SC - Aquapatys = roasted garlic?

[Mark.S Harris]

Bear writes:

>The Ommayids moved the capitol of Islam to Damascus in mid-7th Century.
>After the Abbasids seized control in 750 CE, they moved their capitol to
>Baghdad, so that it was the capitol by the beginning to the 9th Century.
> The sole survivor of the Ommayids, creates the Caliphate of Cordoba by
>the end of the 8th century.  This means that by the time coffee is
>discovered, the seat of power is Baghdad and the Arabian peninsula is a
>backwater.  Wealth and power moved out of Arabia, and I can easily see
>Arabia coming to coffee late when the supply increased and its cost
>diminished.
>
>One of the major spice routes was up the Red Sea to Egypt then to other
>Mediterranean ports, then inland to land locked cities.  Mocha is a port
>on this route in southwest Yemen.  If I remember this correctly, Uker
>places the use of coffee in Egypt and Damascus  in the 11th Century,
>approximately conteporary with Avicenna.  An inference can be made, that
>the sea ports closest to Ethiopia were harvesting coffee and sending it
>up the trade route as a luxury good.  This trade route probably changed
>at the beginning of the Crusades.

Hattox dates the appearance of Coffee in Egypt etc. as later than the
appearance in Arabia. As best I recall, his sequence is
Abyssinia--Yemen--elsewhere in Arabia--Cairo--Istanbul.

>Turkish and Syrian utensiles from the 13th and 14th Centuries have been
>identified as coffee grinders and coffee makers.  Barring error in the
>identification of such utensiles, this suggests that coffee use was
>spreading.  It also suggests that coffee was moving from harvested wild
>coffee to cultivated coffee, increasing the available supply.

It sounds like a case of different scholars interpreting the evidence quite
differently. I'm not sure how one can distinguish coffee grinders from
other grinders--and suspect that the interpretation might depend a lot on
whether you thought coffee was being used there then. If it was merely an
exotic used for medicinal purposes, special utensils would also be exotic,
and rare, if they existed at all.

What is the date of your source? Short of comparing the detailed arguments,
a good first step would be to find out which author had access to the other.


David/Cariadoc
http://www.best.com/~ddfr/


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