Garcia da Orta's Colóquios dos simples e drogas da India (Goa, 1563), the earliest source catalogued here
Sources are the published works that document cannabis and are catalogued here as articles. Most of them are not about cannabis. The plant appears incidentally in works written for other purposes: a physician's dialogue on Indian drugs, a revenue officer's report on a ganja monopoly, a district gazetteer, a flora of the Moluccas.
Each source has an article setting out what the work is, who made it, what it records about cannabis and how it has been read since. A source page is not a citation. Citations appear in the articles that use them.
Studies in the Egyptian Medical Texts is a series of five philological articles by the English
Egyptologist Warren R. Dawson, published in
The Journal of Egyptian Archaeology between 1932 and
1935. The five parts carry twenty-four numbered entries, each
taking a word from the Egyptian medical papyri whose sense was
disputed and arguing for an identification. The subjects are plants, animals, minerals, contested words
and named afflictions. Entry 11, in the third instalment, concerns cannabis: there Dawson argues that
the plant name he transliterates šmšmt denotes hemp.
Whether cannabis is attested in pharaonic Egypt turns on that reading, which Dawson draws from the
distribution of the prescriptions and from later Arabic medicine rather than from any statement the
Egyptian texts make. As a work of philology the series is also evidence of how
European Egyptology of the 1930s reconstructed the pharmacopoeia of the papyri,
which places it in the history of the plant's documentation as much as in the record
of the plant itself. read more →
Did you know...
From the sources
...that the earliest source catalogued here, Garcia da Orta's Colloquies, was printed at Goa in 1563, early enough that its date falls on the Julian calendar?
...that Robert Hooke described cannabis to the Royal Society in a lecture of 1689, but the account of it was not printed until Richard Waller published his papers in 1726, nearly a quarter of a century after Hooke's death?
...that Rumphius's flora of Ambon was finished around 1690 but not published until 1741, thirty-nine years after its author died?
...that five of the chapters catalogued here come from one volume, Vera Rubin's Cannabis and Culture of 1975, which gathered field studies from India, Nepal, Morocco, southern Africa and Southeast Asia?
...that Robert Knox's account of Ceylon, written after nineteen years held captive in the Kingdom of Kandy, carries the earliest known description by an Englishman of using cannabis medicinally on the island?
Record what a source documents: fourteen of the thirty-seven sources carry no documented region yet, so they cannot be found from the geography they evidence
Printed for the author; sold by Thomas Payne and Son (1783); Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown (1811) · 1783 (2nd edition 1784; 3rd, enlarged edition 1811)
