Cannabis on the Silk Road

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History

History of cannabis·Historical sources

Ancient Origins & Early Use

Domestication·Yanghai Tombs·Jirzankal Cemetery·Pazyryk burials·Scythian cannabis use·Centre of origin·Nikolai Vavilov

Historical Texts & Documentation

Atharvaveda·Sushruta Samhita·Shennong Bencaojing·Ibn al-Baytar·Avicenna·Herbarium Amboinense (1690)·Indian Hemp Drugs Commission·Carl Linnaeus·Historical sources

Trade Routes & Dispersal

Cannabis on the Silk Road·Spread of cannabis to South Asia·Spread of cannabis to Southeast Asia·Spread of cannabis to Africa·Spread of cannabis to the Americas·Hippie Trail·Yarkand charas trade

Traditional Cultivation History

History of cannabis cultivation·Hemp

History by Country

Asia: Philippines·China·Kazakhstan·Kyrgyzstan

Africa: Angola·Kenya·Nigeria·South Africa

Americas: Brazil·Chile·Mexico

Oceania: Australia·Papua New Guinea

Preparations & Their Names

Bhang·Charas·Ganja·Hashish·Cannabis product names

Cannabis in Medicine History

Cannabis in Western medicine·Cannabis in traditional Chinese medicine·Cannabis in Ayurveda·Cannabis in Persian medicine·Cannabis tinctures

Prohibition & Drug War History

Cannabis prohibition·War on drugs·Harry J. Anslinger·Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs·Marihuana Tax Act of 1937·International Narcotics Control Board·Eradication campaigns

Cannabis & Colonialism

Cannabis in colonial India·Cannabis in colonial Burma·Cannabis in the Spanish Empire·Bengal Presidency cannabis trade·Colonial hemp trade

Cultural & Social History

Cannabis legalisation movement·Anti-cannabis propaganda·Cannabis in Hinduism·Cannabis in Sufism·Rastafari·Medical cannabis

Historical Varieties & Genetics

Southern hemp·Genetic erosion·Ex situ conservation·Legendary landraces·Local cannabis names

Portal·Category

Graves of the first millennium BCE on the overland routes between China and western Asia, later called the Silk Road, held cannabis plants, burnt cannabis and hemp seed. They lie in the Turpan basin of Xinjiang, in the Pamirs and in the Altai. A tomb of the 7th century CE at Astana, near Turpan, held a figurine of a horse whose tail was made of hemp fibre. In the 19th century caravans carried charas, cannabis resin, from the oases of Southern Xinjiang over the Karakoram to India.

Whether the plant itself travelled these routes, and in which direction, is argued from such finds, from plant genomes and from the words for hemp. The authors disagree. A genome study of 2021 placed the first domestication of cannabis in East Asia and wrote that about 4,000 years ago fibre cannabis "was spreading westward into Europe and the Middle East".^: 3 Studies of fossil pollen by John McPartland and colleagues hold the plant to be native to Europe. The team that published a cannabis shroud from the Jiayi Cemetery near Turpan wrote in 2016 that "no one knows the origin of the Cannabis found in these and other early Central Eurasian sites", which might have been gathered nearby or brought from elsewhere, wild or cultivated.

Before the first millennium BCE

See also: Domestication

Tengwen Long and colleagues reviewed the finds of cannabis fibre, pollen and fruits across Eurasia in 2017. They proposed that people began to use the plant in Europe and in East Asia at about the same time. They suggested that a rise in finds of cannabis fruits in East Asia between about 5,000 and 4,000 calibrated years before present might be linked with an exchange and migration network through the steppe. In their reading that network was "influenced by the more intensive exploitation of cannabis achenes popular in Eastern Europe pastoralist communities". They called for better-dated data "especially from South Russia and Central Asia". In the genome study of Guangpeng Ren and colleagues, a few early domesticated lines expanded to form the hemp and drug types about 4,000 years before present. They set this beside the appearance of fibre artefacts in East Asia and the westward spread of fibre cannabis that Bronze Age finds show in their reading.^: 3

Meng Ren and colleagues, publishing the finds from the Pamirs in 2019, wrote that historians and archaeologists have linked the Central Asian peoples of the first millennium BCE with cannabis "likely due in large part" to a single passage of Herodotus. Several scholars, they wrote, had suggested that the crop spread with "the mythical 'Scythian' warrior nomads". Citing Long and colleagues among others, they added that the argument for Central Asian origins had lately been revived and carried back to the "poorly defined" Yamnaya culture group. They judged it "highly unlikely" that the cannabis growing on the steppe before the first millennium BCE was cultivated. Wild cannabis grows across Central Eurasia from western China to eastern Europe, they noted, so claims that steppe peoples of the third and second millennia BCE spread the plant as a "camp follower" "need to be clarified". McPartland and William Hegman, reviewing the European finds in 2018, concluded that the Scythians, an Iron Age steppe people, "likely introduced hemp cultivation to Celtic, Slavic and Finno-Ugric cultures".

In southern Turkmenistan, Viktor Sarianidi reported remains of ephedra, cannabis and poppy in vessels from the buildings he read as temples at Gonur Depe and Togolok-21, sites of the Bactria–Margiana Archaeological Complex. C. C. Bakels examined material from the Gonur and Togolok-21 vessels and identified the impressions in it as most likely broomcorn millet. She found them too small for hemp seed and of the wrong shape. Meng Ren and colleagues regard the original identifications of cannabis at Gonur as erroneous.

South of the mountains, Chris Stevens and colleagues counted hemp among the crops of Chinese origin that appear at sites in northern India and Pakistan from the early second millennium BCE. Their roughly simultaneous arrival, they wrote, had led to hypotheses that they spread through exchange and early trade networks "through Central Asia". They called the origin of hemp "uncertain". Rita Dal Martello and colleagues wrote that cultivated cannabis "could have possibly derived from Central Asia" into India by that corridor. On linguistic grounds they proposed that Central Asia in the Middle to Late Bronze Age "would have served as a hub for the diffusion of cannabis varieties, together with their names".

Burials of the first millennium BCE

Turpan basin

In tomb M90 of the Yanghai Tombs, a man of about 45 was buried with 789 grams of cannabis in a leather basket and a wooden bowl. Hong-En Jiang and colleagues dated the plant material by radiocarbon to 2500 years before present. Ethan Russo and colleagues reported in 2008 that the date had been corrected to a calibrated 2700 years before present. They read the size, colour and attachment scar of the fruits as signs of a cultivated plant. The man's bones were disarticulated. They suggested that he had died in the highlands of the Tian Shan and been brought to Yanghai for burial.

At Jiayi, in the same basin and the same culture, 13 nearly whole female plants had been laid over the body of a man in tomb M231. Jiang and colleagues took the plants to have been laid there fresh, since their leaves were pressed flat, and so most likely grown nearby. The Yanghai cannabis, of which only the flowering heads survived, "may well have been an item of trade from a neighboring region", in their view. A later study of the plant remains of Jiayi dated a cannabis fruit from tomb M156 by radiocarbon to 2844–2737 calibrated years before present and a stem from M231 to 2735–2490. Its authors found twigs, leaves, flowering heads and fruits of cannabis in pottery jars and concluded that the people of Jiayi gathered the plant locally and gave it a first processing. They noted that no use of cannabis fibre had yet been reported from the prehistory of Xinjiang.^{: 1401, 1405–1406}

Pamirs

At the Jirzankal Cemetery, at about 3,000 metres in the eastern Pamirs, wooden braziers from tombs of about 2,500 years ago carried residues of burnt cannabis. Meng Ren and colleagues read the residues as coming from plants with more THC than wild cannabis usually produces. They called the Pamir plateau "an essential channel of cultural communication and trade" between ancient China, Central Asia and south-west Asia. The cemetery held glass beads and angular harps of western Asian type with silk from eastern China. Strontium isotopes showed that 10 of 34 people sampled had grown up elsewhere. They placed this exchange before the Han state set up taxes and military posts on the northern routes in the last century BCE.

Only one of the ten tombs of people from elsewhere held a brazier, which suggested to the authors that burning cannabis was a local burial practice. For the strength of the plants they left three explanations open. People may have selected plants for it. The stresses of high altitude may have raised THC in local plants. Or carrying cannabis "across the mountain barriers" may have crossed populations that had grown apart, giving stronger offspring.

Altai

In barrow 2 of the Pazyryk burials, built about 300 BCE, Sergei Rudenko found two copper vessels holding fire-cracked stones and charred hemp seed. He compared them with the rite Herodotus described among the Scythians. Ren and colleagues, who place Herodotus's account in the Caspian steppe, note that the Pazyryk tombs lie over 3,000 kilometres to its north-east. They held that the burning at Pazyryk and at Jirzankal took place during the burial and may belong to a different rite from the cleansing after a burial that Herodotus described. Jiang and colleagues grouped the Altai seed with the Turpan finds and concluded that ritual or medicinal use of cannabis "was a widespread custom among Central Eurasian peoples" in the first millennium BCE.

Fibre and paper

Agnieszka Helman-Ważny examined the fibres of 130 Chinese manuscripts from Dunhuang and Turpan under the microscope. Those whose colophons give a date were copied between the 5th and 10th centuries CE. Most, 88 of them, were written on rag paper made from recycled cloth: 84 mainly of ramie with some hemp, and four of hemp alone. The oldest dated manuscript, of 406, was of ramie and hemp. She took the large share of rag paper as support for the view that it was made locally from cloth available at Dunhuang and Turpan, while allowing that it could have been made elsewhere, since "rags and old cloths and robes were accessible almost everywhere". Writing with Sam van Schaik on the Tibetan manuscripts from Dunhuang, also mostly on rag paper of ramie and hemp, she cautioned that the cloth for such paper "could be obtained in areas quite distant from the place of production".

The Astana Cemetery near Turpan was used from the 3rd to the 9th century CE. Its grain offerings included hemp fruits, in a tomb of the mid-7th century, with millet, wheat, barley and rice. Tao Chen and colleagues read the crops of the cemetery as a sign that farming in the basin widened after Han Chinese settlers arrived; before then its herders had grown few cereals. The same team identified the tail of a clay horse, from a tomb with an epitaph of 665, as hemp fibre by infrared spectroscopy, a drying test and microscopy. In their account wool had been the main textile fibre of the region in earlier centuries; after the Han period hemp and silk took its place, silk for the wealthy and hemp for others. Citing earlier studies, they report large amounts of hemp cloth, paper and shoes from the Astana tombs, much of it made locally.

Hemp and hashish in the Islamic lands

The historian of pharmacy Sami Hamarneh wrote that hemp "seems to have been introduced into Islamic countries in the ninth century from two sources": from India through Persia, and through acquaintance with Greek medical writing.^: 229 The Arabist Indalecio Lozano dates the first Arabic reports of its use for ritual or pleasure to the 13th century. They come from the eastern Islamic lands, where in his account certain groups of Sufis did most to spread it.^: 87

The Egyptian historian al-Maqrizi (died 1442) recorded two accounts of where the drug came from. In the first, told in 1259–60 by a monk of Haydar's order, Shaykh Haydar found the plant near his mountain home by Nishapur in Khurasan. After his death the drug reached Iraq in 1230–31 and passed from there to Syria, Egypt and Rum.^: 120–123 In the second, a Qalandari shaykh denied that Haydar had used it and traced it to a shaykh in India, from where it passed to Yemen and Fars before reaching Iraq, Rum, Egypt and Syria.^: 126 Lozano notes that many scholars have taken the legend of Haydar's discovery as historical fact.^: 89

Caravan trade in charas

Main article: Yarkand charas trade

In 1894 the Indian Hemp Drugs Commission called charas "practically a foreign article" in India. The bulk came "from Yarkand through the Himalayan passes", and much less from other parts of Central Asia by the routes on the Afghan frontier. The British Joint Commissioner in Ladakh wrote in 1881 that the charas of the Ladakh road was made at Yarkand, Yengi Hissar, Kashgar and Khotan. It was held inferior to the charas of Bukhara, which came through Kabul to Peshawar and through Kandahar to Shikarpur in Sind. Resin also went west from Xinjiang. James Aitchison wrote in 1874 that the finest, made at Karmak near Yengi Hissar, all went to Bukhara and Kokand and that "none of the really good quality ever comes to Leh".^: 52

Henry Cayley, the British officer at Leh in 1867, expected the trade between India and Eastern Turkestan to stay "chiefly carried on by Yarkandis", since merchants from the plains were not used to the march over the Himalaya and the Kunlun.^: 333 Hermann Kreutzmann writes that the trade was financed by money-lenders from the Punjab and Sindh and carried on by trading communities of Amritsar and Hoshiarpur, with some traders from Bajaur and Kashmir.^: 79 The United Nations Secretariat dated Xinjiang's ban on the export of charas to 1934 and judged in 1953 that "the great charas traffic is now extinct".

Words for hemp

Michael Witzel listed Vedic bhaṅgā and Iranian banga, "hemp, hashish", among the words that Indo-Iranian speakers took in his view from the language of the Bactria–Margiana culture of Central Asia. In the same entry he allowed two other origins: the Sanskrit root bhañj, "to break", or a link with words of the Caucasus.^: 34 He set a second word, *kan- "hemp", among the Wanderwörter that "have traveled the length and breadth of Eurasia". In his account it spread "via N. Iranian languages (such as Scythian), to the borders of Europe". Its forms include Greek kánnabis, Church Slavonic konoplja, Kirghiz kandir and Hungarian kender; he derived Old High German hennep from a Scythian *kanap.^: 34

John T. Koch wrote in 2020 that the Germanic word for hemp "is universally agreed to be a loanword", borrowed before the consonant shifts of Grimm's law. He noted forms of the word in Assyrian documents "a few centuries before Herodotus" and pointed out that Herodotus does not call it Scythian. Following Guus Kroonen, he placed it in a layer of farming words that Germanic took from a language of the North European Neolithic.^: 39

Tomasz Marszewski's survey of the debate on the Iranian word reports W. B. Henning's view that Persian bang came to name Indian hemp only after the Muslim conquest in India began in the 11th century, as a borrowing of Indian bhanga. The same survey reports W. Belardi's call to "cross out 'hemp' from the vocabulary of old and middle western Iranian".^{: 35, 37}

See also

• Charas
• Domestication
• Hashish
• Hippie Trail
• Scythian cannabis use
• Spread of cannabis to South Asia