nests, that fat-tailed sheep in Arabia needed wheeled wooden carts to carry their fat tails, and that cannabis was used as a ritual purifier; but on the subject of coffee he was overwhelmingly reticent. Opium was used extensively in religious ceremonies in Minoan Crete, but not coffee. The Periplus of the Erythraen Sea, a first-century AD Greek compendium of the Red Sea trade, makes no mention of it amongst the contemporary Ethiopian exports of ivory, tortoiseshell, ostrich feathers, spices, aromatics, and ebony. Although there have been extensive excavations in the city of Aksum, the centre of an Ethiopian empire that reached its zenith in the fourth and fifth centuries AD, it has not been shown that coffee was either consumed or traded from there. This is despite frequent mentions of Aksum and its activities in Graeco-Roman and Byzantine texts, and rather undermines the common contention that it was the Aksumites who introduced coffee to Yemen, which they ruled at intervals between the third and sixth centuries. Fragmentary archaeological evidence of Aksumite trade with distant China in the third century AD has been found, but, of trade in coffee grown a few hundred miles away, none.
While the record is thin concerning coffee in Ethiopia, it is bafflingly obscure elsewhere in the ancient world. If coffee were to be found there, Egypt would be the first place to look, being just downstream (albeit 1500 miles and four cataracts of the Nile) from coffee’s highland home. When the first humans originally migrated from Ethiopia in about 100,000 BC, they ventured north into Egypt and thence to the Near East. This pioneering band died out, and it is only when a second batch left the Highlands in 80,000 BC and crossed the lower Red Sea into Yemen that the common ancestry of all non-African humans was established. The fact that over a period of the next 5000 years humans made their way from Yemen, first to India and thence to Java and Sumatra, describing in slow time coffee’s later onward march, is a compelling prehistorical curiosity.
If there had been coffee use in early Ethiopia, it is highly probable that the Egyptians would have learnt about it. They were frequently supplied with slaves from that area, along with gold and cattle, by their southern neighbours, the Nubians, and the 25th Dynasty, around 600 BC, was the result of the Ethiopian conquest of Egypt. That the knowledge of coffee somehow failed to make it down the Nile would suggest that, despite its availability, coffee was not in use in Ethiopia at that time. Recent analysis of mummy remains has tended to confuse matters further. It would appear that while caffeine is not to be found in the hair of the deceased, traces of cocaine and nicotine are. The idea of the ancient Egyptian aristocracy tooting and toking may come as something of a shock to an orthodox view of life on the banks of the Nile, but the real mystery is that both coca and tobacco are native bushes of the New World, and in ancient times the Americas supposedly remained to be discovered for another two thousand years. The competition to identify the earliest Old World travellers to the New is certainly hotting up and the ancient Egyptians make a distinguished addition to the roster; but from the point of view of this study, if they were prepared to travel across the Atlantic for cocaine and nicotine, one wonders why they ignored the caffeine that could be found up the Nile?
It may be the case that knowledge of coffee travelled to ancient Greece. Some classicists have maintained that nepenthe, which Homer tells us Helen brought with her out of Egypt and used to alleviate her sufferings, was coffee: ‘She mingled with the wine the wondrous juice of a plant which banishes sadness and wrath from the heart and brings with it forgetfulness of every woe.’ However, this seems a somewhat inadequate description of the effects of caffeine, which in excess can make its consumers edgy and irritable. Others identify coffee with the ‘black broth of the Lacedaemonians’ – a position maintained by a welter of seventeenth-century scholars including George Sandys (the poet and explorer), Robert Burton (author of The Anatomy of Melancholy), and Sir Henry Blount (the traveller). Their notion remained in general currency until one Gustav Gilbert determined with great conviction in 1895 that the ‘black broth’ was ‘pork, cooked in blood, and seasoned with salt and vinegar’. This sounds a concoction far more suited to the Lacedaemonians, better known as the Spartans.
There have been claimed sightings of coffee in the Old Testament, including in the presents Abigail made to David, the red pottage for which Esau sold his birthright, and in the parched grain that Boaz ordered to be given to Ruth. Some have suggested that Pythagoras’ prohibition on the consumption of beans was aimed at coffee, but it seems more likely to have been the result of his dislike of wind, of both bodily and mental origin. In conclusion, while speculating on the subject has provided hours of harmless amusement to many, there is no confirmed reference to coffee in the Egyptian, biblical, or classical literatures.
Given the fact that the coffee tree produces tempting red cherries, it is easy to imagine that some pioneering individuals attempted to eat them raw. The flesh of the cherry is pleasant to eat, but humans would find chewing the two green beans that make up the stone of the cherry hard work. It is unlikely that early man, with a reasonable selection of foods available, would have been bothered. Although the cherries contain some caffeine, most is to be found in the bean, which would probably have been spat out, and the full effects would have gone relatively unnoticed.
The spread of farming, however, introduced to Ethiopia a more determined masticator. By about 8000 BC the early Fertile Crescent farmers had domesticated a number of the tractable animals that surrounded them, including the goat. These spread within a few thousand years from their Fertile Crescent roots to Egypt and thence up the Nile to the Ethiopian Highlands. While sheep and cattle are contentedly pastoral in their eating habits, goats are notoriously destructive eaters and tend to range wider for their foraging. Unlike birds, which plants use to spread their seeds via their digestive systems, woolly-haired animals spread seeds that adhere to their coats, leaving them free to chew into oblivion any plant, fruit, or seed that comes their way. Goats’ stomachs are fully equipped chemically to deal with vegetable matter that other mammals would simply pass. Thus it is quite possible that it was the domesticated goat, observed perhaps by an accompanying human, that first experienced the raw caffeine hit of a chewed green coffee bean. This is purely conjecture, however.
If Egyptologists, classicists, and biblical scholars have failed to pinpoint the use of coffee in their respective literatures, neither have Arabists fared any better, despite the fact that coffee drinking first arose amongst the Sufis in Arabia Felix, now Yemen. Until the use of coffee became fairly widespread in the sixteenth century, the references to it remain obscure, and no material evidence exists alongside the texts to help prove that coffee was the substance referred to. For example, the renowned Persian physician Abu Muhammad ibn Zakiriya El Razi (known more commonly as Rhazes), who lived between AD 865 and 922, describes a beverage he calls bunchum as being ‘hot and dry and very good for the stomach’. Although it is difficult to resist the obvious suggestion that bunchum is the same as bun, the Arabian and Persian word for coffee berry, other scholars have identified it as some sort of root. Nonetheless, the reference to bunchum in the works of Ibn Sina (‘Avicenna’), the influential Bokharan physician (AD 980–1037), is sometimes held to be a description of coffee: ‘It is hot and dry in the first degree, and according to others, cold in the first degree. It fortifies the members, it cleans the skin, and dries up the humidities that are under it, and gives an excellent smell to all the body.’ Many scholars dispute the attribution, however, and there is no supporting archaeological evidence whatever to show that coffee was prepared or consumed at the time. Neither does the description make mention of the most obvious feature of coffee – the effect of the caffeine upon the nervous system.
However, this does not mean that the obscure terms used in these early descriptions should be lightly dismissed. While European culture had, since the sack of Rome in AD 455, gone into the dramatic decline known to history as the Dark Ages, Middle Eastern culture, by contrast, was flowering, with an added impetus provided by the new religion of Islam. In the fields of medicine, astronomy, mathematics, architecture, and astrology, as well as the arts, the Muslim world was significantly in advance of its European contemporaries. The description used by Avicenna may seem fanciful, but the terms made sense within a coherent, applied medico-scientific structure, derived, at least in part, from knowledge of the ancient world that had been lost to the Western purview with the destruction of the Library at Alexandria in AD 391. The remains
