Sugar is driven from Sanskrit word!

India crystallised cane sugar while Europe had only honey. The word sugar itself is Sanskrit, and the first Greek report of it is from Alexander's own admiral. 326 BCE. Alexander's army reaches the Indus. His admiral, Nearchus, reports home on the strange things of India. One of them has no name in Greek. A reed, he says, that makes honey without bees. The geographer Strabo preserved his words. A few centuries later, Pliny describes the same thing: a substance from India called saccharon, white, gathered from reeds, that breaks between the teeth .. so rare in Rome it was used as medicine. They had met sugar. Europe, and most of the world, sweetened with honey. India had learned to press cane, boil the juice, and make it crystallise. The Arthashastra, the Mauryan manual of state, already lists grades of it: guda (jaggery), khanda (crystal sugar) and sharkara (refined grains). Now follow the words. Sanskrit sharkara = grit, gravel, because of the crystals, became Persian shakar, Arabic sukkar, Latin succarum, French sucre and English sugar. Sanskrit khanda became Persian qand, and then the English word candy. The technique travelled the same road. Persian physicians at Jundishapur learned refining in the 6th century. The Arabs carried cane to Egypt, Sicily and Spain. Crusaders tasted it in the Levant. In 1493, Columbus carried cane to the Caribbean. Today the world produces around 180 million tonnes of sugar a year. Every grain of it goes back to ancient Indians that astonished one of Alexander's officers and to a Sanskrit word for grit.