Ancient Inventions

Chewing Gum

Chewing gum is today familiar the world over, but for most of its history its use was confined to Central America. When the conquistadores invaded the Aztec Empire in 1518, they encountered gum-chewing prostitutes hanging about on street corners looking for business. These women put yellow cream on their faces, colored their teeth red with cochineal, doused themselves liberally with perfume and walked the streets chewing gum.

Chewing gum had been discovered several hundred years earlier by the Maya of southern Mexico. The found that chicle, a thick milky liquid that oozes out of cuts made in the wild sapodilla tree and then hardens into gum, was extremely tasty. The importance of chicle to the Maya is clearly from their mythology: The culture hero Kukulkan ("the Feathered Serpent"), who conquered the Maya and changed their way of life to such an extent that he became worshiped as a god, was a great chewer of gum.

It is truly iron that Hernán Cortés, who led the Spanish invation of Mexico, was mistaken for Quetzalcoatle, the Aztec equivalent of Kukulkan. The god, so it was prophesied, would that year return in triumph, but instead Cortés destroyed Aztec society. Among the things that disappeared under the subsequent Spanish rule were the extensive trade routes that brought chicle from the forests to the capital. Chewing gum was preserved by the forest dwellers of Mexico until it was discovered in America by Thomas Adams, Jr., around 1870, and independently a few years later by William Wrigley, Jr. A further strange twist in the story is that the growing demand for chewing gum at the beginning of this century was met by the surviving Mayan Indians hunting out more sapodilla trees. In the course of their searches they discovered the ruins of most of the great Mayan cities of the past.

Read about other ancient inventions that shaped history and paved the way for modern inventions.