The World of Caffeine (3 page)

With every cup of coffee you drink, you partake of one of the great mysteries of cultural history. Despite the fact that the coffee bush grows wild in highlands through-out 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.
¹
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.
²

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 Saluberrimá
Cahue seu Café 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 bring the berries to an Islamic holy man in a nearby monastery. But the holy man disapproved of their use and threw them into 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.
³
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. (For a modern update of this story, see the discussion of Kopi Luak,
chapter 12
.)

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 seeds and pulp with animal fat, forming small balls that they carried for sustenance on war parties. The flesh of the fruit is rich in caffeine, sugar, and fat and is about 15 percent protein. With this preparation the Galla warriors devised a more compact solution to the problems of hunger and exhaustion than did the armies of World Wars I and II, who carried caffeine in the form of tablets, along with chocolate bars and dried foodstuffs.

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 Gallæn uses of coffee:

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.

Yet even without the guidance of early records, we can judge from the plant’s prevalence across Africa in recent centuries that coffee was growing wild or under cultivation throughout that continent and possibly other places during the building of the Pyramids, the waging of the Trojan War, the ascendancy of Periclean Athens, and the conquest of Persia by Alexander the Great, and that it continued to flower, still largely unknown, through the rise and fall of the Roman Empire and the early Middle Ages.

If this is so, then why was coffee’s descent from the Ethiopian massif and entry into the wide world so long delayed? It is true that some of the central African regions in which coffee probably grew in the remote past remained impenetrable until the nineteenth century, and their inhabitants had little or no contact with men of other continents. But the Ethiopian region itself has been known to the Middle East and Europe alike for more than three thousand years. Abyssinia, roughly coextensive with Ethiopia today, long enjoyed extensive trading, cultural, political, and religious interactions with the more cosmopolitan empires that surrounded it. Abyssinia was a source of spices for Egypt from as early as 1500 B.C. and continues as a source today. The Athenians of Periclean Athens knew the Abyssinian tribes by name. Early Arabian settlers came from across the narrow Red Sea and founded colonies in Abyssinia’s coastal regions. It is inescapable that this area, although far from being a political and social hub, was known to outsiders throughout history. The discovery of coffee, therefore, is one that ancient or medieval European or Middle Eastern traders, soldiers, evangelists, or travelers should have been expected to have made very early, here, if nowhere else. The fact remains that, for some unknown reason, they did not.
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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, to the coffee berry and the drink, and they still have these meanings there 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
“buncham”
and what he says about the beverage’s effects is at least consistent with a reference to coffee in terms of humoral theory: “
Bunchum
is hot and dry and very good for the stomach.”
⁶

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. The fifth and final part of his book is a pharmacopoeia, a manual for compounding and preparing medicines, listing more than 760 drugs,
⁷
which includes an entry for
buncham.
In the Latin translation made in the twelfth century, this entry reads in part, “
Bunchum quid est? Est res delatade
Iamen. Quidam autem dixerunt, quod est ex radicibus anigailen…
Bunchum, what is that? It comes from Yemen. Some say it derives from the roots of anigailen…]”
⁸
In explaining the medicinal properties and uses of
bunn
and
buncham,
Avicenna uses these words in apparently the same way as Rhazes (the unroasted beans are yellow):

The name “Avicenna” is the Latinized form of the Arabic Ibn Sina, a shortened version of Abu Ali al-Husain Ibn Abdollah Ibn Sina. He was born in the province of Bokhara, and when only seventeen years old he cured his sultan of a long illness and was, in compensation, given access to the extensive royal library and a position at court.
¹⁰
Avicenna himself is credited with writing more than a hundred books. Some of his admirers claim, perhaps too expansively, that modern medical practice is a continuation of his system, which framed medicine as a body of knowledge that should be clearly separated from religious dogma and be based entirely on observation and analysis.
¹¹

Leonhard Rauwolf (d. 1596), a German physician, botanist, and traveler and the first European to write a description of coffee, which he saw prepared by the Turks in Aleppo in 1573, was familiar with these Islamic medical references:

It was no accident that Rauwolf and other early European writers on coffee should have been acquainted with Avicenna’s
Canon of Medicine,
which, following its translation into Latin in the twelfth century by Italian orientalist Gerard Cremonensis (1114–87), became the most respected book in Europe on the theory and practice of medicine. Few books in history have been as widely distributed or as important in the lives and fortunes of so many people around the world.
¹³
The
Canon
was required reading at the university of Leipzig until 1480 and that of Vienna until nearly 1600. At Montpellier, France, a major center of medical studies, where Dr. Daniel Duncan was to write
Wholesome Advise against the Abuse of Hot Liquors,
Particularly of Coffee, Chocolate, Tea
(1706), it remained a principal basis of the curriculum until 1650.
¹⁴

The fact that the
Canon
apparently mentions the coffee plant and the coffee beverage, describing them in the same humoral terms used by later physicians and ascribing to them several of the actions of the drug we now know is caffeine, makes the stunning silence about coffee in the Middle East and Europe, from Avicenna, in the year A.D. 1000, until the Arab scholars of the 1500s, the more puzzling. This accessible, apparently safe plant with stimulating and refreshing properties was destined to become an item of great interest in Islam, whose believers were not permitted to drink alcohol. It was equally well received in Christian Europe, where water was generally unsafe and where the drink served at breakfast, luncheon, and dinner was beer. Once people from each of these two cultures had had a good taste of coffee, history proves that the drink made its way like a juggernaut, mowing down entrenched customs and opposing interests in its path. Yet, after the time of Avicenna, coffee was apparently forgotten in the Islamic world for more than five hundred years.

One way to gain an appreciation of the mystery of coffee’s late appearance is to note that, even if the Rhazian reference is deemed genuine,
coffee remained unknown to the Arabs until after Arab traders had become familiar with Chinese tea.
Arab knowledge of tea as an important commodity is demonstrated by an Arabian traveler’s report in A.D. 879 that the primary sources of tax revenue in Canton were levies on tea and salt. Awareness of tea’s use as a popular tonic is evinced in the words of Suleiman the Magnificent (1494–1566): “The people of China are accustomed to use as a beverage an infusion of a plant, which they call
sakh….
It is considered very wholesome. This plant is sold in all the cities of the Empire.”
¹⁵
Considering that tea was produced in a land half a world away, accessible only by long, daunting sea journeys or even more hazardous extended overland routes, the lack of Arab familiarity with coffee, which grew wild just across narrow passage of the Red Sea, becomes even harder to understand.