Cultivated in Iran, but wiki doesn’t say how old the species is.
Native to Namibia, but wiki doesn’t say whether it has enough nicotine to be interesting.
Lists lots of species, but doesn’t have much info on most of them.
It IS correct – I didn’t sayu that you didn’t see ANY, just not a lot. My point is that it’s more profitavble and easier to grow it further south. But Canadians can’t do that, so they grow it as far south as they can. I’m still amazed that it’s profitable – if it were really profitable to grow it that far north, there’d be more vfarms in the Mid-Atlantic states than there are.
This page has some more info and states that it it found not only in Northern Australia but also in Papua New Guinea, Indonesia and Thailand:
http://www.gwannon.com/species/Eriocaulon-australe
It’s pretty well established that trade links existed between India and SE Asia more than 2000 years ago, and then between India and Persia and between Persia and Egypt.
eg see here:
http://zeenews.india.com/news/from-the-past/india-s-ancient-trade-links-with-se-asia-found_650356.html
It’s pretty awesome to imagine that native “Australian” Cocaine might have been cultivated in Indonesia or Papua New Guinea and then traded 20 or 30 times taking 2 or 3 years to get there before ending up in some Pharaohs hands.
Before we write an Australia <-> Egypt narrative, is there a reason to believe they couldn’t tell cocaine and meteloidine apart?
That article is about Nothoscordium fragrans, an onion, not Nicotiana fragrans, a tobacco.
And looking around, it appears that Nicotiana fragrans has been subdivided into several species, with Nicotiana fragrans now restricted to New Caledonia and Polynesia, and the Australian and African forms reclassified as separate species. What that is based on and whether it has any bearing on human distribution I have no idea.
Bloody taxonomists. Lose touch for a couple of decades and they go and split every bloody thing that they don’t lump.
Anyway, the point is that the remains that there were species of *Nicotiana * (now apparently called N. africans) in Africa and Indonesia 3, 000 years ago. So the presence of nicotine in mummies doesn’t require any Old World connection.
I can’t find anything to that effect, but a lot of these aren’t analysed and what had been analysed is behind paywalls.
The main point is that that closely related species were available to Egypt,and without knowing exactly what tests were done we can’t know what exactly they were testing for. The Old World Erythroxylum species certainly contain plenty of psychoactive tropanes, and many “drug tests” will return those as a positive cocaine result.
That page is about Eriocaulon australe, not Erythroxylon australe. Very different plants. The *Erythroxylon *is confined to Australia and New guinea. Not that it matters much. There are at least a dozen *Erythroxylon *species indigenous to areas from Southern Australia and Central India.
The point being that this is a Gondwanan genus, not one restricted to the Old World. And its members seem to have been used as drugs everywhere they grew. A drug finding its way form India to Egypt wouldn’t be very surprising at all since, as you note, those trade routes have existed for millennia.
I’m suggesting at most an Indonesian-Egypt trade route which is far more plausible.
The mainstream response to the finding is according to Wiki to concentrate on old world sources of Tobacco and Cocaine which I guess means the tests are not specific enough to narrow down exactly which species the traces came from.
theres an indepth article here (scroll down)
http://www.thehallofmaat.com/modules.php?name=Articles&file=article&sid=45
[quote=“coremelt, post:26, topic:619762”]
I’m suggesting at most an Indonesian-Egypt trade route which is far more plausible.
I agree, but reading the link you provided, even that seems overly elaborate.
A few interesting quotes:
So there are known sources of cocaine on the same freakin’ continent as the mummies. Yet for some reason people want to ascribe the presence of cocaine in the mummies to New World trade.
Ockham’s Razor should be wielded with great force here. If a source of cocaine exists in regions with which the Egyptians were known to have trade routes, we should assume that was the source fo the cocaine to which the Egyptians had access.
Invoking trans-Atlantic trade seems plain silly in light of this information.
So we know that local species of tobacco were used in both Europe and Asia in pre-European times, and Egypt was collecting tribute Asia and from places within a hundred and fifty miles of Europe. And tobacco grew on the same continent as Egypt at the time.
Once again, Ockham’s razor comes into play.
I really don’t see why anyone would consider the presence of cocaine or nicotine to be evidence of New World trade. It’s a totally unwarranted assumption.
Yep. According to a 2003 report from the Congressional Research Service, Pennsylvania ranks ninth in tobacco farm acreage, putting it in about the middle of the pack for tobacco-producing states.
I agree, I never knew there was South East asian plants with Cocaine like alkaloids and I never knew there was African Tobacco plants. Once again the dope fights ignorance. Thanks to Blake for his extremely specific responses.
Personally I find what it reveals about the trade network from Egypt to Africa and SE Asia to be more interesting than any potential egyptians in the new world scenario.
BTW that article also contains a fascinating factoid that some types of Gems found only in Afghanistan were found in Egyptian tombs, so the trade network was at the very least from Egypt to Afghanistan.