Talk:Cannabis on the Silk Road

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Page scope

Cannabis on the Silk Road covers cannabis on the overland routes between China, Central Asia, South Asia and West Asia: the arguments over its movement before the first millennium BCE, the burials of that millennium in the Turpan basin, the Pamirs and the Altai, hemp fibre and paper of the 3rd to 10th centuries, the medieval accounts of hashish reaching the Islamic lands, the 19th-century caravan trade in charas and the words for hemp. Where and when the crop was domesticated belongs to Domestication; each excavated site, the charas trade and hashish have pages of their own.

Data verification

Record source conflicts, dating problems and sources not used here. Keep narrative content on the article.

Discussion

Sources

Ren and colleagues (2019), Science Advances 5: eaaw1391: the Jirzankal braziers, the Pamir plateau as a route of exchange, the critique of steppe-carrier claims, the Gonur identifications and the Pazyryk comparison.
Ren and colleagues (2021), Science Advances 7: eabg2286, p. 3: the expansion of hemp and drug types and the westward spread of fibre cannabis about 4,000 years before present.
Long and colleagues (2017), Vegetation History and Archaeobotany 26: 245–258, and McPartland and Hegman (2018), the same journal 27: 627–634: syntheses of the finds across Eurasia and in Europe. McPartland, Guy and Hegman (2018), the same journal 27: 635–648: the pollen synthesis.
Stevens and colleagues (2016), The Holocene 26: 1541–1555; Dal Martello and colleagues (2024), Vegetation History and Archaeobotany 33: 503–518: the corridor between China, Central Asia and South Asia.
Jiang and colleagues (2006), Journal of Ethnopharmacology 108: 414–422; Russo and colleagues (2008), Journal of Experimental Botany 59: 4171–4182: Yanghai tomb M90.
Jiang and colleagues (2016), Economic Botany 70: 213–221: the Jiayi shroud. Zhang and colleagues (2025), Chinese Science Bulletin 70: 1397–1412, in Chinese: the plant remains of Jiayi and their radiocarbon dates (table 1, p. 1401).
Rudenko (1970), Frozen Tombs of Siberia; Dergachev and colleagues (2001), Radiocarbon 43: 417–424: the Pazyryk set and the date of barrow 2.
Chen and colleagues (2012), PLoS ONE 7: e45137, and (2014), Economic Botany 68: 59–66: the Astana grain and the hemp tail of the horse figurine.
Helman-Ważny (2016), STAR 2: 127–140; Helman-Ważny and van Schaik (2013), Archaeometry 55: 707–741: fibre analysis of manuscripts from Dunhuang and Turpan.
Sarianidi (2003) and Bakels (2003), Electronic Journal of Vedic Studies 9: Gonur Depe and Togolok-21.
Hamarneh (1972), Medical History 16: 226–237, p. 229; Lozano (1996), Anaquel de Estudios Árabes 7: 87–108, in Spanish; al-Maqrizi in Silvestre de Sacy's French translation (1806), pp. 120–126.
Indian Hemp Drugs Commission (1894), vol. I, chs VII and XIV; Aitchison (1874); Kreutzmann (2026); United Nations Secretariat (1953): the charas trade.
Witzel (2003), Sino-Platonic Papers 129, p. 34; Koch (2020), Celto-Germanic, p. 39; Marszewski (1996), Folia Orientalia 32, pp. 35 and 37: the words for hemp.

Source discrepancies

The Yanghai date. Jiang and colleagues (2006) give 2500 years before present; Russo and colleagues (2008) report a corrected, calibrated 2700 years; Ren and colleagues (2019) give about 500 BCE.
Pazyryk. Ren and colleagues (2019) date the Pazyryk tombs to about 500 BCE and place them in the Tuva Republic. The tree-ring and radiocarbon dates put barrow 2 at about 300 BCE, and the Pazyryk valley lies in the Altai Republic.
Where Herodotus's Scythians lived. Rudenko compared the Pazyryk set with Herodotus's account of the Scythians of the Black Sea; Ren and colleagues place the account in the Caspian steppe.
Gonur Depe. Ren and colleagues (2019) call the original cannabis identifications erroneous; Billings and colleagues (2022) treat Bakels's millet identification as tentative.
Long and colleagues (2017). Ren and colleagues (2019) cite Long and colleagues among those who carried the argument for Central Asian origins back to the Yamnaya culture. Dal Martello and colleagues (2024) list the same paper for a Central Asian origin. Its abstract proposes a multiregional origin of use and an influence from eastern European pastoralists on the steppe network.
Hamarneh's Indian route. Hamarneh names no source for the route from India through Persia. His sources in that paragraph are Dioscorides and Ibn Wahshiyya.
Witzel and Lubotsky. Witzel (2003) lists *bhang among the Central Asian loanwords in Indo-Iranian. Lubotsky's list of such loanwords (2001), which Witzel draws on, has no entry for hemp.

Other sources

López-Prat and colleagues (2022), Heritage Science 10: 67, on clay sculptures of the 5th to 11th centuries from Tepe Narenj and Qol-e-tut near Kabul: the plant fibres in the clay were identified as ramie or nettle.
Zharylgassynova and Duisenbay (2026), Otan tarikhy, on the Karakuys settlement in East Kazakhstan, of the early Iron Age: 30 hemp fruits from flotation near a hearth. Only the wheat was dated, and the site was also occupied in the 19th and 20th centuries, so the hemp is undated. The authors call the hemp a wild plant with medicinal properties.
Li and colleagues (2026), on plant remains from Astana: a preprint, not peer-reviewed.
Spate and colleagues (2022), Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution: a review that reports Cannabis pollen with Xanthium in a core from Bosten Lake in Xinjiang after 4,000 years before present, read as a sign of human disturbance, and with Plantago and Urtica at Kichikol and Karakol in Kyrgyzstan after 3,000, citing Beer and colleagues (2007), Beer and Tinner (2008) and Tarasov and colleagues (2019).

Terms

Rag paper is paper made from recycled cloth; the hemp in it was first a textile.
Years before present count back from 1950. Radiocarbon and calibrated years are given as each source gives them.

Images reserved in the article

One image has a place in the article but is not yet uploaded:

File:Cannabis-Silk-Road-sites-map.svg (lead, in the series box), a map to be drawn. A relief map of Central Asia and western China with a dot for each site the article names: Yanghai, Jiayi and Astana near Turpan; Jirzankal in the Pamirs; Pazyryk in the Altai; Gonur Depe and Togolok-21 in Turkmenistan, marked as disputed. A line runs from Yarkand over the Karakoram to Leh for the 19th-century charas road. No arrows of spread.