Where the word Cannabis comes from

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, calling it 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 Hanep 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.

The origins of Hashish

The actual origins of Hashish are as hazy as its sagacious smoke.

One of the earliest written uses of the word Hashish — which is Arabic for dried grass — discovered so far comes from a pamphlet found in Egypt dated 1123AD. It was used as a slur, accusing Nizari Muslims of being “Hashish-eaters,” which would be the equivalent of calling someone a stoner today.

This could also be seen as some of the earliest evidence of Cannabis being used as a recreational drug.

Hashish is mentioned in the classic Arabian tale, One Thousand and One Nights, which dates to the 11th century, and records from the 10th century show scholars debated its use.

Stories were also spread that followers of Hassan ibn al-Sabbah — leader of the Nizari Muslims in what today would be northern Iran — used Hashish to help them get into the proper mindset to commit murder. They were called Hashishins, which got conflated and mistranslated through several centuries and languages, eventually leading to the modern term: assassin.

Hashish possibly evolved from Charas, likely starting when Cannabis was brought by the Scythians into what is today Lebanon, Syria and Egypt.

It would have been used as a textile, but the Scythian penchant for Cannabis could have led to exploration of consumption methods.

Charas — made by rubbing flowering buds between the hands and scraping the resin into a ball — had been consumed for thousands of years, so ancient people would have known about trichomes.

But as any good stoner knows, Cannabis has to be decarboxylated to really be effective.

Dried resin, called kief (which comes from the Arabic word for pleasure), would have been pressed together, much like with Charas, and the climate of what today is Afghanistan, Syria, Egypt and Lebanon would have been hot enough for decarboxylation to happen, at least partially.

That means early Hashish would have been more potent than Charas, which could be why it was given a new, Arabic name.

Still today, Lebanon, Morocco and Afghanistan are known for making the best Hash.

Hashish was also mainly consumed as an edible for the first several hundred years. It wasn’t until the 1400s that explorers brought smoking to Eurasia from North and South America, along with tobacco.

The first laws against Hashish were made in the 1300s. Ibn Taymiyyah issued a Fatwa, likening it to wine, with the punishment being 80 lashes.

Another Arabian Emir, Soudon Sheikhouni of Joneima, outlawed its use in 1370. That punishment was having all your teeth pulled and your crops burned but people still consumed it.

By the 1700s, laws against Hashish had spread throughout the Islamic world.