I wrote this as a bit of a giggle for my local SCA newsletter. I am not advocating for the use of Cannabis sativa for psychotropic purposes, but I do believe that we should be using the fibre in place of wood. It also makes pretty good shirts.
Cannabis from antiquity to the middle ages
Cannabis sativa. Illustration from the
"Vienna Dioscorides" 512 AD adapted from De Materia Medica by
Dioscorides, 1st century BC.
What is the difference between hemp and cannabis?
They are, in
fact, the same plant. The difference is that one was bred for industrial fibre
production, and the other was bred for the production of THC
(tetrahydrocannabinol), the chemical which gets you ‘high’. The original, wild
Cannabis sativa plant was something in between the two in form, function, and
use.[1]
Origins-
Archaeological
evidence is sparse, but Cannabis sativa (from the Greek word kannabis) may have
originally come from Central Asia (the area between the Caspian Sea and
Mongolia), or South Asia (the area between the Himalayan mountains and the
Indian Ocean).
The etymology
seems to follow that an earlier, late-Paleolithic or early Neolithic word
denoting the seed and fibre uses of the plant originated in the Indo-Iranian
root word of *kan or *ken, and a later word denoting the narcotic uses of the
plant spread from the areas of Iran or Northern India.[2] Associated words from
various cultures- Armenian- kanep, Bulgarian- konop, Old English- hænep, Old
Norse- hampr. The word kannabis was a Greek transliteration of the Thracian
name for hemp.[3]
The Egyptians
and Assyrians knew about cannabis, but it was not known about in Greece until
the 5th century BCE, when Herodotus describes seeing a vapour bath
during a burial ritual where the Scythians he was visiting burned cannabis
seeds in a tent which functioned like a sweat lodge. He related that the
Scythians ‘shouted for joy’. He also described hemp fibres as being almost
indistinguishable from flax. He had never seen this plant before.[4] By the 4th
century BCE cannabis seeds were being eaten recreationally at Symposiums, as
lampooned by the comic poet Ephippus.[5]
Cannabis
surfaces medicinally in the Greek physician Dioscorides’ herbal De Materia
Medica, written somewhere between 50-70 CE, and the Roman works of Galen in the
2nd century CE. The leaves were used as poultices for wounds on
horses, skin sores, and nosebleeds, and the seeds were used against tapeworms,
or steeped in wine or water and heated for blockages and pain in the ears. But
if eaten in quantity they supposedly dried up semen, so were sometimes prescribed
for teenage boys who were having too-frequent nocturnal emissions. Galen
disapproved of this, however, and said that they should only be used to thin
the humours. Cannabis seeds were seen to be warming, drying, harmed the head,
thinned the humours, and prevented flatulence.[6]
