Did people smoke anything before tobacco was discovered?
BBC History Revealed meets the great explorers of the Tudor age who raced to the New World and brought back new and wondrous discoveries, including tobacco
For most Europeans in the early 17th century, the idea of smoking tobacco was a strange novelty. And what’s more, King James VI and I hated it. He called it “lothsome to the eye, hatefull to the Nose, harmefull to the braine, dangerous to the Lungs, and in the blacke stinking fume thereof, neerest resembling the horrible Stigian smoke of the pit that is bottomelesse”.
To King James, tobacco was a newly-discovered crop from the Americas, but the ancient Mayans and Aztecs of Mexico had long since smoked it in pipes or rolled up in cigars, puffing on it, as Winston Churchill did, over a good meal with friends.
But other types of smoking are even older. In the Bronze Age – as far back as 5,000 years ago – we know the inhalation of burned plants was used in magic, ritual and medicine in such places as India, Mesopotamia and Egypt, while some archaeologists think Stone Age shamans probably inhaled hallucinogenic opiates to commune with the gods.
It was likely that such drug-taking was often more religious than recreational, so not really the equivalent of a 20-a-day cigarette habit, but it’s believed that every human society in history has known smoking of some sort.
This article was taken from BBC History Revealed magazine
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