“Lu and his colleagues also found 600 mummies in the tombs, a dozen of which are believed to have been shamans because sacks of marijuana leaves were found next to the corpses. ‘The marijuana must have been buried with the dead shamans who dreamed of continuing the profession in another world.’”
I was gonna reach enlightenment, but then I got high.
I was gonna give your skull a new vent, but then I got high.
Now I’m mummified, and I know why.
'Cause I got high, 'cause I got high, 'cause I got high.
Isn’t there some puzzling evidence of coca and nicotine use by the ancient Egyptians? Not surprisingly this turned to be very controversial as they are both of Western hemisphere origin.
I’m pretty sure that they found hemp ropes and sandals and such in archaelogical sites that weren’t in the New World… Wasn’t it the plant to use for making ropes for quite a long time? Doesn’t hemp grow in places like India, and not just the Americas? I’m almost certain that ganja usage goes waaaaaay back in India.
Yep, and my Wikipedia link (Yours is cannabis, mine is hemp, I dunno why they are different but they are. Yours has some info mine doesn’t, and vice versa.) also backs up my memories as far as hemp items being found in archaelogical digs, and it growing in places like India.
Hemp is one of my all-time favorite words for glottochronology (the science of tracking linguistic changes over time).
In linguistic prehistory, cannabis is an example of what’s called a Wanderword (which means “wandering word” in German). When an ancient word turns up in widely-scattered language groups that had no direct contact with one another, it’s a Wanderword. Compare:
Sumerian ku-ni-bu (sorry, I don’t know how to type cuneiform in Unicode)
Old Persian kanab-
Greek κανναβις kannabis
Proto-Germanic *hanap > German Hanf, Dutch hennep and also > Old English hænep > Modern English hemp.
Note how the shift of protolanguage initial *k- to *h- in Germanic dates this as a very early word acquisition, Germanic separated from Proto-Indo-European before 500 BCE. It means cannabis was known to the ancestors of Germanic speakers before the Germanic branch even developed. It could have been a loanword from Sumerian directly into Proto-Indo-European, which is a time depth consistent with the Turpan burials.
The etymon of cannabis was already so widespread at such an early time depth, we really have no way of knowing which language it originated in. Heck, Sumerian could have borrowed it from an unknown earlier language for all we know. Herodotus wrote of the Scythians in Central Asia using it to get high, it was apparently a word in the Scythian language too, and Central Asians may have been the first to do shamanic work with it, as the Turpan burials attest.
Doesn’t hemp grow in places like India, and not just the Americas? I’m almost certain that ganja usage goes waaaaaay back in India.