Posted by:
SL Cabbie
(
)
Date: December 04, 2010 02:08PM
Right now my excuse is mangoes; they orginated in India or somewhere nearby on the Asian subcontinent, but Sorenson and Johannessen are claiming they made it to the New World way back when (they are now raised extensively worldwide in tropical climes and have become a staple of Latin American cuisine).
I saved this one on my hard drive, however, filed under a "Cocaine Cleopatra" label....
http://www.thehallofmaat.com/modules.php?name=Articles&file=article&sid=45>The history of drug use interests many anthropologists but due to the paucity of evidence very little is known about which plants were used for medicinal or spiritual purposes by particular cultures and when they first began using them. In the late 1980s the German anthropologist, Dr Franz Parsche became interested in determining whether mummified remains could be forensically tested for the presence of drugs. If modern analytical techniques could be employed on ancient samples then we could determine which particular drugs were used by specific cultures and also get an idea of when they were first used. Dr Parsche collaborated with Dr Wolfgang Pirsig and Prof. Svetlana Balabanova, both at the University of Ulm, to obtain and analyse ancient mummies from Egypt, South America, the German “Bell” culture and Sudan for traces of drugs. Their controversial data showed that mummies from both Egypt and Peru contained cocaine, nicotine and the active component of hashish - tetrahydrocannabinal (THC). These results also confirmed a discovery made in 1976 when the mummified remains of the ancient Egyptian pharaoh Ramses II were found to contain traces of tobacco leaves.
>Additionally a species of tobacco, Nicotiana africana, has recently been identified as indigenous to Namibia in South West Africa. It is therefore not unreasonable to suspect that other species of tobacco may have grown in Egypt, or in the surrounding regions, and that this could account for the high amounts of nicotine identified in these Egyptian mummies.
Another reasonable hypothesis is that nicotine was used in insecticides in museums (and mummies are suceptible to attacks by several varieties of bugs).
And a bit more that should get some wannabe Harry Anslinger sorts to put down their crack pipes...
>Cocaine is produced in quantity exclusively by Erythroxylum species native to South America [8 & 35 - 37]. However the genus Erythroxylon contains over 200 species distributed throughout the tropics including the Americas, Asia, South Africa, Madagascar and Australia. Some of these species produce cocaine although in much smaller amounts than in the South American species. [38 - 42] E. brownianum for instance is a species native to South Africa which produces 400ppm (parts per million – equivalent to 0.4mg/g) cocaine in its leaves. [40] E. monogynum, red cedar, is native to India and contains up to 400ppm cocaine in its roots. [40] The shoots and leaves from this plant are also edible. It is possible that the Ancient Egyptians could have had access to these species of plant or even that there were related species present in Egypt that produced cocaine in sufficient quantity to account for the amounts identified.
>The discovery of cocaine in Egyptian mummies is however not so easy to account for as no direct evidence unequivocally supports any particular contention. Although it is possible that experimental error or modern fake mummies could account for these results both of these explanations are highly unlikely. The authenticity of the mummies has been confirmed by independent experts, the methods employed by Balabanova are reliable and are also used by forensic departments around the world. In addition Balabanova's results were confirmed by GC/MS at four different laboratories.
>However, there is no reason to suppose that the cocaine identified by Balabanova in Egyptian mummies originated in South America because there are cocaine producing Erythroxylum species, which are indigenous to regions of Africa, India and Asia. The hypothesis that trade routes existed between Egypt and South America simply cannot be substantiated with any corroborative evidence and it would be incredibly unlikely that if links had existed that trade would have been restricted to plants that could be used as drugs. Furthermore, the use of such drugs by indigenous cultures is often associated with their religious beliefs and drugs are often revered as gifts from the gods. It would therefore be unusual for a culture to use particular drugs and to not make reference to their effects in their texts and legends.
>Although Thor Heyerdahl established it is theoretically possible that Egyptian reed boats could survive a single trans-Atlantic journey, it beggars belief that such an exhaustive journey would be repeated over thousands of years without mention in any surviving Egyptian texts. Additionally, Mesoamerican scholars have thoroughly refuted pre-Columbian African "influences" on New World cultures.
These guys are more polite than I would've been, but I think they make their point... BTW, John L. Sorenson was filling an LDS mission to Tahiti when Heyerdahl crashed his Kon Tiki raft into the reefs near there (they would've had to build something entirely new for a return voyage). Given what we know of the LDS missionary "mindset," it seems reasonable to suggest that Sorenson interepreted this one as a message from God about what should be his life's work...