The earliest forms of cigarettes have been attested in Central  America around the 9th century in the form of reeds and smoking tubes.  The Maya, and later the Aztecs,  smoked tobacco and various psychoactive drugs in religious rituals and  frequently depicted priests and deities smoking on pottery and temple  engravings. The cigarette, and the cigar, were the most common method  of smoking in the Caribbean, Mexico and Central and South America until  recent times.

The South and Central American cigarette used various plant  wrappers; when it was brought back to Spain, maize wrappers were  introduced, and by the seventeenth century, fine paper. The resulting  product was called papelate and is documented Goya's paintings La Cometa, La Merienda en el Manzanares, and El juego de la pelota a pala (18th century).

By 1830, the cigarette had crossed into France, where it received the name cigarette; and in 1845, the French state tobacco monopoly began manufacturing them.

In the George Bizet opera Carmen, which was set in Spain in the 1830s, the title character Carmen was at first a worker in a cigarette factory.

In the English-speaking world, the use of tobacco in cigarette form became increasingly popular during and after the Crimean War, when British soldiers began emulating their Ottoman Turkish and Russian comrades. This was helped by the development of tobaccos that are suitable for cigarette use, and by the development of the Egyptian cigarette export industry.

During World War I and World War II, cigarettes were rationed to soldiers. During the second half of the 20th century, the adverse health effects of cigarettes started to become widely known and text-only  health warnings became commonplace on cigarette packets. The United  States has not yet implemented graphical cigarette warning labels,  which are considered a more effective method to communicate to the  public the dangers of cigarette smoking. Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, however, have both textual warnings  and graphic visual images displaying, among other things, the damaging  effects tobacco use has on the human body.

The cigarette has evolved much since its conception; for example,  the thin bands that travel transverse to the "axis of smoking" (thus  forming circles along the length of the cigarette) are alternate  sections of thin and thick paper to facilitate effective burning when  being drawn, and retard burning when at rest. Synthetic particulate  filters remove some of the tar before it reaches the smoker.