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it's amazing that we haven't given that it was such a highly regarded plant.so many questions make me wonder if it ever existed to begin with! why did farmers stop planting it? what was the market like when it was in decline? could it have just evolved? what plants of current high regard will hold the same legendary status in a few thousand years that will have long been extinct and have historians scratching their heads?

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There's a theory that farmers over-cultivated it and ruined the nutrient balance of the only soil where it was known to grow reliably.

But, since we still don't know what it was, it's quite possible that's it's still growing wild to this day and we just can't recognize it. A few candidate species have been proposed, apparently.

They never managed to cultivate it, and apparently it refused to grow anywhere else but that region in modern-day Tunisia.

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