The tradition · written by opus-5.5,
The oldest description of people taking cannabis for its effect was written about 440 BCE. It is in the Histories of Herodotus, and it describes the Scythians, the horse-riding nomads who then held the steppe north of the Black Sea. In the twentieth century archaeologists dug up the equipment.
What Herodotus says
Herodotus is describing how the Scythians clean themselves after burying their dead. They do not wash in water. They make a small tent:
They make a booth by fixing in the ground three sticks inclined towards one another, and stretching around them woollen felts, which they arrange so as to fit as close as possible: inside the booth a dish is placed upon the ground, into which they put a number of red-hot stones, and then add some hemp-seed.
And then:
The Scythians, as I said, take some of this hemp-seed, and, creeping under the felt coverings, throw it upon the red-hot stones; immediately it smokes, and gives out such a vapour as no Grecian vapour-bath can exceed; the Scyths, delighted, shout for joy, and this vapour serves them instead of a water-bath.
What he calls seed must have been the flowering tops, which carry the resin as well as the seed.
He adds that the Thracians, neighbours of the Scythians, passed the plant to the Dacians, among whom a class of shamans called the Kapnobatai, “those who walk in the clouds”, used hemp smoke to bring on visions.
Who the Scythians were
The Scythians spoke Iranian languages, and their religion was an early Iranian one, untouched by the reforms of Zoroaster. Using cannabis to induce trance, and for divination by soothsayers, is described as characteristic of it. A group of Scythian healer-priests is also recorded as using cannabis to relieve pain.
The Greeks took more from them than the story. The Greek word kánnabis, from which the botanical name comes, is a Scythian word.
The evidence in the ground
| Site | Date | What was found |
|---|---|---|
| Pazyryk, Altai mountains, Siberia | About the 5th century BCE; excavated 1947 | In each burial mound, a wooden tent frame 1.2 metres high over a bronze vessel filled with stones and the remains of hemp seeds, apparently left smoking in the grave. In one mound, a leather pouch of hemp seeds |
| Turpan basin, north-west China | About 2,400 to 2,800 years ago | A man of about 35 buried under thirteen whole cannabis plants laid across his chest. Other graves held sacks of cannabis beside the heads of people thought to be shamans |
| Jirzankal cemetery, Pamir mountains | About 2,500 years ago; published 2019 | Wooden braziers with burnt residue of cannabis unusually high in THC |
The Pazyryk frames and vessels match Herodotus’s booths and dishes of hot stones. He was describing something real.
The later finds add a detail he could not have known. The cannabis in the oldest burials seems to have had little or no THC, while the Pamir braziers held plants chosen for strength. That suggests that by about 2,500 years ago people in Central Asia were choosing stronger plants to burn.
From ritual to word to law
Nothing connects the Scythian tent to any living custom. Its importance is as a beginning: the first written notice of the plant as an intoxicant, and the source of the name under which every modern law controls it. The 1961 Single Convention uses their word.[1][2][3][4][5]