Category Archives: Plants

Bunk is not Bunn: A Silly Claim about the Origin of Coffee

In a non-academic website called Atlas Obscura, there is an article with the entertaining title: “Before Drinking Coffee, People Washed Their Hands With It.” The article was written by Nawal Nasrallah, an Iraqi scholar who has published excellent work on classical Arabic recipe books. However, this particular article is anything but sound scholarship. Her main argument is that a “mysterious ingredient” very similar to coffee was known five centuries before the documented appearance of coffee, known in Arabic as “bunn“, as a drink. “However, instead of bunn, it was called bunk, and rather than drinking this ingredient, it was mostly used for cleaning and freshening the hands,” she argues.

Her argument is flawed from the start. She is aware that the 9th century Ibn Masawayh defined bunk as an aromatic coming to Iraq from Yemen. He clearly identifies it as coming from the trunk wood of a plant called Umm Ghaylan. However, Nasrallah says Ibn Masawayh was confused, without indicating why. The link to the wood of Umm Ghaylan is also made by al-B’iruni, who adds that it is a Persian term, and by other scholars. Umm Ghaylan is a well-known name for a species of acacia grown on the Arabian Peninsula. Nasrallah was unaware that the renowned botanical scholar Abu Hanifa al-Dinawari, a contemporary of Ibn Masawayh, described Umm Ghaylan as a synonym for talh, the well known term for several acacia species, including the major gum arabic variety. Al-Dinawari also noted the terms for the parts of the tree, specifically defining bunk as the bark (laha) of the acacia tree. This term for bark is still in use in Saudi Arabia. So unless these early scholars were making it up, which I doubt, the meaning of bunk is clearly established. The claim that a 16th century traveler named Leonhard Rauwolf said that the coffee beans he saw being roasted (he never saw the tree) were the same as the term bunk used centuries earlier is hardly reliable proof, especially since Rauwolf assumed that the term bunn for coffee was no different than the earlier term bunk. It was not unusual for writers at this time to make such claims without any real evidence.

Nasrallah writes that early medical scholars like al-Razi and Ibn Sina describe the qualities of bunk “to check the unpleasant odors of sweat and the smell of the quick-lime used in baths to remove hair,” but no mention is made of it as a drink. It is a serious stretch of logic to suggest, as the author does, that when Ibn Sina said that “consuming bunk had mind-altering properties, ‘which could affect the intellect,’” this was proof that this was the first time anyone had pointed out the impact of caffeine. It is not unusual for herbals to comment on the impact of certain substances on the mind, so such a general statement does not imply caffeine from coffee.

In addition to ignoring the clear identification of the plant, which is not mysterious at all, Nasrallah can cite no evidence from Yemen for such an identification. If the coffee plant was indeed coming from Yemen in the 9th century, why is there no reference in any Yemeni text to it? The geographical text of the 9th century al-Hamdani mentions numerous plants, but not any known term for coffee, nor the term bunk. Nor do the agricultural and medicinal treatises of the Rasulid era (13th-15th centuries) refer to coffee. The known documented sources suggest that coffee came from Ethiopia as a drink useful for Sufis; this was probably sometime in the latter half of the 15th century. By 1500 it had spread widely from Yemen and even prompted a legal meeting in 1511 to determine if it was licit for Muslims, as discussed in an article by the historian Jon Mandaville.

The speculation continues with the following claim: “As for coffee as a hand-cleaning product, it seems that the spread of good-quality colored and perfumed soaps eclipsed its popularity. As bunk itself faded away, so did the knowledge of what it was used for.” To suggest that by the 16th century no one used traditional plant products for aromatics or for hand washing is ridiculous, as such practices have continued into the last century. To assume that perfumed soaps were widely available among a population that was still mainly rural and poor is silly. To think that the drinking of coffee took off after several centuries of hand-washing is wishful thinking. There is no evidence at all that the term bunk, which is not related to the coffee term bunn, ever referred to anything other than a product of the acacia tree. To argue otherwise is pure bunk.

Seasonal Knowledge and Arab Gulf Almanacs

I am pleased to announce the publication of my new book: Seasonal Knowledge and the Almanac Tradition of the Arab Gulf. Details about the book, including a free online pdf of the table of contents can be obtained here: https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-030-95771-1

Below is the start of the Introduction…


Before the middle of the twentieth century, everyday life in the Arab Gulf was oriented to the sea and the land. Along the coast and for the island of Bahrain there had been a thriving pearl diving industry until the 1920s, while fishing remained one of the most important food production activities. Trade around and beyond the peninsula was still largely carried out by traditional dhows. Apart from Oman, which has a long tradition of irrigated and rainfed agriculture, most of the Gulf states faced a harsh, arid environment with limited water and only a few fertile oases. Herding of camels, sheep and goat was one of the main ways of surviving in the arid areas. It should not be surprising that prior to the oil wealth that created a lush economic transformation, the main topic of concern was the weather. Successful navigation, pearl diving and fishing required an intimate knowledge of seasonal change, as did pastoralism and farming.

Information on the seasonal sequence for the Arabian Peninsula stems back over a thousand years in collections of poetry, star lore and almanacs. One of the most important Arabic texts is the Kit?b al-Anw?’ (Book of Weather Stars) of Ibn Qutayba (d. 276/879), who is quoted by almanac compilers in the Gulf to this day. Ibn Qutayba describes in detail local knowledge about star risings and settings, weather seasons, pastoral activities, agriculture and a range of environmental conditions. Unfortunately, much of this indigenous heritage has disappeared, as the folklore of generations is now rarely passed on orally within families. In recent years older individuals in the Gulf have written memoirs, preserving their knowledge of life before the Petro Utopia. This gives us a glimpse of the past, a puzzle with many missing pieces, but not the full understanding that comes with actual contact.

Resurrecting the history of seasonal knowledge in the Arab Gulf and the entire Arabian Peninsula thus requires a textual archaeology. It is not enough to simply document what is written, as though one is showing off museum objects; this knowledge needs to be placed into a lived context to have a better understanding of how people went about their lives off the land and on the sea.

The past is like an ocean in which we can sample only a small part of the vast number of ideas and customs that have passed by over the years. To follow this metaphor, most of our sampling is along the shore, learning from individuals we can ask directly or engage with in ethnographic fieldwork. We can only cast our research net a short distance in trying to reach back into what really happened and was said in the past. A historian can sail as well, dropping an anchor where there seems to be something worth exploring. But there are depths in this ocean of knowledge that can never be reached. There are also reefs, barriers that make it difficult to have smooth sailing through our disciplined search for the past. To what extent can we know what local knowledge was shared? Then there is the question of what kind of fish we are trying to catch. Is everything that has been done and said, no matter how many generations back, something we should call “heritage”? If we read about it in a book, even one written centuries ago, does that automatically make it “heritage”? How can we vouch for the accuracy of what has been written down when we cannot see it for ourselves or question the interpreter? These are not insurmountable hurdles, but they do caution us to recognize the limitations of reconstructing the past.

My career as a scholar began in the highland mountains of Yemen, where I carried out ethnographic research on traditional water resource use and local agriculture in the late 1970s. Talking with farmers and observing their work for over a year allowed me to gain an understanding of local practices that no book could give me. While in the field I had access to a fourteenth century Yemeni agricultural text, which described many of the agricultural activities I was seeing for myself. My first book was an edition and translation of a thirteenth century Yemeni agricultural almanac. Over the years I have become what is best called a historical anthropologist, someone who looks at heritage as a product evolving from a past and not simply what one sees, without hindsight, functioning in the present. As an anthropologist I focus on the diversity of what people do and say, giving voice to them rather than plugging them into an outside theoretical package from the start. As a historian I have an opportunity in examining texts to see the strands of past knowledge that survive and still influence the present.

Aden in the mid-19th Century

James Vaughn, a physician stationed in British-controlled Aden in the mid-19th century, published an article in 1853 in the British Pharmaceutical Journal and Transactions (12:226-229,385-388), which is available online. After discussing several medicinal and local exports, such as incense, dragon’s blood, and local dye plants from Yemen and from Somalia, he admonishes his colleagues back in England to do serious study of the botanical wealth of Yemen. I attach his comments below as they are still relevant a century and a half later…

With Pierre Loti in Persia

My friend, the historian G. Rex Smith, has recently translated into English a marvelous travel diary by the French military official and traveller Pierre Loti (1850-1923). It is also available on Amazon as a Kindle Book. This day-by-day diary details Loti’s trip along the caravan trail of 1900 from the coast at Bushire to Shiraz and his ultimate goal of Isfahan in order to visit the area during the season of roses. One might expect such an account to be dry, but Loti comments on what he saw, including the people, along the way and one gets a first-hand sense of what it was like to travel a treacherous route that was at times over pure desert and at other times up or down seemingly impenetrable mountain heights. There is also a brief account of his stop at Muscat on the way to Persia. Smith, with the aid of his son, has done an admirable job in reflecting the flavor of the original French and includes 24 photographs taken by Loti. This is a book well worth reading, whether you are interested in Persia at the time or not.

The original French version is available as a pdf here. Archive.org has quite a few of his works.

For information about Loti online, check out https://biography.yourdictionary.com/pierre-loti and https://museeprotestant.org/en/notice/pierre-loti-1850-1923-2/.