Anyone down to hotbox a ceremonial hut? Sounds kinda cool.
Well, that is exactly what use to happen and apparently we should be bummed we missed out.
Historians discovered the use of cannabis back in ancient times. Cannabis is actually one of the oldest cultivated plants in East Asia. It appeared in written text as early as 1,000 BCE.
Wooden Braziers
Researchers from the Chinese Academy of Sciences have added something significant to the historical record: a 2,500-year-old bong. I mean, technically, it’s a wooden brazier but it really is a bong used to hotbox the ceremonial hut at a funeral.
A bong is technically a water pipe and there was no water involved in this piece. We are using the word “bong” as a way to communicate it was used for cannabis and not tobacco.
The research study, which was led by archaeologist Meng Ren mentioned that chemical analysist “indicates that cannabis plants were burned in wooden braziers during mortuary ceremonies” (Leafly).
Large One Hitters
Can you believe that ten wooden braziers were found at the scene? I mean, that is kind of a lot of bongs for a smoke session.
They were buried in eight tombs at the Jirzankal Cemetary, an ancient burial site that dates to approximately 1,500 BCE.
Basically, the ten wooden braziers looked like very large one-hitters. When looking at the piece, there is a deep rounded well that was carved into the wood. Then, walnut-sized rocks were placed inside the vessel. It can be expected that these were then heated in a fire being that the bowls were slightly charred and the rocks contained a burned cannabinoid residue.
Testing then revealed CBN on all of the burned residue inside the vessels and on some of the stones. CBN is the oxidative metabolite of THC which is another way of saying it’sthe leftover after THC combusts.
A History Lesson Moment
Thanks to Leafly, we learned that , “the discovery announced in Science Advances provides some of the first evidence backing up the famous claims of the ancient Greek historian Herodotus. In his classic The Histories, the author described residents of the Caspian Steppe region smoking cannabis during the first millennium BCE” (Leafly).
“As Meng Ren and others noted in their writeup:
[Herodotus] noted that people would sit in a small tent, and the plants were burned in a bowl with hot stones. Frozen tombs from the Pazyryk culture (ca. 500 BCE) in the southern Altai Mountains of the Tuva Republic, Russia, seem to corroborate the account of Herodotus, despite being located over 3,000 km to the northeast… Furthermore, according to The Histories, ancient Scythians used the cannabis smoke as a cleaning rite (similar to bathing) after [a burial ceremony]; however, the smoking revealed both in the Pamirs in the present study and in the Altai mountains was obviously performed during the burial and may represent a different kind of ritual, perhaps, for example, aimed at communicating with the divine or the deceased” (Leafly).
When you stop and think about it for a second, was this just a way of grieving and celebrating a loved one by smoking a little weed?
Nothing wrong with that in my book.
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