_Coffee in the Near East in the early centuries--Stories of its origin--Discovery by physicians and adoption by the Church--Its spread through Arabia, Persia and Turkey--Persecutions and intolerances--Early coffee manners and customs_ The coffee drink had its rise in the classical period of Arabian medicine, which dates from Rhazes (Abu Bakr Muhammad ibn Zakariya El Razi) who followed the doctrines of Galen and sat at the feet of Hippocrates. Rhazes (850-922) was the first to treat medicine in an encyclopedic manner, and, according to some authorities, the first writer to mention coffee. He assumed the poetical name of Razi because he was a native of the city of Raj in Persian Irak. He was a great philosopher and astronomer, and at one time was superintendent of the hospital at Bagdad. He wrote many learned books on medicine and surgery, but his principal work is _Al-Haiwi_, or _The Continent_, a collection of everything relating to the cure of disease from Galen to his own time. Philippe Sylvestre Dufour (1622-87)[22], a French coffee merchant, philosopher, and writer, in an accurate and finished treatise on coffee, tells us (see the early edition of the work translated from the Latin) that the first writer to mention the properties of the coffee bean under the name of _bunchum_ was this same Rhazes, "in the ninth century after the birth of our Saviour"; from which (if true) it would appear that coffee has been known for upwards of 1000 years. Robinson[23], however, is of the opinion that _bunchum_ meant something else and had nothing to do with coffee. Dufour, himself, in a later edition of his _Traitez Nouveaux et Curieux du Cafe_ (the Hague, 1693) is inclined to admit that _bunchum_ may have been a root and not coffee, after all; however, he is careful to add that there is no doubt that the Arabs knew coffee as far back as the year 800. Other, more modern authorities, place it as early as the sixth century. _Wiji Kawih_ is mentioned in a Kavi (Javan) inscription A.D. 856; and it is thought that the "bean broth" in David Tapperi's list of Javanese beverages (1667-82) may have been coffee[24]. While the true origin of coffee drinking may be forever hidden among the mysteries of the purple East, shrouded as it is in legend and fable, scholars have marshaled sufficient facts to prove that the beverage was known in Ethiopia "from time immemorial," and there is much to add verisimilitude to Dufour's narrative. This first coffee merchant-prince, skilled in languages and polite learning, considered that his character as a merchant was not inconsistent with that of an author; and he even went so far as to say there were some things (for instance, coffee) on which a merchant could be better informed than a philosopher.