Before the Joint: Cannabis in the Ancient World

Every story about weed starts with somebody claiming it's ancient. Most of the time they're right, just not in the way they think. The real record isn't one emperor writing a prescription in 2737 BCE. That emperor, Shen Nung, never existed, and the herbal text credited to him was written thousands of years later. It's pollen in lake mud, seeds in a Japanese trash heap, hair from a Siberian tomb that tests positive for weed, a burned brazier on a mountain in western China, a line of Chinese poetry about soaking hemp in a moat, and a little limestone altar in the Judean desert. Put those together and you get a plant that followed people around for ten thousand years before anybody wrote a law about it.

Where the plant came from

Start with the plant itself. In 2019, researchers led by John McPartland went through 155 fossil pollen studies looking for the oldest pollen that matched cannabis. The trick is that cannabis pollen looks almost identical to hop pollen, so they sorted it by what grew nearby: steppe plants point to cannabis, forest plants point to hops. Their answer put the plant's birthplace on the northeastern edge of the Tibetan Plateau, near Qinghai Lake.

Then in 2021 a team publishing in Science Advances sequenced the genomes of 110 cannabis plants from around the world. Their conclusion was that cannabis was first domesticated in East Asia during the early Neolithic. In coverage of the study, the split between the wild line and the plants people kept was dated to roughly 12,000 years ago. The split between fiber types and drug types came much later, around 4,000 years ago. Rope plants were bred tall with few branches. Drug plants were bred bushy, with more flower and more THC. The authors also think the plant's true wild ancestors are probably extinct, so what grows "wild" in China today is likely feral, the descendants of old crops gone back to nature.

Not everyone buys the single-origin story. McPartland himself pushed back, pointing out that 9 of the study's 16 most ancestral samples came from Xinjiang and Qinghai, which he counts as Central Asia, and that the study had no samples from Russia or Afghanistan. A 2016 review by Tengwen Long and colleagues noted that cannabis shows up in Europe and East Asia at nearly the same time, and proposed that people in both places may have taken it up independently. Long suggested the plant may have been a "cash crop before cash." So the honest version is this: the plant grew wild across a huge stretch of Eurasia, and several groups of people figured it out on their own.

The oldest seeds

The earliest physical evidence of people and cannabis together comes from Japan. At the Okinoshima site in Chiba, archaeologists found hemp fruits from the earliest Jōmon period. A 2023 review of cannabis seeds across Asia, by Dal Martello, Fuller and colleagues in the journal Vegetation History and Archaeobotany, lists them among the earliest directly dated cannabis seeds in the world, between 8280 and 7660 BCE. They're larger than wild seeds and lack a small structure at the base that wild seeds have, which suggests people were already selecting the plant. At Torihama in Fukui, pollen and plant remains show cannabis growing around the settlement, and a piece of hemp rope from the site is often called Japan's oldest fabric product.

In China, the same 2023 review points to seeds from Zhuzhai dated around 5900 to 5800 BCE, again larger than known wild seeds. China's earliest cannabis remains overall turn up in Henan around 7,850 years ago, and by about 5,000 years ago people in the Yangtze delta were retting it, which means soaking the stalks to pull out fiber. Between roughly 5,000 and 4,000 years ago, cannabis seeds suddenly show up at far more sites across East Asia. Long's team suggests that spike may be linked to exchange networks across the steppe, running through the Hexi Corridor.

The 2023 review adds a detail that matters for anyone who smokes. Fiber-type seeds start to diverge from about 3000 BCE. From about 2000 BCE, smaller seeds appear that the authors presume came from plants higher in THC. At Haimenkou in Yunnan, occupied between 1650 and 400 BCE, they measured more than 800 charred seeds, including about 700 from a single storage context dated 1400 to 1100 BCE. Somebody was saving seed on purpose.

Europe's slow start

Europe has its own early record, and it's messier. Some pollen studies suggest wild cannabis grew on the European tundra, disappeared as the climate warmed about 9,000 years ago, and came back around 4,500 years ago with Bronze Age herders from the steppe. A 2018 review by McPartland and Hegman went through 136 studies and found no solid evidence of Neolithic hemp use in Europe at all. The first strong signal is one Copper Age site in southeastern Europe, tied to the Gumelnița-Varna culture, then a lot more in the Bronze Age, tied to the Yamnaya and Catacomb cultures. They think the Scythians later spread hemp growing to Celtic, Slavic and Finno-Ugric peoples.

A 2025 study by a Hungarian-led team pushed that timeline earlier. In lake sediment at Varna, on Bulgaria's Black Sea coast, hemp pollen appears by about 5430 BCE, with signs of cultivation around 4280 BCE. In Hungary, the first likely cultivation shows up in the Middle Copper Age, around 3450 BCE in the east and 3150 BCE in the west, which the authors connect to herders from the Pontic steppe.

The Yamnaya are the steppe people who moved west out of what's now Ukraine and Russia about 5,000 years ago. Burned seeds at some of their sites hint they may have brought ritual smoking with them. The researchers present that as possible, not proven.

The first real high

The oldest direct proof that people took cannabis for its effects isn't smoke on a brazier. It's human hair.

In the Republic of Tyva in southern Siberia, a team led by Gino Caspari of the University of Bern and the Max Planck Institute for Geoanthropology has been digging Tunnug 1, a Scythian princely tomb in the Uyuk Valley. They recovered about 1,000 cannabis seeds, likely from wild plants, and radiocarbon dating puts them in the early eighth century BCE, about 2,800 years ago. Preserved hair from the central burial chamber showed clear signals of cannabinol, the compound THC breaks down into, and weaker signals consistent with THC itself. The study, "Direct evidence for psychoactive cannabis use 2,800 years ago," came out in Science on November 5, 2026. As Caspari told CNN, the hair "essentially allows (us) to drug test a person who has been dead for three millennia."

The tomb also held dozens of sacrificed horses and most likely human sacrifices. Caspari told CNN the cannabis may have been used to sedate the victims, "but we cannot prove that." The team can't say how much was used, whether it was smoked or eaten, or how strong the plants were. They're now sequencing the seeds' DNA, which Caspari called the oldest preserved cannabis DNA. Roger Forshaw of the University of Manchester, who wasn't involved, told CNN the hair is "direct molecular evidence of cannabis use."

That find is about three centuries older than the next one, and the next one shows how people did it.

For that, you have to go to the Pamir Mountains in western China.

At the Jirzankal cemetery, about 10,000 feet up, archaeologists dug up ten wooden braziers from eight tombs dated to about 2,500 years ago. Nine of them carried cannabis residue. When the team ran it through gas chromatography and mass spectrometry, the THC levels came back higher than what wild plants normally produce. The study came out in Science Advances in June 2019, and the team concluded the smoking likely happened during burial ceremonies. Either people were picking the strongest plants, or they were growing them for strength, or the altitude pushed potency up. Nobody knows which yet.

There's a useful comparison elsewhere in Xinjiang. At the Jiayi cemetery, from about the same era, the hemp showed no THC at all, so it was probably for rope, cloth or seed. Same plant, two jobs.

Back in Xinjiang, about 2,700 years ago, a man of about 45 was buried in the Yanghai Tombs near Turpan with 789 grams of cannabis. His grave goods included a harp, archery gear and horse bridles, and the researchers called him a shaman. Chemists found CBN, the compound THC breaks down into, but couldn't confirm the THC itself. At another Turpan Basin grave, someone was laid out with 13 nearly whole female cannabis plants across the body like a shroud. The 2023 review reads finds like these, female plants with their flowers placed in graves, as ritual and possibly medicinal or psychoactive use.

Hemp in the oldest Chinese poems

The Shijing, or Book of Songs, is China's oldest collection of poetry, with songs from the Zhou dynasty. Hemp shows up in it as part of everyday life. One poem from the state of Chen, in James Legge's old translation, opens with the line "To steep your hemp, you seek the moat," describing a pool beyond the city's east gate where people soaked hemp to free the fiber. Another, "On the Mound Is Hemp," uses a hemp field as its opening image. These aren't drug poems. They're farm poems, which tells you how ordinary the crop already was.

The Scythians and their tents

The most famous ancient description of getting high comes from Herodotus, writing around 440 BCE. He describes the Scythians, horse nomads of the steppe, building small tents covered with wool mats after a funeral. Inside, they threw hemp seeds onto red-hot stones. In A.D. Godley's translation, the fumes were so good that "no Greek vapor-bath could surpass it," and "the Scythians howl in their joy at the vapor-bath." Herodotus treats it as their version of bathing, since he says they never wash with water. He also notes that hemp grew both wild and planted in Scythia, and that Thracians wove it into cloth that looked like linen.

Scholars usually assume the "seeds" were really the flowering tops, since seeds don't contain THC. For a long time, the whole idea of steppe smoking rested mainly on this one passage, plus the archaeology. The Tunnug 1 hair, from more than three centuries before Herodotus wrote, puts Scythian cannabis use on firmer ground.

And the archaeology does line up. At the Pazyryk burial mounds in the Altai Mountains of Siberia, excavated between 1947 and 1949, diggers found small tent frames, bronze vessels and stones. An account in the Russian Academy of Sciences' magazine Science First Hand describes hemp seeds in a decorated leather flask and on smoked stones inside a bronze kettle. One caution: other reports on the same tombs say tests showed some of the seeds were coriander, so not every container held cannabis.

In 2013, workers clearing ground for a power line near Stavropol in Russia's North Caucasus uncovered a Scythian mound with gold vessels about 2,400 years old. The black residue inside tested positive for opium and cannabis. Those tests were run by criminologists in Stavropol, and I couldn't find them in a peer-reviewed paper, so treat the detail with some caution.

India and the Vedas

In South Asia, the record is mostly textual. The Atharva Veda names bhanga as one of five plants that ease anxiety. Many scholars read bhanga as cannabis. Some, including the medieval commentator Sayana, read it as a kind of grass. The text is usually dated to about 1500 to 1000 BCE, though some sources place it earlier.

What isn't in doubt is that bhang became woven into Hindu religious life, especially around Shiva. One story says Shiva chose cannabis as his favorite food. Another says bhang cooled him down after he drank the poison churned up from the ocean. Bhang is still drunk at Holi and Maha Shivaratri, and the BBC reported in 2017 that Varanasi alone had more than 200 government-approved bhang shops.

The Sushruta Samhita, a classical Indian medical text, recommends bhanga for phlegm and diarrhea.

Persia's mystery drink

Ancient Iran has a puzzle of its own. The Avestan word bangha is linked by many scholars to the later Persian bang and possibly to the Vedic bhanga. Later Zoroastrian texts describe a drug called mang, mixed into wine or the sacred drink haoma to bring on visions, and say the priest Ardā Wirāz drank it before his famous journey through heaven and hell. The catch, according to the Encyclopaedia Iranica, is that old Persian and Arabic writers used bang for three different plants: hemp, henbane and jimsonweed. So Persia may have had a cannabis vision drink, or it may have been something far more dangerous.

An altar in Judah

The Middle East's oldest solid evidence is surprisingly specific. At Tel Arad, in what was the Kingdom of Judah, archaeologists studied two limestone altars from a shrine used around 760 to 715 BCE. In 2020, chemists published results in the journal Tel Aviv. The larger altar had burned frankincense. The smaller one had THC, CBD and CBN residue, mixed with animal dung so it would smolder at low heat instead of burning off. The authors called it the earliest known evidence of cannabis use in the ancient Near East.

What it meant to the people burning it is a separate question. The chemistry is solid. The ritual interpretation is the researchers' best reading.

Further east, Assyrian tablets from the first millennium BCE use a word, qunnabu, for a plant that gave oil, fiber and medicine. That identification comes from older scholarship and hasn't been fully re-checked by modern specialists.

What about Egypt?

This is where a lot of cannabis history goes wrong. You'll see claims that the ancient Egyptians used medical marijuana, that it's in the Ebers Papyrus, and that cannabis pollen was found in the mummy of Ramesses II. None of that holds up well.

The Egyptian word in question, shemshemet, was read as hemp by the Egyptologist Warren Dawson, based on one phrase describing it as cord material. Several Egyptologists have since rejected that reading. The recipes using it call for roots and liquids, not flowers, and Egyptian rope was usually papyrus or reed.

The Ramesses II pollen came from a 1985 French study. The same sample also had cotton pollen, which critics say isn't known in Egypt until much later, and that points to contamination. A 2001 paper in Antiquity traced tobacco found in the same mummy to a 19th-century insecticide used by conservators. The 1992 tests on mummies in Munich that reported hashish, nicotine and cocaine have the same problems and have never been replicated.

So Egypt goes in the "maybe, but probably not" column.

What Part 1 tells us

What it wasn't yet was a crime. That comes much later. Tomorrow, in Part 2, we follow the plant through Greece and Rome, Han China, the Islamic world, medieval India and the Viking north, where hemp became infrastructure and hashish became a scandal.

New York
420 Week

Before the Joint: Cannabis in the Ancient World

Where the plant came from

The oldest seeds

Europe's slow start

The first real high

Hemp in the oldest Chinese poems

The Scythians and their tents

India and the Vedas

Persia's mystery drink

An altar in Judah

What about Egypt?

What Part 1 tells us

Sources

Don’t find out
after it happens.

Get on the list.

New York420 Week

Where the plant came from

The oldest seeds

Europe's slow start

The first real high

Hemp in the oldest Chinese poems

The Scythians and their tents

India and the Vedas

Persia's mystery drink

An altar in Judah

What about Egypt?

What Part 1 tells us

Sources

The Daily Flip

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The State of Legal Weed: America's Adult-Use Market, State by State

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Get on the list.

New York
420 Week

Don’t find out
after it happens.