Dioscorides’s bruonia melaina is Bryonia alba, not Tamus communis, and an illustration labeled bruonia melaina in the Codex Vindobonensis is Humulus lupulus not Bryonia dioica

The Cucurbitaceae genus Bryonia contains ten species that are distributed throughout the Mediterranean to North Africa and from central Europe to Kazakhstan. References to the medicinal uses of species of Bryonia span two millennia, including two passages in Dioscorides’s De Materia Medica, written in about 65 CE. An illustrated copy of this text, known as the Codex Vindobonensis and dated 512 CE, is enriched with illustrations, including two labeled as bruōnia or bryonia. Here we argue that while Dioscorides’s text clearly concerns the blackfruited B. alba and a red-fruited species, perhaps B. cretica or B. dioica, only one of the plates in the Codex shows a species of Bryonia, while the other shows Humulus lupulus. INTRODUCTION The Eurasian Cucurbitaceae genus Bryonia L. (bryony) comprises ten species that occur from central Europe to Kazakhstan and south through the Mediterranean to northern Africa (Jeffrey 1969; Volz and Renner 2008). Two species have been introduced in eastern North America and New Zealand. Medicinal uses of bryony have been recorded for over 2000 years, beginning with texts attributed to Hippocrates, who lived around 460-380 BCE (translations including the sections about Bryonia are available at http://etext.library.adelaide.edu.au/h/hippocrates//). Other early mentions are in Dioscorides’s De Materia Medica, written in about 65 CE and Pliny’s Historia Naturalis, completed in 77 CE (Wellmann 1906-1914). References to Bryonia also appear in ancient Egyptian sources (Haggag 1997). A passage in the Materia Medica that describes a plant called ampelos melaina, since at least the Renaissance has been interpreted as referring to the Cucurbitaceae Bryonia. This interpretation, however, was changed in a new translation of De Materia Medica (Beck, 2005) that instead renders ampelos melaina as referring to the 1Cucurbitaceae 2008, Proceedings of the IX EUCARPIA meeting on genetics and breeding of Cucurbitaceae (Pitrat M, ed), INRA, Avignon (France), May 21-24, 2008