Camphor is used as an incense in holy rituals in temples.¹ It was traditionally derived from Cinnamomum camphora, a tree native to many parts of East Asia and India.² In South India, it is native to Kerala; in North India, it is found in Uttar Pradesh.³ The Malayalam word for “camphor” is കര്പ്പൂരം karppuram.
Incense was one of the items of the Indian Ocean trade with ancient Egypt, because of its profuse use in Egyptian temples for purification rituals just like in Kerala’s temples. Egyptian records as early as 25th century BCE mention maritime expeditions to faraway lands for incense and other aromatics.⁴
The Old Egyptian word for “incense” and “cense” was kerp.⁵ In several spellings dating to the Old Kingdom (ca. 2000 BCE and earlier), it is written with the vulture hieroglyph 𓄿 that had the sound [r] during those times.⁶ Considering that kerp and karppuram are quite similar in sound and meaning, it is highly likely that they derived from the same linguistic source.⁷ Indeed, without the Sanskritized -am ending, karppuram would be karp-ur, which means “large incense” in both Malayalam and Egyptian, probably indicative of the large sized camphor tree compared to the smaller myrrh and frankincense.⁸
The pronunciation of kerp changed in Egyptian to kap after 1600 BCE when the vulture hieroglyph changed in sound.⁹ Yet, this change was not reflected in Malayalam, pointing to an interesting conclusion: the Egyptian word kerp and the Malayalam word karppuram likely derived from each other before 1600 BCE. Subsequently, the pronunciation in Egyptian changed, but not in Malayalam, indicating that there was a discontinuity in cultural contact between Egypt and Kerala. In other words, the cultural exchange resulting in word borrowing stopped at some unknown time in the past before 1600 BCE and was likely not renewed thereafter at least as far as camphor was concerned.
On the other hand, the word for “camphor” in Gujarati is kapur, closer to the later Egyptian form, suggesting that the maritime trade in camphor moved away from Kerala to the northwestern shores of the Indian peninsula. By then, camphor from Uttar Pradesh may have become available at ports in Gujarat, dethroning Kerala’s ancient monopoly in this exotic commodity.
Notes
[1] For example, camphor is one of the ingredients used as an unguent in anointing and dressing idols in temples. See Unni, N.P., 2006, Tantra Literature of Kerala, 95, 157 (Delhi: New Bharatiya Book Corp.)
[2] In modern times, camphor is also derived from turpentine oil.
[3] https://indiaflora-ces.iisc.ac.in/herbsheet.php?id=2567&cat=13. It is also native to parts of, Delhi, Arunachal Pradesh and Tripura.
[4] Wilfred Schoff, 1920, “Cinnamon, Cassia and Somaliland,” Journal of the American Oriental Society, v. 40: 260–70. The incense that ancient Egyptian records indicate could have been frankincense and myrrh, rather than camphor.
[5] The word may have evolved into kap after around 1600 BCE. 𓊶𓊪𓏏𓊮 https://thesaurus-linguae-aegyptiae.de/lemma/163400; 𓎡𓄿𓊶𓊪 https://thesaurus-linguae-aegyptiae.de/lemma/163310.
[6] https://thesaurus-linguae-aegyptiae.de/sentence/IBUBdxHheh8onkB5pvZ4VND281E; https://thesaurus-linguae-aegyptiae.de/sentence/IBUBdxKCWFoZOk3thHGrc8cffuU; https://thesaurus-linguae-aegyptiae.de/sentence/IBUBd7dBspbzZkBxpFf1ZrTG40g; https://thesaurus-linguae-aegyptiae.de/sentence/IBUBd7rPt2l7i0zahXbHyAelst0.
[7] The Sanskrit word for camphor is the same as the Malayalam word. Before one jumps to the conclusion that the Malayalam word derived from Sanskrit, consider the timeframe of word borrowing. Camphor is indigenous to Kerala and Uttar Pradesh, two areas that were separated by miles of thick jungles around 2500 BCE, when the term kerp was already in use in Egypt. In 2500 BCE, before the advent of iron, the region that is now Uttar Pradesh was likely not populated by civilized societies. It is unlikely that camphor from Uttar Pradesh was traded with Egypt during that timeframe. Various theories put the widespread inhabitation of Uttar Pradesh after 1000 BCE, i.e., the advent of the Iron Age. By this time, the Egyptian word for incense had already changed to kap. Thus, if Sanskrit was the origin of the word, the Malayalam word should have been kapur, not karppuram.
[8] 𓅨𓂋 wr “great” https://thesaurus-linguae-aegyptiae.de/lemma/47271. ഉരു uru “large,” https://dsal.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/app/gundert_query.py?page=140. However, “large incense” would be ur-karp according to modern rules of word joining in Malayalam.
[9] James Allen, 2013, The Ancient Egyptian Language: An Historical Study (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press); Carsten Peust, 1999. Egyptian Phonology: An Introduction to the Phonology of a Dead Language (Gottingen: Peust und Gutschmidt).
