Dr. Yates saw amongst the paintings in a tomb at Thebes the representation of a smoking party. (_Travels in Egypt_, ii. 412.)
There is an old tradition in the Greek Church, said to be recorded in the works of the early Fathers, of the Devil making Noah drunk with tobacco, &c. (Johnson's _Abyssinia_, vol. ii. p. 92.)
Nanah, the prophet of the Sikhs, was born 1419. Supposing him fifty when he published his _Ordinances_, it would bring us to 1469, or 23 years before the discovery of America by Columbus. In these _Ordinances_ he forbade the use of tobacco to the Sikhs; but found the habit so deeply rooted in the Hindû that he made an exception in their favour. (Masson's _Beloochistan_, vol. i. p. 42.) Should this be true, the Hindû must have been in the habit of smoking long before the discovery of America, to have acquired so inveterate a predilection for it.
If the prophecy attributed to Mahomet be not a fabrication of after times, it is strongly corroborative, and goes to show that he was himself acquainted with the practice of smoking, viz.
"To the latter day there shall be men who will bear the name of Moslem, but will not be really such, and they shall smoke a certain weed which shall be called tobacco."--See Sale's _Koran_, ed. 8vo. p. 169.
Query. Is tobacco the word in the original? If so, it is a stumbling-block.
Lieut. Burns, in his _Travels_, has the following curious statement:
"The city of Alore was the capital of a great empire extending from Cachemere to the sea. This was conquered by the Mahomedans in the seventh century, and in the decisive battle they are reported to have brought fire, &c., in their pipes to frighten the elephants."
Lieut. Burns conjectures that they must have smoked bang, &c., tobacco being then unknown.
Buchanan's account of the cultivation and preparation of tobacco in Mysore, carries with it a conviction that these elaborate processes were never communicated to them by Europeans, nor brought in any way from America, where they have never been practised. They strike one as peculiarly ancient and quite indigenous.
The rapid dissemination of tobacco, as also of forms and ceremonies connected with its use; its already very extensive cultivation in the remotest parts of the continent and islands of Asia, within a century of its introduction into Europe, amounts to the miraculous; and particularly when we see new habits of life, and novelties in their ceremonies of state, at once adopted and become familiar, to such otherwise unchangeable people as the orientals are known to be. Extraordinary also is the fact that the forms and ceremonies adopted should so precisely coincide (in most respects) with those in use among the American Indians, and should not be found in any of the intermediate countries through which we must suppose them to have passed. Who taught them the presentation of the pipe to guests, a form so strictly observed by the Red Men of America, &c.? But the "narghile," the "kaleoon," the "hookah," the "hubble-bubble," whence came they? They are indigenous.