Coffee

Herodotus IV.23 says that, at the far confines of the Scythian plains and near the ascent of high mountains, dwell a bald-headed people who wear Scythian garb, but speak their own language; they dwell under trees--draping these trees with a white felt cover for shelter in winter, but not in summer. As for the trees, they are not higher than fig-trees, and the people live on their fruit; the name of the tree is pontikon. The fruit of the pontikon is like a bean, but with an inner kernel. When the fruit is ripe, the people strain it through a cloth; they lick or drink, mixed with milk, the black juice which trickles through. Also they make lozenges of the thick residue, and eat them. No one does a thing to these people: they are regarded as holy, bear no arms, decide the disputes which their neighbors bring before them, and the asylum they give to fugitives is never violated. Their name is Argimpaioi.

First: Herodotus' word 'Argimpaioi' cannot be interpreted as 'bald-headed'. Argimpaioi is the same name as Arimaspoi in the Issedonian story of Aristeas, which Herodotus translates as 'one-eyed'. Ernst Herzfeld (the linguist and archeologist) writes: "Both are adjectives derived from the name of the Scythian Ardvisura Argimpasa," ie Ardvi Lady Protector-of-all-Animals, a goddess well-known in ancient Persia and also worshiped north of the Black Sea. That is, both the Bald-heads and the One-eyes are the same thing, northern worshipers of Ardvi--but Herodotus did not know this, for he was a Greek and not a Persian.

Ctesias mentions the pontikon nut in Indica frag. 19, while speaking of the siptachora-tree: "The tree is said to bear fruits in clusters, like the vine, and yet have berries like the pontika nuts." The word used for nuts, karya, means nuts in general (according to Athenaeus II.53.b) "hard-shelled nuts, also almonds in Attica"; Theophrast uses the word karya for cherry-stones. Herzfeld writes: "That it was the fruit of the siptachora-tree that resembled the pontika nuts is hard to believe, because manna is no fruit, but the resin of various trees; siruxist, known in Europe under the name "Turkish Delight", is called after its shape, palathe of Herodotus, and since Ctesias, as physician, was interested in these products, he probably called the form of the products, not the fruits similar."

(Aside: the word siruxist derives from sir 'milk, sweet' xist 'brick'; in Khurasan extracted from olive trees; used in modern India rather than the older word tabasir < Sanskrit tvaksira 'bark-milk, bark-sugar'. The usual Persian word is tarangubin, from angubin 'honey', Kurdish gaz.)

Athenaeus II.53.b quotes Nicandrus of Colophon as saying the pontic nuts are called by some lopima, while the dictionaries of Hermionax and Timarchides say 'Zeus' acorn' is a second name. Besides Ctesias and Nicandrus, only the physician Galen mentions it--VI.335 in passing: "a boil, sometimes as large as a pontikon nut, sometimes twice or thrice that size." The phrasing suggests that other physicians would know the size of a pontikon nut. Elsewhere, in Arab pharmacology, the word is generally used as a weight.

Now, Herodotus and Ctesias use the name for something unknown to the Greeks; hence pontic nut cannot mean 'nut from the Pontus area' ie the Black Sea. Nor is Tomaschek's etymology right: "Scythian *pantika, 'belonging to the road', because carried as 'viaticum.'" However the fruit was still probably named after the country where it grew.

In the Fayyum, in papyri listing the private accounts of individuals, pontikon nuts are mentioned twice. One papyri merely says a half choinos of pontika costs 2 oboli; the other, that one choinos of pontika costs one drachm. Hence, in the Fayyum the pontika nut was known, available (and cheap).

Elias of Nisibis mentions a Syriac word 'puntaqa' as a pharmaceutic term; linguists derive this as a loanword from Greek 'pontika' and say that Arabic 'bunduq', 'funduq' derives from it. Now funduq means a small nut, an acorn, a bean, a pill--the fruit of a tree, round as a small nut, with an inner kernel and similar to the pistachio. It is usually translated hazel-nut, and the word pistachio (Arabic fustuq < Iranian *pistaka, New Persian pistah) is related to it. Anyway, Ctesias is probably writing 'pontikon' for New Persian *puntaka, without relation to the Greek pontos; *puntaka or *puntika is a normal Old Persian adjective of origin and means 'from Punt, Puntic.' And the south Persian pronunciation of *puntaka would be *punnah.

So Herodotus, speaking of a pharmaceutical item from somewhere in the east, known to the Persians but unknown personally to him, has mistaken the origin and thinks this nut from Punt is a nut from the far north. He is quoting Aristeas, and speaking of fabulous countries in distant climes. What he is describing is a place where men live under trees, with no shelter save a felt canopy or tent in the winter season, and on the slope of the mountains is a tree no higher than a fig, yielding a fruit in the shape of a bean, with a hard shell and inner kernel.

He is describing the coffee tree of the South Arabian and Abyssinian mountains, which were the old land of Punt. The Arabic word for tree and fruit is bunn, which is assumed to derive from Abyssinian bun. But (Herzfeld concludes) bunn is the Arabic pronunciation of south Persian *punn < Middle Persian *pund Old Persian punt, the pontikon of Herodotus.

The pontikon is the coffee bean.

. . . Now, as for the origin of the word 'coffee'. It comes from Arabic qahwah, originally a poetic word for a white wine. However the evidence suggests that about 1400 AD, in South Arabia, people started brewing their pontika nuts into actual coffee, a hot beverage; previously, they consumed it as a foodstuff. In Abyssinia, people still eat powdered coffee mixed with milk; in Arabia, they still eat the beans, and in Persia they eat the dry powder; like the preparation described by Herodotus, these are prehistoric methods. The coffee bean itself was known as far back as 1400 BC; coffee beans were found among the remains of grains in the Hurrian strata of Nuzi, dating to about that period.

However in 1400 AD, the Sufis in South Arabia started to drink copious quantities of coffee before their ecstatic exercises, and before each draught they would shout, "Ya qawi! O strong one!" which was one of the 999 epithets of Allah, chosen because the numerical value of its letters is 116, the same as that of qahwah. (Also, there is a Kaffa region in Abyssinia.) Because of this, the word qahwah became coopted as the word for the beverage 'coffee'.

Source:

Herzfeld, Ernst, Zoroaster and His World, 1947. All this is his research and his argument, not mine; I reproduce it without permission and without hope of gain, merely for the enjoyment of the thing.

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