Nice book about languages etc
The Sumerians flavoured their meals with a sipce called gamun in Sumerian. In Akkadian, it was called kamunum, which we know from bilingual lists. We still use this spice, and still know it by an almost identical name, cumin. The Akkadians enjoyed the tasty, nourishing seeds and oil of the sesame plant, called šamaššammu. The name is thought to mean sun-oil, or sun-plant, and is the ancestor of our word, sesame.
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From around 1000 CE, cumin is mentioned in Old English plant lists as cimen. Later, it would be known in England as comyn, or as cumin, the name still used for it today. In the Middle Ages, between the twelfth and the fifteenth centuries, English tenants even paid their rent in pepper and cumin.
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It's a myth that spices were used to mask the taste of rotten meat. Spices were much more expensive than meat, and it wouldn't have made sense to waste them that way, especially when meat usually came from freshly slaughtered animals.
