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Smoke Like an Egyptian

Possibilities of Old World Tobacco-Use in Ancient Times

This topic has been on my mind for the past few weeks. I was mainly inspired by this fun image of Alexander the Great smoking a cigarette that I've attached above. This reminded me of an interesting case where, so the story goes, in 1992 at a museum in Munich, the mummified remains of a 21st Dynasty Egyptian priestess tested positive for coca, hashish, and nicotine. Other mummies were also examined, and all had traces of nicotine in their hair. This, of course, was rather controversial because coca and tobacco are thought to be New World plants. This sparked many theories of pre-Columbian trade between the Old World and the New.

With this strange incident in the back of my mind, I learned that there is, in fact, at least one species of tobacco known to be native to the Old World: Nicotiana africana, or African tobacco. Very little literature exists on this species, but it is known to grow on certain isolated mountains in the Namib highlands, a very remote part of the world. It is really quite mysterious in and of itself how a member of the Nicotiana family ended up in southern Africa, across the ocean over 3,000 miles away from the Americas, but I digress. Furthermore, I can find no evidence of this plant’s use by the native bushmen. Is it possible that this plant could have reached as far away as Egypt? It is probably safe to say that, if this plant is our culprit, it did not travel to Egypt over land. We know that Hanno the Navigator, a Carthaginian explorer (c. 500 BC), likely made it as far as the Gulf of Guinea before turning back—still quite far from the Namib. From Herodotus, we know of an expedition sent by Pharaoh Necho II (c. 600 BC), who dispatched a fleet of Phoenician sailors to map a route around the continent. Herodotus tells us that, after three years, the fleet successfully sailed around the Cape and returned through the Straits of Gibraltar. This expedition certainly would have passed by Namibia, but apparently, they did not encounter the plant, as they would not have ventured far into the harsh inland. The Egyptians kept meticulous records, and it seems that this was the first and only complete circumnavigation of the continent—probably until the Portuguese in the 1400s. We will have to explore other possibilities then.

Continuing our research, I was quite surprised to learn that African tobacco is not the only species not native to the Americas. In fact, there are a handful of species native to Australia and Polynesia, and, even more salient to our research, they have a long history of usage by the natives. Our first records of these plants in the West come from Sir Joseph Banks, botanist aboard HMS Endeavour on Captain Cook’s first voyage of discovery. He noted that the natives chewed leaves in the manner of tobacco or betel nut. Further studies revealed the mixture known as pituri, a blend of Nicotiana suaveolens (or other local species) and wood ash from acacia and/or eucalyptus. The reader may note that alkali from wood ash is commonly incorporated into certain drug mixtures to facilitate their absorption into the body (freebasing), a practice also found in Andean coca use. Further anthropological studies have revealed that tobacco has been used in Australia probably as long as humans or the plant have been present on the continent (whichever came first). Now this of course is no smoking gun, but it does provide us with solid evidence of Old World tobacco use in ancient times.

I would initially be inclined to propose that one of these aforementioned Australian varieties of the plant could have perhaps passed by trade into Southeast Asia and then into India and the Near East, but I have not as yet found any evidence of it. It is possible that medieval Muslim traders from Indonesia could have encountered the plant, as they occasionally traveled as far as the shores of northern Australia. Of course, if this were so, we would face an even more mysterious question: how could an addictive stimulant like tobacco not quickly proliferate around the world if it had the chance?

There still exist a number of yet-unidentified plants in the botanical corpus of the ancient Near East. Many seem to have had some level of shamanistic and/or recreational usage. I would propose that one of these may represent a now-extinct species of Nicotiana that once lived in the region. One wonders how a plant with addictive properties like tobacco could go extinct; however, if you consider the climatic changes that started c. 10,000 BC, as well as the possibility that it may have been already rare and difficult to cultivate, it is not out of the question that such a thing could vanish altogether. In fact, this scenario calls to mind the silphium plant, which was apparently prolific in the ancient Greek world--a cure-all, used for everything from common colds to contraception. It was so widely used that it was harvested (or perhaps more aptly, hunted) to extinction.

This research has raised more questions than answers. The likeliest scenario is that the drugs found on the mummies were probably left by apparently rather bohemian archaeologists. I believe, though, that we have proved there is at least a small possibility of tobacco use in the Near East in ancient times.