Cultural practices (was: Announcing Jython, the sucessor to JPython (fwd))

[Cameron Laird]

In article <mailman.972063532.569.python-list at python.org>,
Lulu of the Lotus-Eaters  <mertz at gnosis.cx> wrote:
>"Alex Martelli" <aleaxit at yahoo.com>
>|And "Nike" was a term for "victory" (in Greek) from since
>|well before anybody raised coffee in the island of Java.
>|So why would it be 'more protectable' as a trademark...?
>
>'Nike' we can probably date from around 8th Century B.C., I imagine (I
>am not a Greek philologist, however).  When did coffee cultivation
>begin? When did it begin on Java?
>
>Just curious.
>
>
>

Coffee has probably been *chewed* in East Africa in
the vicinity of Ethiopia (where Kaffa is the old town
which apparently lent its name to the beveage) for
at least a hundred thousand years, and perhaps much
longer.  Its cultivation is, I understand, still 
surprisingly controversial, with claims more-or-less
well attested from around 1000 BC to 1000 AD for vari-
ous sites around the African horn and southern Arabia.
It was undeniably an element of Arabian culture by the
beginning of the most recent millenium.

Various governments restricted the escape of coffee
cultivation from their control, and it might not have
arrived in India successfully until the mid-seventeenth
century.  The Dutch smuggled it to Java in 1696, and
expanded its production explosively.
-- 

Cameron Laird <claird at NeoSoft.com>
Business:  http://www.Phaseit.net
Personal:  http://starbase.neosoft.com/~claird/home.html