Black Gold. Antony Wild
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 of what was known as Alexandrian syncretism – the holistic amalgam of ancient Egyptian, Zoroastrian, Kabbalistic, and Roman and Greek esotericism alongside pre-Socratic and Neoplatonic philosophy and that of early Christianity – had been preserved by scholars at the sacred town of Harran in southern Turkey. The Hermetic school at Harran became a strong influence on emerging Islamic science and mathematics, as well as alchemy. Rhazes was a noted exponent, and both he and Avicenna exhibited the polymathic traits that characterized the alchemist through the ages – in equal measures poet, astronomer, philosopher, musician and physician. Alchemy was only superficially the search for a way to turn base metals into gold: it was, more importantly, a spiritual quest for the transmutation of the human soul. Science, art, and philosophy were brought equally into the service of this perfectionism.
The Sufis, a mystical branch of Islam who came to prominence in the second century after its foundation, were influenced by alchemy. ‘The Sufi master operates upon the base metal of the soul of the disciple and with the help of the spiritual methods of Sufism transforms this base metal into gold’, it was recorded. The word ‘sufi’ derives from the Arabic for wool, reflecting their simplicity of dress. Although the sect came about as a reaction to the perceived worldliness of early Islam, members did not believe that a practitioner should withdraw from human society. Sufi ‘orders’ were not like the closed monastic orders of Christendom; adherents continued to work and enjoy family life, and, as a result, most of their prayers and rituals took place at night. The general character of Sufi practice involved the communal singing of poetry; the ritual repetition of the divine name; a veneration for saints, many of whom were shaykhs, or former leaders of Sufi orders; and the ritual visits to the tombs of such saints.
Spread by proselytising shaykhs, by the twelfth century Sufism had reached Yemen. There, in the late fifteenth century, it would appear that the Sufis were the first to adopt coffee drinking. Not only did coffee assist in enabling devotees to stay awake during their night rituals, but the transformation of the coffee bean during roasting reflected the alchemical beliefs in the transformation of the human soul which lay at the heart of Sufism. Coffee worked both at a spiritual and a physical level.
The arrival of Sufism in Yemen is a matter of historical record. The same cannot be said about the arrival of coffee. By the end of the sixteenth century the mountains of Yemen were producing a significant proportion of the world’s coffee, and it would be natural to assume that it had been introduced from Ethiopia across the Red Sea in earlier times. This is not the case.
Pre-Islamic Yemen was a wine-growing area, and alcohol thus appears to have