Origins: where the hookah comes from

1Pipes older than tobacco

Tobacco is a plant from the Americas. It reached Persia, reportedly with the Portuguese, in the early 16th century. That makes the hardest question of the whole story whether a pipe with water existed before tobacco.⁴

Ceramic pipe bowls were found in a cave near Lalibela in Ethiopia and radiocarbon dated to around 1320. A chemical analysis in 1975 found traces of cannabis in them.¹

A paper in the Journal of African History notes that people in southern Africa knew water pipes before they learned about ordinary elbow pipes from the Dutch.²

2The legend of Emperor Akbar's physician

The best-known story says the hookah was devised by Abul-Fath Gilani, a Persian physician at the court of the Mughal emperor Akbar, so that smoke could be "purified" through water. The Royal Collection in London, which holds his portrait, puts it more carefully: the invention is credited to him.⁶⁵

The dates are the problem. Encyclopaedia Iranica gives Gilani's death as 1588, while tobacco only reaches Akbar's court in 1604, when the envoy Asad Beg brings it from Bijapur together with a jewelled pipe.³⁵

3Persia and the qalyan

The poet Ahli Shirazi, who died in 1535, mentions the qalyan. Encyclopaedia Iranica nevertheless warns that there is no reliable evidence of the water pipe before the 1560s, so he may have meant something else.³

Shah Abbas I, who ruled from 1588 to 1629, disliked tobacco and banned it, but Persians kept smoking.⁴

4Words that keep the history

Narghile comes from Persian nārgīl, coconut, because the first water vessel was a coconut shell. Museums such as the Science Museum in London still hold coconut hookahs like these.⁷⁸

Hookah came through Hindustani huqqa from the Arabic word ḥuqqa, a vessel.⁹