The origins of the word Cannabis date to around 900BC with the Scythians — nomadic warriors from an area that today would extend from eastern Iran to southern Siberia.
They used Cannabis as a textile and also as part of a cleansing ritual after funerals.
A teepee-like structure was set up and Cannabis seeds, buds and leaves were thrown on hot stones. The smoke and vapour was inhaled, by some accounts as a way of communing with the spirit world.
Its use would have expanded as they discovered its anti-anxiety and mood enhancing properties.
“They anoint and wash their heads; as for their bodies, they set up three poles leaning together to a point and cover these over with woollen mats; then, in the place so enclosed to the best of their power, they make a pit in the centre beneath the poles and the mats and throw red-hot stones into it… The Scythians then take the seed of this hemp and, creeping under the mats, they throw it on the red-hot stones; and, being so thrown, it smoulders and sends forth so much steam that no Greek vapour-bath could surpass it. The Scythians howl in their joy at the vapour-bath. This serves them instead of bathing, for they never wash their bodies with water.” — Herodotus
Scythians introduced Cannabis to the ancient Greeks, which is where our word for it comes from.
The Scythian word was Kanab (which may have come from the Assyrian word Qunub) and the ancient Greeks borrowed that. They would add ‘IS’ to the end of words for things that weren’t Greek, giving us Kannabis.
Then came the Latin word, Cannabis, which we still use today.
The English word, Hemp, has the same roots:
English comes from Germanic dialects that can be traced to Latin and Greek, however its early speakers pronounced the C/K sound as an H and the B as a P, so Kanab became Hanap, then Hanaep and eventually Hemp.
Cannabis and Hemp technically mean the same thing in two languages, but today Hemp generally refers to the textile and Cannabis to the drug.
The term Marijuana — which comes from Mexican Spanish — was popularized in Canada and the U.S. in the 1920s and 1930s as a pejorative connecting it to immigrants.
And it’s called Ganja in Jamaica as indentured workers brought to the Carribbean by the British in the mid-1800s brought the name with them and it stayed.
The earliest written usage of Cannabis Sativa in reference to getting high was by English herbalist William Turner in his 1548 work, The Names of Herbes.
Sativa is a Latin word that means ‘farmed’ or ‘cultivated’.
In 1753 it was officially given the name Cannabis Sativa L., by botanist Carl Linnaeus, who created the modern system of naming organisms.
Then in 1785, evolutionary biologist Jean Baptiste Lamarck decided the Cannabis plant found in India was different enough — and used to make Hashish — that it should have its own name, so he ascribed it Cannabis Indica L. (which means Cannabis from India, also known as Indian Hemp).
With this, we officially had two types of Cannabis — Sativa and Indica — but the debate over whether they really are two separate plants, or two variations of the same one, continues.