page_title: Beta vulgaris
section_title: History
hierarchical_section_title: Beta vulgaris / History
caption_attribution_description: English: Beta vulgaris ssp. maritima, Sea Beet, habitus; Botanical Garden KIT, Karlsruhe, Germany. Deutsch: Beta vulgaris ssp. maritima, Amaranthaceae, See-Mangold, Wilder Mangold, Habitus; Botanischer Garten KIT, Karlsruhe, Deutschland.
context_page_description: Beta vulgaris is a plant which is included in the subfamily Betoideae of the family Amaranthaceae. It is the economically most important crop of the large order Caryophyllales. It has several cultivar groups: the sugar beet, of greatest importance to produce table sugar; the root vegetable known as the beetroot or garden beet; the leaf vegetable known as chard or spinach beet; and mangelwurzel, which is a fodder crop. Three subspecies are typically recognised. All cultivars fall into the subspecies Beta vulgaris subsp. vulgaris. The wild ancestor of the cultivated beets is the sea beet.
context_section_description: The sea beet, the ancestor of modern cultivated beets, prospered along the coast of the Mediterranean Sea. Beetroot remains have been excavated in the Third dynasty Saqqara pyramid at Thebes, Egypt, and four charred beetroots were found in the Neolithic site of Aartswoud in the Netherlands though it has not been determined whether these were domesticated or wild forms of B. vulgaris. Zohary and Hopf note that beetroot is "linguistically well identified." They state the earliest written mention of the beet comes from 8th century BC Mesopotamia. The Greek Peripatetic Theophrastus later describes the beet as similar to the radish, while Aristotle also mentions the plant. Available evidence, such as that provided by Aristotle and Theophrastus, suggests the leafy varieties of the beet were grown primarily for most of its history, though these lost much of their popularity following the introduction of spinach. The ancient Romans considered beets an important health food and an aphrodisiac.
  Roman and Jewish literary sources suggest that in the 1st century BC the domestic beet was represented in the Mediterranean basin primarily by leafy forms like chard and spinach beet. Zohary and Hopf also argue that it is very probable that beetroot cultivars were also grown at the time, and some Roman recipes support this. Later English and German sources show that beetroots were commonly cultivated in Medieval Europe.
caption: Sea beet (Beta vulgaris subsp. maritima), the wild ancestor of the cultivated forms.
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