SC - Indian Grain-found in the Medici Archives

[Decker, Terry D.]

> "The generally accepted view has been that Columbus discovered maize in
> the
> New World in 1492 and brought it back to Spain, whence it was taken with
> great rapidity to other parts of Europe, to Africa, and through the Middle
> East and India to China. Proponents of this view acknowledge as a
> difficulty
> that the earliest recorded references to maize in Europe give it names
> such
> as "gran turco", but suggest that this was mere confusion, of the same
> sort
> which resulted in an American bird receiving the name "turkey"."
> 
The guinea fowl (Numida meleagris)  was also known as "turkey".  It may be
that relating an unknown commodity to the splendor and decadence of the
Ottoman Empire was a marketing ploy.  Again, it might just be confusion
about the origin of the product.  One of the common names for Numida
meleagris in the US is Hungarian guinea fowl, an odd name for a bird which
originates in Africa.

For a little more confusion, there are two turkeys in the New World.
Meleagris gallopavo is the North American turkey beloved by Ben Franklin.
Agriocharis ocellata is the turkey of Mexico and Central America which was
the bird imported into Europe in the 16th Century.  According to one of my
sources, most of our domesticated turkeys are  varieties of A. ocellata.

> "An alternative schol of thought holds that maize must have arrived in
> Asia,
> Africa and Europe before 1492. The early names which it had in these three
> continents are cited as evidence that the plant had a Middle Eastern
> (Balkan, Turkish, Arabic) centre of distribution in the Old World, and the
> already strong argument from nomenclature is fortified by accounts of
> early
> travellers in Africa and elsewhere (all this being set out, with a
> multitude
> of references, by Jeffreys, 1975) and by pointing to the inherent
> improbability that a plant which first reached Spain in 1492 could have
> been
> undir cultivation in the E. Indies in 1496 and in China by 1516. (Also,
> there seems to be archaeological evidence of its having reached Papua New
> Guinea (via Polynesia) 1,000 years ago. Once there, it could have
> travelled
> westwards through SE Asia and S. Asia, and then have been carried by Arabs
> to Africa.)"
> 
> "The controversy, for those who admit there is one, is alluring, not least
> because acceptance of the second hypothesis would imply that other New
> World
> plants could have reached the Old World in pre-Columbian times."
> 
> Jeffreys refers to M. D. W. Jeffreys: "Pre-Columbian Maize in the Old
> World", in Margaret L. Arnott (ed.): Gastronomy.
> 
> Nanna
> 
There is a type of maize indigenious to China and probably used as food at
one time.  It is distantly related to New World maize.  IIRC, the botanist
who described the plant was trying to determine the botanical history of
maize in China and came to the conclusion that there is no botanical
evidence for Pre-Columbian New World maize in China.

While corn could have travelled westward and been brought to Africa by the
Arabs, I have yet to see any documentation similar to that for sugar cane or
bananas.

Bear
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