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Persia, the utmost that has been claimed for it by writers of any authority is
that it is "almost wild." And as to Turkestan, if the population is now so
sparse that in many parts the plant appears far from habitations, it has to be
recollected that once the area was densely peopled, and it will be presently
shown that there is evidence that here from very early times the plant was
cultivated. It is, however, truly wild in the desert country immediately to the
north of Turkestan,—the Kirghiz Steppes,—and it is found as a truly wild
species from this area eastward to Dahuria and Transbaicalia. In Japan and in
China, even Northern China, the plant occurs in a " wild" state only by roadsides
and on rubbish-heaps.
Of all the countries where hemp is now deliberately cultivated, the nearest
to, and the one that has longest held intercourse with, the region where hemp
is indigenous, is China. It is therefore with no surprise that we find the plant,
though not truly wild in China, mentioned in Chinese writings since 500 B.C.
When we further learn that the names which hemp bears at present in China
cannot be connoted with the names given to the plant by any other people, we
are forced to conclude that the Chinese derived the plant as a source of fibre
directly from the region in which it is indigenous.
The plant was unknown to the ancient Egyptians ; there are no remains of
its seeds or of its fibre among the deposits that accompany or the fabrics that
surround the ancient mummies.¹ And being unknown in Egypt, we may
very justly conclude that the plant was unknown to the races of Mesopo-
tamia, even more ancient than the Egyptian, whose civilisation, we are now
beginnin to learn, influenced, if it did not indeed constitute, that of Thebes and
of On, and from whom the Egyptians learned, among lesser things, the making
of their pyramids and the very orientation of their temples.
The plant and its products was equally unknown to the Jews, from
whence it may be concluded that neither its economic nor its narcotic properties
were known to the later Mesopotamian Empires of Niniveh and Babylon, with
which the Hebrew race had so much unwilling intercourse. It has been stated
that the Hebrew word shcsk i ndi c a t e s ' he mp' i n t he s e ns e of a f i br ous pl a nt , but
only by commentators of minor reputation, and it is more usual to interpret this
as meaning flax' ; the latter must obviously be the correct translation, since the
Talmud, which was not drawn up till the Roman period, for the first time speaks
of hemp, and then only to mention its qualities as a fibre-plant, as something
new and little known among the people of Palestine.² What has led commen-
tators to think that shesh might mean hemp is the fact that literally the term
indicates to be cheerful' ; this is of course the very best proof that 'shesh'
cannot mean 'hemp,' since the knowledge of its excitant qualities have every-
where followed the knowledge of its textile ones, and even the latter, as we have
seen, did not reach the Jews till long after the time that the word shesh was
used to designate a fibre.
The ancient inhabitants of Middle Europe, of Greece, and of Italy were
as ignorant of hemp and pits uses as were the peoples of the Ægypto-Assy-
riau area. The remains of the lake-dwellers of Lombardy and Switzerland
are as destitute of any trace of hemp as are the Egyptian tombs. The earliest
Greek writer to mention the use of hemp is Herodotus (450 B.C.), who describes
its use among the Scythians, and indicates that it was becoming known to his
countrymen in his time. But long after his day the plant was of little account,
either in Greece or her colonies, for in the time of Archimedes the Syracusans
imported their cordage from Gaul and Spain. This, however, shows that by
this time the plant and its economic use had reached Western Europe without
having yet found their way clown the two classical peninsulas. The earliest
Roman writer to speak of the plant is Lucilius (100 B.C.), though about this
time the plant must have begun to be well known and widely grown in Italy,
for its cultivation is mentioned by Varro (26 B.C.) and Columella, and fully
detailed by Pliny (79 A.D.)
Dioscorides, who lived about Pliny's time, shows that by this period its
use was familiar to the Greeks also, and Galen, who lived a century later, gives
1 Lest this should seem a surprising fact, it may be well to mention the undoubted fact that cotton,
which is as largely grown to-day in Egypt for one purpose as hemp is for another, was equally unknown to
the ancient Egyptians.
² De Candolle, Origin of Cultivated Plants, p. 148.