Subject: pharaoh drug use

From: [email-masked] (Yuri Kuchinsky)
Date: 7 Oct 1996 16:12:30 GMT

I've been reading recently a fairly curious work, SAILING TO
PARADISE, 1994, by Jim Bailey. He also wrote GOD-KINGS AND THE
TITANS, 1973, that received quite a mixed reception in its time.
Suffice it to say that he is an extreme hyper-diffusionist and
believes that extensive across-the-ocean voyages and trade were the
rule before and during the Bronze Age, and petered out from the
beginning of the Iron Age. He tries to show that extensive pure
copper deposits from the Great Lakes area were exported to Europe
across the Atlantic around 5,000 years ago. These views are rather
extreme, and I'm quite sceptical about this, myself.
 
Did someone else read this book, and what do you think?
 
Now, one snippet of information from this book is curious, in light
of the recent discussion of Egyptian mummies, and drug use at that
time (re: cocaine and tobacco traces found in mummies).
 
"A botanist, Galletly Wilson, working in the Karamajong area of
Uganda, argues that tobacco, a native American plant, was used
across Africa as snuff long before the arrival of the Portuguese.
And that the indigenous American sweet potato was also in use in
Uganda before the days of Columbus." (p. 95)
 
Can anyone provide any info about the work of this Mr. Wilson?
 
Thanks in advance,
 
Yuri.