Thought it was interesting...
Early information on the smoking of cigars originates from artifacts of
the Mayas of the Yucatan region of Mexico. Smoking of tobacco was
part of the religious rituals and political gatherings of the natives of the
Yucatan peninsula as shown in the artwork on a pottery vessel from the 10th
century (Figure 1) where a Maya smokes a string-tied cigar (Kingsborough,
1825). Five hundred years later, in 1492, when Christopher Columbus
landed in America, he was presented with dried leaves of tobacco by
the House of Arawaks. Columbus and his crew were thus the first Europeans
who became acquainted with tobacco smoking. Early in the 16th century,
Cortez confirmed that tobacco smoking was practiced by the Aztecs in
Mexico. In addition, tobacco was grown in Cuba, Haiti, several of the West
Indian Islands, and on the East coast of North America from Florida to
Virginia (Tso, 1990).
The Mayan verb sikar, meaning to “smoke,” became the Spanish noun
cigarro. The form of cigar Columbus had first encountered was a long, thick
bundle of twisted tobacco leaves wrapped in dried leaves of palm or maize.
In 1541, the Cuban cigar appeared in Spain. The first person known to have
grown tobacco in Europe was Jean Nicot, the French ambassador to Portugal.
He introduced tobacco and tobacco smoke at the royal court of Paris, where
Catherine de Medici and her son, King Charles IX, used it to treat migraine
headaches (Jeffers and Gordon, 1996). In 1570, the botanist Jean Liebault
was the first to grow tobacco in France; he gave the plant the scientific name
Herba Nicotiana, in honor of Jean Nicot. However, the name tobacco, which
is derived from the American Indians’ word tobacco, remained in common
use.
