The Origin

Some modern scholars have argued that the word ‘Tobacco’ is derived from the Arabic word ‘Tubbaq’ was that the practice of smoking tobacco which, they say, was known in the Near and Far East in ancient times, spread to West Africans through whom it found its way into America possibly a century before the so-called discovery. If this were so, it is odd that such early explorers as Vasco da Gama and Marco Polo should make no reference to the smoking of tobacco in the Orient before 1500, while later explorers, who followed the Dutch, English and Portuguese traders into Asia in the seventeenth century, make frequent reference to it. In fact, other historians have shown more convincingly that it was these seventeenth century traders into Asia in the seventeenth century, traders who spread the habit of smoking tobacco was in digenous to the countries they visited.