Cannabis in the Ancient World: 10,000 Years of History
From Neolithic Taiwan to Scythian funeral rites to medieval medicine — cannabis is one of humanity's oldest cultivated plants.
Cannabis is one of humanity's oldest cultivated plants, with a history stretching back roughly 10,000 years. Long before anyone spoke of "strains" or "potency," early farmers grew it for tough fibers, nutritious seeds, and its medicinal properties. The plant followed trade routes across Asia, Africa, and Europe, picking up spiritual, medical, and industrial uses along the way. Understanding this deep history helps explain why cannabis appears in so many cultures — and why calling it a "modern" phenomenon is a mistake.
The Earliest Cultivation: Neolithic Taiwan and China
The oldest evidence of cannabis use comes from pottery fragments unearthed on the island of Taiwan, dating to roughly 8000 BCE during the Neolithic period. These fragments bear the marks of hemp fiber pressed into wet clay, suggesting people were already extracting and using the plant's tough stalks. From there, cultivation spread across mainland China, where cannabis became one of the earliest domesticated crops alongside millet and rice.
The Chinese used nearly every part of the plant. Hemp fibers were spun into cloth and twisted into rope; seeds were eaten for their protein and pressed for oil. The classic Chinese text The Book of Odes (Shijing), compiled around the 11th to 7th centuries BCE, mentions cannabis (ma) repeatedly as an ordinary farm crop. Some historians consider hemp one of China's "five grains," a staple of early agriculture.
Medicine and Spirit in Ancient China
Cannabis also entered the Chinese pharmacopeia early. The legendary emperor Shen Neng, traditionally dated to around 2700 BCE, is credited with prescribing cannabis tea for ailments including gout, rheumatism, and malaria. While Shen Neng himself may be semi-mythical, his name is attached to one of the earliest written references to cannabis as medicine.
A more concrete source is the Pen Ts'ao Ching, the earliest surviving Chinese pharmacopoeia (compiled around the 1st century CE from older oral traditions), which describes ma-fen — cannabis fruit or flowers — and notes that taking too much "makes one see demons." That observation, made two millennia ago, recognized both therapeutic and psychoactive effects. Cannabis went on to appear in later Chinese and other East Asian medical texts as a treatment for pain, wounds, and assorted illnesses.
Scythians, India, and Spiritual Use
Westward, in the steppe grasslands of Central Asia, the nomadic Scythians developed a striking ritual around cannabis. In the 5th century BCE the Greek historian Herodotus described how Scythians threw hemp seeds (likely whole flowering tops) onto red-hot stones inside small felt tents and inhaled the vapor. They did this both to cleanse themselves after a burial and to honor a dead chief — an early documented example of cannabis vapor baths.
In India, cannabis became woven into religious and everyday life. Ancient Vedic texts, compiled roughly between 1500 and 500 BCE, mention bhanga (bhang), praising it as one of the five sacred plants that release anxiety. Three traditional preparations emerged: bhang (a drink of leaves and milk), ganja (flowering tops), and charas (hand-rubbed resin). Ayurvedic medicine classified cannabis as a treatment for conditions ranging from digestive complaints to fever. The plant became associated with the god Shiva, and it remains part of certain Hindu rituals today.
Spread Through the Middle East, Africa, and Europe
Cannabis traveled along trade and conquest routes into the Middle East and North Africa. Islamic medical texts from the medieval period described hashish (concentrated resin) — used medicinally by some physicians, even as religious authorities debated its permissibility. The Sufi mystic tradition, in particular, developed a complicated relationship with hashish, which some associated with spiritual insight and others condemned.
From Africa the plant reached Europe by multiple paths. Hemp had been known to the Romans and Greeks mainly as a fiber crop, but psychoactive varieties spread northward and westward over centuries. By the medieval and early modern periods, hemp cultivation was common across Europe for making rope, cloth, and sailcloth. Napoleon's troops encountered hashish during the Egyptian campaign of 1798–1801, and the subsequent French fascination fed literary depictions — most famously the Club des Hashischins in mid-19th-century Paris, which counted writers like Charles Baudelaire and Alexandre Dumas among its members.
Hemp: The Plant That Built Navies
For most of recorded history, cannabis was valued less for its flowers than for its fiber. Hemp rope, sailcloth, and canvas were essential to seafaring — so essential that in 16th-century England, King Henry VIII actually required landowners to grow a set amount of hemp to support the Royal Navy.
The linguistic legacy survives in plain sight. The word canvas derives directly from cannabis (via the Greek kannabis and Latin cannabis). For centuries, the sails that carried explorers, traders, and warships across the world's oceans were made from hemp. In the American colonies, hemp was such a strategic crop that several colonies passed laws mandating its cultivation. This industrial relationship explains why cannabis was once entirely ordinary — a fiber and medicine rather than a contested substance.
Key takeaways
- Cannabis has been cultivated for roughly 10,000 years, with the earliest evidence from Neolithic Taiwan around 8000 BCE.
- Ancient China used it for fiber, seed, and medicine — the emperor Shen Neng (~2700 BCE) is traditionally credited with early medical prescriptions.
- The Scythians' vapor baths, described by Herodotus in the 5th century BCE, are among the earliest documented recreational or ritual inhalations.
- In India, cannabis became sacred, tied to Shiva worship and Ayurvedic medicine through preparations like bhang and charas.
- The word "canvas" comes from "cannabis" — hemp fiber built the ropes, sails, and navies of the pre-industrial world.
- Prohibition is a modern anomaly: for the vast majority of human history, cannabis was an ordinary crop.