Ancient America did not Influence Egypt ?

SCIENTISTS at the National Museum, Cairo c.1987 discovered tobacco seeds and a tobacco parasite in the abdominal cavity of Ramesu II (reigned Sept. 1279-July 1212 B.C.). We do not know if they inadvertently introduced these themselves, as scientists introduced modern alloys into the ink of a medieval map in analyzing it. By radioimmunoassay & gas chromatography/mass spectrometry German chemists 1992 detected cocaine & hashish in nine examined Eqyptian mummies ranging 1070 B.C.-395 A.D. and nicotine in eight of the nine--hair, soft tissue, bones. Hashish is unsurprising. Royalty at the capital Akhetaton where Akhetaton reigned 1350-34 B.C. had imported laudanum from Mycenae in flasks shaped like poppy pods. But the ancient Near East & Greece did not know cocaine, which could have come only from South America, or tobacco only from Orinoco Valley or Caribbean. (John Rolfe transplanted the Orinoco strain to VIrginia). Elaborate animal-effigy Hopewell pipes appear to have followed Oriental models. Pipe-smoking reached India, China and Japan in the 1st millennium A.D. Nicotina rustica reached the Ohio from Mexico in Adena, caluments in Hopewell. THERE IS NO WAY to get tobacco to Eqypt in the ime of Ramesu II---not a question of technology but of history. A secret royal Eqyptian garden would have to have begun in the the time of Ramesu II for tobacco, and the 21st Dynasty (a period of autonomous Delta-city enterprise but imperial weakness) for 14 2/3-centuries' continuous supply of coca as well--when transoceanic or even trans-Mediterranean trade was impossible centuries at a time. When Carthage blocked east-Mediterranean transit past Gibraltar as Greeks blocked west-east, Carthaginian caravans reached Siwa Oasis at the western frontier of Egypt but could not account for tobacco or coca anywhere in Egypt before the late Classical era and did not then. Eminent botanists since the 17th century have identified no coca or tobacco in ancient Egypt. (A Jan. 1997 article implied dereliction for not yet finding what never existed.) THE MUMMIES have however been exposed to constant cigarette smoke 1881-1992. Cocaine would have been secretive but fits that period, increasingly 1962-1992. Beginning with ancient tomb robbers, Ramisu II's munny had a long history of manhandling. It turned up July 1881 at Qurna near Thebes in a cache of 40 royal Mummies which had been moved many times since their braging that July to Cairo, where varied personnel unwrapped, photographed, measured, and studied. G. Elliot Smith & team published anatomical examinations 1912. Radiograms 1924 showed Ramesu II arteriosclerotic, x-rays 1965 (without removal from coffin) severe periodonitis & periapical abscess, but investigators went heedless of mummy exposure 1881-1992 to casual smokers--professionals who examined, laborers who moved to exhibitions and installed, museum attendants & visitors (Egyptian men have been partial to Camels.) Cocaine residue as on $20 bills became invisibly omnipresent worldwide by the time of the German testing 1992. Columbus reported native smoking in the Caribbean as somthing novel. Amerigo Vespucci commented on the novelty of continuous leaf-chewing by all men in the Gulf of Venezuela (1499), each of whom carried his gourd supply--the first European word of coca addiction. AMERICA HAD NO INFLUENCE on ancient Egypt. Undeniable ancient Egyptian influence on America was indirect and post Ramessid in not post-Hellenistic. The tobacco virus favors transplanting. [Received in 1997 - Ed.]