HIGH TIMES BEGIN
The earliest known evidence of cannabis for altering perception – at least 2,500 years ago – has been uncovered from tombs in western China. Today, more than 150 million people regularly smoke cannabis, making it one of the world’s most popular recreational drugs. Traces of the plant were identified in 10 wooden burners or braziers at Jirzankal Cemetery, 3,000m (10,000ft) up in the Pamir Mountains. It had high levels of the psychoactive compound tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), suggesting people at the time were well aware of its psychoactive effects. Excavations have uncovered skeletons and wooden plates and bowls. All are typical of the Sogdians, a people of western China and Tajikistan who generally followed the Persian faith of Zoroastrianism, which later celebrated the mind-expanding properties of cannabis in sacred texts. At Jirzankal, glass beads typical of Western Asia and silk from China confirm the long-distance trade for which the Sogdians became famous, and isotopic analysis of 34 skeletons showed that nearly a third were migrants.
Cannabis evolved about 28 million years ago on the eastern Tibetan Plateau, according to a pollen study published last May. A close relative of the common hop found in beer, the plant still grows wild across Central Asia. More than 4,000 years ago, Chinese farmers began to grow it for oil and for fibre to make rope, clothing and paper. (The word ‘canvas’ derives from ‘cannabis’). The early cultivated varieties, as well as most wild populations, had low levels of THC and other psychoactive compounds.
The international team excavating Jirzankal, led by Yang Yimin and Ren Meng
of the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing, thinks the Sogdians were deliberately breeding plants with higher levels of THC and burning them as part of funerary rituals. They were apparently burned in an enclosed space, so mourners almost certainly inhaled THC-laced fumes. It’s the earliest clear evidence of cannabis being used for its psychoactive properties. However, Megan Cifarelli, an art historian at Manhattanville College in Purchase, New York, who has studied ancient drug use, notes the aromatic fumes might also have been used to mask the smell of a putrefying corpse.
The Jirzankal excavators think cannabis use was restricted to elites until potent dope began to spread across Central Asia through the Silk Road linking China with Iran. In 440 BC, Herodotus wrote that the nomadic Scythians, who controlled vast areas from Siberia to Eastern Europe, made tents and heated rocks in order to inhale hemp vapours that made them “shout for joy”. And in 2013 an archaeologist in Stavropol, Russia,
excavated a nearby 2400-year-old Scythian tomb that held gold vessels bearing residues of both opium and cannabis, supporting the idea that elites used the drug first. Ancient artwork and textual references from Syria to China hint at even earlier cannabis drug use, and the new analytical methods could soon provide concrete evidence of this.
The Jirzankal findings, published in Science Advances last June, tally with other early evidence for the presence of cannabis from burials further north, in the Xinjiang region of China and in the Altai Mountains of Russia. sciencemag.org, 12 June; BBC News, Guardian, 13 June; NY Times, 14 June 2019. For complete cannabis plants in a Chinese tomb from 400-800 BC, see FT348:12.