Rome, 1st century AD. Somewhere, yet another fire is breaking out. In the house of Emperor Nero, proudly on display, stands the last surviving specimen of a large plant of the genus Ferula, in the Umbelliferae family: the legendary silphium. Not a single one will ever be found again.
The plant, according to legend a gift from the god Apollo, grew only in a narrow coastal strip about 60 km long in Cyrenaica (today’s Libya), and it was the greatest economic resource of the ancient city of Cyrene, so much so that it even appeared on its coins.
Silphium was considered one of the most important medicinal resources of the ancient world, with practically unlimited uses. What came from its root, a red resin called laserpicium, was sold for its weight in gold, literally. Below is a silphium seed!
But wait a moment! A heart-shaped seed + an aphrodisiac medicine
Someone thought: let’s make it the symbol of love… and it is no coincidence that the hieroglyph for the silphium plant has this shape too. Never underestimate how romantic the ancient Egyptians were.
In short, over time, the little heart shape as we know it becomes, at least around the Mediterranean and the lands nearby, “the ideogram of love”. Little by little the association spreads further and further.
Warning: the next part is obviously not historically accurate, and I had fun making up the events that lead to 1988:
Siberia, one December long ago. Sergey turns to his friend Ivan: “I want Olga to know that I love her.” Ivan: “Draw her a heart in the snow, the Western way.” And so on, word of mouth after word of mouth, the centuries go by, until one fine day. The fleet of Kublai Khan, trying to invade Japan, is about to be swept away by the divine wind for the second time. An unsuspecting Korean sailor named Bon-Hwa, drunk on soju (a Korean spirit), incredibly manages to reach the shore almost by chance, shipwrecked on the island of Okinawa. There he meets Kozue, an ama pearl diver, who gives him his first taste of sake. The two fall madly in love, and Bon-Hwa, who knows the heart symbol, scorches its outline onto a coconut to show his beloved how he feels. And so the symbol has finally landed in Japan too. Much later, a distant relative of the pearl diver becomes a graphical interface programmer at the Japanese company Sharp. His name is unknown, but for convenience we will call him Shiba Hiroshi.
It is 1988, and someone has to decide which set of emoji goes into the interface of the new PDA that is about to come out: the PA-8500 (the original emoji set is below). The team Hiroshi works in proposes to start with just the smiley face and the poop. Hiroshi digs his heels in and asks for the heart as well. The rest, as they say, is history.
This is also when the word emoji is born. Remember, it comes from joining two Japanese words: (e 絵, picture) + (moji 文字, character). So the word emoji describes a pictogram. All this film just to say that when you send a little heart to a woman or a man from Rome, it is a bit like sending the last silphium seed back home after 2,000 years.
