User:Agradman/coffee

The world of caffeine By Bennett Alan Weinberg, Bonnie K. Bealer, 2001

Despite the fact that the coffee bush grows wild in highlands throughout Africa, from Madagascar to Sierra Leone, from the Congo to the mountains of Ethiopia, and may also be indigenous to Arabia, there is no credible evidence coffee was known or used by anyone in the ancient Greek, Roman, Middle Eastern, or African worlds. Although European and Arab historians repeat legendary African accounts or cite lost written references from as early as the sixth century, surviving documents can incontrovertibly establish coffee drinking or knowledge of the coffee tree no earlier than the middle of the fifteenth century in the Sufi monasteries of the Yemen in southern Arabia.

The myth of Kaldi the Ethiopian goatherd and his dancing goats, the coffee origin story most frequently encountered in Western literature, embellishes the credible tradition that the Sufi encounter with coffee occurred in Ethiopia, which lies just across the narrow passage of the Red Sea from Arabia's western coast. Antoine Faustus Nairon, a Maronite who became a Roman professor of Oriental languages and author of one of the first printed treatises devoted to coffee, De Saluberrima CaCahue seu Cafe nuncupata Discurscus (1671) relates that Kaldi, noticing the energizing effects when his flock nibbled on the bright red berries of a certain glossy green bush with fragrant blossoms, chewed on the fruit himself. His exhilaration prompted him to

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bring the berries to an Islamic holy man in a nearby monastery. But the holy man disapproved of their use and threw them into a the fire, from which an enticing aroma billowed. The roasted beans were quickly raked from the embers, ground up, and dissolved in hot water, yielding the world's first cup of coffee. Unfortunately for those who would otherwise have felt inclined to believe that Kaldi is a mythopoeic emblem of some actual person, this tale does not appear in any earlier Arab sources and must therefore be supposed to have originated in Nairon's caffeine-charged literary imagination and spread because of its appeal to the earliest European coffee bibbers.

Another origin story, attributed to Arabian tradition by the missionary Reverend Doctor J. Lewis Krapf, in his Travels, Researches and Missionary Labors During Eighteen Years Residence in Eastern Africa (1856), also ascribes to African animals an essential part in the early progress of coffee. The tale enigmatically relates that the civet cat carried the seeds of the wild coffee plant from central Africa to the remote Ethiopian mountains. There the plant was first cultivated, in Arusi and Ilta-Gallas, home of the Galla warriors. Finally, an Arab merchant brought the plant to Arabia, where it flourished and became known to the world. The so-called cat to which Krapf refers is actually a cat-faced relative of the mongoose. By adducing its role in propagating coffee, Krapf's tale was undoubtedly referencing the civet cat's predilection for climbing coffee trees and pilfering and eating the best coffee cherries, as a result of which the undigested seeds are spread by means of its droppings.

Both stories, of prancing goats and wandering cats, reflect the reasonable supposition that Ethiopians, the ancestors of today's Galla tribe, the legendary raiders of the remote Ethiopian massif, were the first to have recognized the energizing effect of the coffee plant. According to this theory, which takes its support from traditional tales and current practice, the Galla, in a remote, unchronicled past, gathered the ripe cherries from wild trees, ground them with stone mortars, and mixed the mashed sees and pulp with animal fat, forming small balls that they carried for sustenance on war parties....

James Bruce of Kinnarid, F.R.S. (1730-94), Scottish wine merchant, consul to Algiers and the first modern scientific explorer of Africa, left Cairo in 1768 via the Red Sea and traveled to Ethiopia. There he observed and recorded in his book, Travels to Discover the Source of the Nile (1790), the persistence of what are thought to have been these ancient Gallaen uses of coffee:

The Gallae is a wandering nation of Africa, who, in their incursions into Abyssinia, are obliged to traverse immense deserts, and being desirous of falling on the towns and villages of that country without warning, carry nothing to eat with them but the berries of the Coffee tree roasted and pulverized, which they mix with grease to a certain consistency that will permit of its being rolled into masses about the size of billiard balls and then put in leathern bags until required for use. One of these balls, they

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claim will support them for a whole day, when on a marauding incursion or in active war, better than a loaf of bread or a meal of meat, because it cheers their spirits as well as feeds them.

Other tribes of northeastern Africa are said to have cooked the berries as a porridge or drunk a wine fermented from the fruit and skin and mixed with cold water. But, despite such credible inferences about its African past, no direct evidence has ever been found revealing exactly where in Africa coffee grew or who among the natives might have used it as a stimulant or even known about it there earlier than the seventeenth century.

COFFEE AS MATERIA MEDICA: THE FIRST WRITTEN REFERENCES.

There is evidence that the coffee plant and the coffee bean's action as a stimulant were known in Arabia by the time of the great Islamic physician and astronomer Abu Bakr Muhammad ibn Zakariya El Razi (852-932), called "Rhazes," whose work may offer the first written mention of them. The merit of this attribution depends on the meaning, in Rhazes' time, of the Arabic words "bunn" and "buncham." Across the sea in Abyssinia these words referred, respectively, tot he coffee berry and the drink, and they still have these meanings today. In his lost medical textbook, Al-Haiwi (The Continent), Rhazes describes the nature and effects of a plant named "bunn" and a beverage named "bucham," and what he says about the beverage's effects is at least

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consistent with a reference to coffee in terms of humoral theory: "Bunchum is hot and dry and very good for the stomach.

However, the oldest extant document referring to buncham is the monumental classic discourse The Canon of Medicine (Al-Ganum fit-Tebb), written by Avicenna (980-1037) at the turn of the eleventh century.

INTERNAL FOOTNOTES

Caffeine and activation theory By Barry D. Smith, Uma Gupta, Bhupendra S. Gupta

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The first known reference to coffee in Arabic writings came from an Islamic physician, Abu Bakr Muihammed ibn Zakariya El Razi (known as "Rhazes"), who wrote a now lost medical textbook circa 900AD. Rhazes made the first reference to what can be reliably identified as coffee, and archaeologists have found iron roasting pans dating to 1000 AD. However, Rhazes' textbook has been lost to the ages, and only more recent references in other Arabian literature exist citing his book (see Dufour, 1685, for a French--language account of the secondary sources). book. The oldest extant account of coffee roasting date to the writings of the famous Islamic physician Ibn Sina, traditionally referred to in English-language texts by his Latinized name, "Avicenna." Avicenna's praises of coffee were published in Arabic circa 1000 AD and translated into Latin circa 1200 AD.

INTERNAL FOOTNOTES