanzo survived the transition intact and flourished, becoming in time the structural centre of the Spanish national stew. Cocido madrileño is, in effect, a three-course meal conjured from a single pot: the rich broth is served first as a soup with fine noodles, the fideo; then come the garbanzos and the root vegetables; and last the array of meats, the chicken, the beef shank, the blood sausage morcilla, and the chorizo, lifted from the pot in turn. This formal sequence, the vuelco or 'overturning', is a settled ritual of the Madrid table, observed in the old taberna with something close to ceremony. Cocido is the dish that fed the labourers who raised the great monastery of the Escorial, the dish that Hemingway took at the venerable restaurant Lhardy, and the dish that, more than any other, defines the long, cold Castilian winter; at its heart, carrying its protein and its substance, sits the chickpea that Moorish Spain made its own.
New Granada (Colombia) — c. 1600 CE
The Spanish carried the garbanzo across the Atlantic to the Americas as part of the great Old World agricultural complex they introduced into the new continent alongside cattle, pigs, wheat, and the olive, and the bean took root wherever the colonists settled and the climate allowed. In Colombia and the northern Andes it was absorbed into the transplanted cocido tradition, stewed at high altitude in the pots of the colonial household together with the local crops of the cold highlands. Bogotá's own cocido bogotano is a direct descendant of the cocido madrileño of Castile, transformed by the altitude and the produce of the Sabana de Bogotá, the high plateau lying some 2,600 metres above the sea: the Castilian sausages give way to Colombian chicken and to Andean tubers, the yellow papa criolla, the mazorca or corn on the cob, and the habas or fava beans, but the chickpea is kept as the dish's enduring protein anchor, the one immigrant bean amongst the native crops. The garbanzo never became the dominant pulse of Latin America, for that place belongs firmly to the black bean and the pinto, both of them native American crops, but it embedded itself permanently in the highland stewing and soup traditions of the continent wherever Spanish colonial culture struck its deepest roots, a quiet Iberian survivor in the cooking pots of the Andes.
Durban, Natal Colony, South Africa — c. 1870 CE
Between 1860 and 1911 the British brought roughly 150,000 indentured labourers from India to the Natal Colony to work the sugar plantations of the humid east coast, and with these people came a fully developed chickpea culture, carried across the Indian Ocean in the cooking habits and the memories of the displaced. The Indian community that grew up around the port of Durban created one of the most vital South Asian diaspora cuisines anywhere in the world, a cooking hotter, more layered, and more fiercely spiced than its Indian antecedents, adapted over the generations to local ingredients and the Natal palate. The chickpea runs through it: in the rich, oily Durban curry, and above all in the fillings of the samoosa, the crisp fried triangle sold at every market stall, taxi rank, and roadside in the city. A second and older Indian Ocean tradition meets it at the far end of the country, in the Cape Malay cooking of Cape Town's Bo-Kaap quarter, carried generations earlier by the enslaved and exiled people brought by the Dutch from Java, the Malabar coast, and Bengal, who folded the chickpea into a gentler, sweet-spiced vocabulary of turmeric, cardamom, cinnamon, and dried chilli, as in the fragrant, mild Cape Malay chickpea curry of the Bo-Kaap. South African chickpea cooking thus bridges two distinct Indian Ocean culinary worlds at once: the restrained, aromatic Cape Malay kitchen of the south and the bold, blazing Indian heat of the Durban coast in the east.
