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Terrazzo hints for Thursday, October 22, 2026
Mosaic № 76. Three hints, from a gentle nudge to the full answer. Open only as many as you need.
Hint 1: what kind of picture is it?
Today's subject comes from history.
The caption reads: “A plant so useful the Romans ate it into extinction.”
Hint 2: the Laws, in plain words
You place 7 stones into a frame of 39 cells. Every cell is filled exactly once.
- Kinship. Same-coloured stones that touch make a region. Today: gold forms 2 separate regions of 1, 1; lapis blue forms 4 separate regions of 4, 2, 1, 1; moss green forms 2 separate regions of 17, 2; terracotta forms 5 separate regions of 5, 2, 1, 1, 1.
- Solitude. No two sun cells may touch, not even corner to corner.
Start with the largest region the Laws name: it has the fewest ways to fit.
The answer: what the mosaic shows
Silphium
Silphium grew on a narrow coastal strip of Cyrenaica in what is now Libya, and nowhere else — every attempt to cultivate it elsewhere failed. Romans used it as seasoning, medicine and contraceptive, and valued it by weight against silver. The city of Cyrene put it on its coins, where the seed pod appears as a plump heart, one plausible origin for the shape we still draw. Pliny records that the last known stalk was sent to the emperor Nero as a curiosity. Grazing, overharvesting and a habitat that could not be reproduced finished it. We are not certain what it looked like.