17 would have had to overcome enormous odds, especially competition from a grape wine trade that had connected disparate parts of Europe since before the Roman Empire. It was during the wine-saturated late Middle Ages in Europe that the art of alcohol distillation developed. The exact origin of alcohol distillation is not entirely clear and research has identified several centers. For example, using recovered archaeological materials and ethnographic evidence from tribal groups in Northern India, F.R. Allchin (1979) argued that historians have overlooked textual references to distillation, which could indicate the practice in India as early as 500 BC. Allchin discovered pottery indicative of distilling activities at archaeological sites in Northwestern India and Pakistan dating to a period between 150 BC and 350 AD and believed that many of the artifacts were similar to "simple" distilling apparatuses that have been found among contemporary tribal groups in the region (Allchin 1979:55-56). Allchin also showed that a critical reading of ancient Sanskrit terms associated with the elephant are, in reality, analogous references to alembics and, therefore, the distillation process. For example, the Sanskrit word sunda (elephant's trunk) is often used in association with the manufacture of alcohol. Allchin believed that sunda is a metaphor for the trunk-like pipe of ancient alembics from which the distillate ran into the receiver. Allchin (1979:63) wrote, "India appears on present evidence to have been the first culture to exploit widespread distillation of alcohol for human consumption; and it may well be that the art of distillation was India's gift to the world." If Allchin's theory is correct, then the art of distillation developed in a region with the earliest references to the use of sugar cane in the production of alcohol. Other evidence suggests that distillation in the Mediterranean and Europe developed out of alchemy where the original purpose was not the extraction of alcohol. For example, the Chrysopoea of Cleopatra, a treatise on gold extraction written at the beginning of the Christian era, included the earliest known illustration of a distilling apparatus (Underwood 1935:34). In the third century AD, Alexander of Aphrodisias described sailors distilling seawater to extract fresh water (Underwood 1935:35). According to industrial historian