How Ancient Is Cannabis Smoking?

Charas smoking at an Afghan ‘chillum house’, photographed in 2018 by Lucas Strazzeri in Tashkurgan, northern Afghanistan.

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In Afghanistan and historic charas centres of Central Asia such as Chitral and Bukhara, the old-school way to smoke cannabis is pure, using a floor-standing water pipe loaded with pure charas….

No tobacco is involved. Tobacco is also conspicuously absent from the other popular traditional cannabis-smoking techniques of Central Asia, such as chasing smoke with a metal or paper tube after placing charas onto hot coals.

In Iran, this method is known to this day by a name derived from dervish mysticism: nafir-e vahdat. A variant of this monistic mystical epithet was reported in the 1890s by Edward Granville Browne: ‘At present, I am informed by one of my Persian friends, the method most fashionable amongst the dervishes of Tehran, is to employ the buq-i wahdat, or ‘trumpet of unity”.

A knowing account of the effects of charas smoking is shared by Browne, not unusually for the Victorian era, when many Britons encountered cannabis through powerful medicines such as Chlorodyne or in the no-less-powerful smokable or edible preparations readily available in bazaars anywhere from Cairo to Calcutta:

The effects of the drug are produced much more rapidly when it is smoked than when it is eaten. Subjectively it produces an extraordinary dislocation of the ideas of time, space, and personality. You feel that within you are two or more personalities – a Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, as it were – commingled, yet each striving to express itself. Or it seems that all those present in the assembly are in reality animated by one spirit, and that the barriers of personality and individuality are, in some inexplicable way, broken down. It is this sensation or illusion that is specially craved after by the dervishes, who find therein a foretaste of that Nirvana, or Absorption into the Universal Spirit, which it is the aim of their pantheistic mysticism to attain; and this is the ‘unity’ alluded to in the name of the buq-i-wahdat of which I have spoken.

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The history of smoking outside the Americas is complex, especially as it relates to Cannabis.

In Eurasia, as far back as 500 BCE, there’s solid archaeological and written evidence of ritual fumigation with Cannabis in the eastern Pamirs, Altai, and Black Sea Steppe. The ‘dope fiends’ in all these cases from the Axial Age are the ethnolinguistically northern Iranic peoples known as the ‘Saka’ or ‘Scythians’.

Far less clear is whether pipe-type devices were ever employed in Cannabis cultures in or around Central Asia prior to the arrival – some two millennia later – of tobacco.

Dodgy claims that the Scythians blazed Cannabis in ‘bongs’ are based on finds from a burial mound in Stavropolski Krai. But the ‘tubes’ are solid gold ornamental armbands, and the ‘smoking bowls’ and ‘bongs’ are most likely gold cups and vessels, none of which exhibit charring. If the positive tests by a Russian police lab are accurate, then the best bet is Cannabis and opium poppy were being drunk by Pontic Scythian nobility in brews.

Centuries of silence about smoke follow, until fumigation with Cannabis at ‘Magian’ shrines and favouring Cannabis drinks instead of wine are recorded by Ibn Wahshiyya, an agronomist and alchemist based in the Sawad of eastern Iraq sometime around the 10th Century.

Besides a few vague and very tenuous references to bubbling sounds in medieval Persian literature, there’s yet more silence about cannabis smoking until the mid-1600s, when a French merchant adventurer, Jean-Baptiste Tavernier, notes that ‘recently the Uzbeks have introduced into Iran the fashion to smoke tchouhersee [i.e., charas] just like tobacco….’

For purists, the last hope for a genesis independent of Nicotiana is Africa, where smoking herbs in pipes is an old custom, predating the Age of Sail. Two water pipes unearthed in a cave in Lalibela, Ethiopia tested positive for Cannabis. Dated to the early 1300s based on their depth in an already heavily dug archaeological site, their exact age is uncertain, but here – perhaps – are our oldest ‘bongs’.

To construct an origin story for them, everything in medieval Arabic and Persian points to the rapid rise of ‘hashish’ to mass popularity across the Muslim world of the early 13th Century, in a matter of mere decades emerging from marginal obscurity to sudden notoriety everywhere from Baghdad to Granada as the controversial new herb from the East.

A major focus of this westward rush of Persianate drug culture out of the depths of Central Asia was the city of Cairo, its gardens soon overrun with stands of Cannabis, its bazaars with bands of wild mendicant dervishes, circles of these vagabonds and their allies from the urban underclass ranged among its parks and cemeteries, whirling and wailing to the thunderous beat of drums.

If the finds from Lalibela really are from the 1320s, then perhaps this Central Asian Cannabis wave expanded from epicentres such as the by now famously stoned capital of Cairo, moved southward along the Red Sea coast and the course of the Nile in close conjunction with popular forms of Islam, and within a century encountered the frontier of the pipe-smoking cultures of Central Africa, fusing with them to create a new Afro–Asiatic hybrid.

Two very tenuously dated pipes are not much to go on, but there’s a real possibility – however faint – that not only is smoking Cannabis in bongs an African innovation born several centuries before the arrival of tobacco, but this hybrid custom or technique may even have diffused back into Persia as early as the 1400s, all but unremarked upon, from an origin in Africa.