by Lucy Inglis
Although the Natufians are key to global agricultural history, there is no evidence that they were poppy farmers. They grew primarily first-wave Fertile Crescent crops, such as emmer and einkorn wheats, peas, lentils, chickpeas, bitter vetch and flax. The first evidence of human settlement coinciding with the poppy is that found at the early Neolithic site of Netiv Hagdud in the Jordan Valley, where plant remains have been carbon-dated to between 8,000 and 10,000 years ago, and include those of Glacium flavum, the horned poppy.9 This variety of the papaver family is now widely regarded as highly poisonous, but it does contain glaucine, which like the opium poppy will relieve pain and suppress the respiratory system, and so help to alleviate persistent coughing. It also has the distinctive opiate side effect of causing agonizing stomach cramps in those unaccustomed to it, effectively preventing early humans overdosing as they conducted experiments on the flora around them. Glaucine is still used in some cough medications, and occasionally for doping canine competitors on the United Kingdom greyhound-racing circuit.10
Outside the Fertile Crescent, Neolithic settlements began to spring up around the world at broadly the same time, and they were first seen in Europe along the basin of the Danube River around 7,500 years ago. Villages were also appearing in Spain and south-western France. It is from Spain that the earliest evidence of the consumption of the opium poppy for narcotic or analgesic purposes is recorded, in a burial in the Can Tintorer mining complex of Gavà, near Barcelona. Can Tintorer was mined by these early people for callainite, a green mineral they used to make jewellery, and when the deposits played out, the mines were used for burials. A man was interred in Mine 28 with a poppy capsule stuck in his bad teeth, and his bones contained evidence of long-term opium consumption.11
The Neolithic people spread rapidly into what are now northern France and Belgium, and the Ukraine. The Ice Age had ended, the retreating ice leaving navigable rivers full of fish, a steady source of protein, and cross-continental overland routes were also becoming established. These river- and lake-dwelling Europeans, dating from 5,700 to 4,900 years ago, are known by historians and archaeologists as the Linearbandkeramik, or the LBK, for their distinctive pottery.
The relatively recent discovery, in 1989, of the Neolithic La Marmotta settlement under the waters of Lake Bracciano, during the building of a new aqueduct to supply Rome, twenty-five miles away, has been a revelation for historians of this early period. The La Marmotta site was only occupied for a short time, around 5700–5230 BC.12 La Marmotta is remarkable, because it appears to be a fully formed community who arrived in boats from the Mediterranean. One of their seagoing canoes, thirty-five feet long, remains almost fully intact in the National Museum of Prehistory and Ethnography in Rome, and indicates that the Marmotta people may have come from Greece, or even the Near East.13 With them, they brought women and children, pigs, sheep, goats, two different breeds of dog, and an array of their plants and seeds to grow in the fertile local soil, including opium poppies.14
The level of sophistication in the Marmotta village – such as super-sharp obsidian and stone tools, beads, plates, cups, artwork and other items, as well as their plentiful diet including cherries, figs and hazelnuts, as well as wild boar and venison – suggests they were better off than many contemporary early people. Their boats, of which they made small ceramic models for either decoration or demonstration, also suggest trade, or at the very least, exposure to other Mediterranean cultures. People such as ‘La Marmottas’ may also have been instrumental in introducing the second wave of Fertile Crescent crops, of olives, grapes, pomegranates and the opium poppy. At the same time, brewing of barley beer began in Assyria. Intoxicants had arrived in the Bronze Age world.15
The LBK lived mainly in timber, and wattle-and-daub longhouses at the edge of lakes or rivers, and their villages included buildings to shelter livestock and for specific work purposes, such as making their pottery. We know that these Neolithic European peoples grew and harvested opium poppies; what we don’t know is if they used them medicinally or recreationally. The seed of Papaver somniferum is not poisonous, and the seed capsule is large, yielding a considerable harvest that can be pressed for a nutritious oil, or made into solid but nutritious cakes, and poppy stalks are a useful animal fodder.
What remains of these LBK villages suggests a peaceful agrarian lifestyle surrounded by livestock, dogs and children, where the poppy was perhaps used to treat severe toothaches, chronic joint pain or ease childbirth. Yet the reality of life on the shores of these European lakes and rivers was markedly different, and many were fortified with complex arrangements of fences and ditches. Evidence of three large – given average village size – massacres remain in the German Neolithic settlements of Talheim and Herxheim in the Rhine Valley, and Schletz-Asparn near Vienna. Dozens of individuals, mostly young men, were killed with the LBK-style farming adze, indicating they were not battling outsiders, but fighting amongst themselves, possibly within the same villages. A wider look at LBK societies, particularly those in western Germany, shows they suffered an almost unthinkable rate of violence during their lives: more than 32 per cent of the bodies show evidence of traumatic injury (2 per cent is indicative of a society engaged in war). Skull drinking cups and evidence of cannibalism have also been found at LBK sites, suggesting violence was not only sporadic, but endemic and, in some locations, ritualized.16 In such settlements, a plant that could not only kill pain, but also induce oblivion, may well have been highly valued. Furthermore, later accounts of war in the ancient world indicate that soldiers drugged themselves before battle, which may also help to account for the horrifying injuries sustained in the LBK population.
Regardless, the level of opium poppy cultivation in various LBK settlements indicates an evolving system of trade and communication, and other finds indicate that the way Papaver somniferum was regarded changed quickly. The clearest evidence of Western opium trading at this early stage is found at Raunds in the Nene Valley of Northamptonshire. In the Long Barrow ditches at Raunds, amongst other detritus of Neolithic life, eight opium poppy seeds were discovered, dating from 3800 to 3600 BC. They are the earliest evidence of the opium poppy in Britain, and as a non-native species, must have been imported.17 Another British Bronze Age find, although later, is that at Wilsford Shaft near Stonehenge in Wiltshire. The shaft itself is a ditch thirty metres deep, used for rubbish by a nearby Bronze Age settlement, and reveals a mixture of detritus from the daily lives of such villages, including discarded plant matter. Papaver somniferum seeds were discovered there when the trench was excavated, as well as poppy capsules from assorted species, but also present was Hyoscyamus niger, or henbane, often taken with opium to counteract the nausea and stomach cramps. With neither plant native to Britain, it is significant to find them both in the rubbish dump of a single village.18
The Raunds and Wilsford Shaft finds, while important, give little context as to how and why opium appears in Britain for the first time, but they do indicate that early civilizations valued it highly enough to travel with it. Some of the most significant evidence for how these early settlements regarded the opium poppy comes from a prehistoric site near Granada, in Spain. Cueva de los Murciélagos, often called the Bat Cave, had been used by early humans for many thousands of years, but a set of burial chambers dating from around 4000 BC revealed bodies buried with Papaver somniferum capsules in small woven bags, along with wheat and locks of hair. The bodies were decorated with esparto grass caps and gold jewellery, indicating high status and careful burial with some ceremony.19 The veneration of the opium poppy by western European society was underway.
Then, just as rapidly as the Neolithic people settled in Europe, their cultivation of opium poppies slowed. The poppy retreats quietly but quickly from the West. Yet its story continues. Still without written language, the Bronze Age people of eastern Europe begin their relationship with opium, and back in the Fertile Crescent, other cultures begin to revere it in art and, later, in words.
The Bronz
e Age
By the time poppy cultivation declined among the Neolithic lake-dwellers, their trade routes had carried the opium poppy over the Alps and into the eastern Mediterranean. This area, where the West meets the East, was, in the time of the early metal ages, a place of trading, seagoing peoples and cults that worshipped strange gods. The general movement of the opium poppy at this time seems to have been, broadly, north-west to south-east, reflecting the influence of the lake-dwellers and the movement of trade.20 The metal ages created a new era of commercialism. Previously, settlements had traded amongst themselves at gatherings and festivals. Stone tools were often objects of exquisite skill, but reliant upon the stone from which they were knapped. Metal, though still a skilled enterprise, could be forged, and had thousands of uses on both small and large scales, everything from pinning cloaks to pinning cartwheels. The Bronze Age, dependent as it was upon the mining of natural resources, and their transportation and exchange, saw a corresponding rise in human movement and interaction. It is therefore unsurprising that many of the earliest and most diverse records of the opium poppy appear in the Bronze Age.
It is often stated that the Sumerians of southern Iraq were the first to use opium for medicinal purposes, since they were thought to have recorded it on cuneiform tablets, translated in the 1920s by historian R. Campbell Thompson. The Assyrian Herbal features the term ‘HUL-GIL’ repeatedly.21 Later historians translated this as as ‘joy-plant’, and took it to refer to the opium poppy.22 Were this accurate, it would date Sumerian use of opium to around 3000 BC, but more recent scholarship has debunked the Sumerian theory. HUL-GIL more likely means ‘joy-cucumber’, although, disappointingly, the surrounding context remains too vague to know what it was used for, and ‘No word in Akkadian or Sumerian has definitely been identified as opium poppy’.23
So opium still hadn’t quite reached the Near East even while it was being used by the, theoretically, more primitive Neolithic peoples of the western Mediterranean. But it was on the move, and archaeobotanical evidence proves that Late Bronze Age peoples in Greece and Bulgaria were growing opium poppies as part of another wave of new crops.24
The Late Bronze Age, c.1500 BC, was key in the use and cultural significance of opium in the eastern Mediterranean and the Levant, but also because of the flowering of decorative objects and art at the time. The Únětice culture in Czechoslovakia was a dominant metalworking force, rather like the LBK had been in pottery, and the British Isles may well have supplied them with gold and tin from Cornwall, showing just how far the trading routes stretched.25
One important Bronze Age people, the Minoans, flourished on Crete, Santorini and other smaller Aegean islands from around 3650 to 1250 BC. They were badly affected around 1600 BC by a mysterious natural event, possibly the eruption of the Thera volcano on Santorini, and went into a decline they eventually succumbed to, after minor periods of recovery.26 The evidence of the Minoans’ sophisticated palaces and temples was only rediscovered at the beginning of the twentieth century. They were, primarily, fishing communities, but grew varied crops, as well as olives and vines up on the Mesara Plain in the interior. They were also traders, as they were perfectly positioned between East and West, both to replenish merchant ships with provisions, and to buy and sell goods. By the time the Minoans were established as a civilization, international trade was already flourishing throughout the Near East. Crete had become a world sea power, and so it is no surprise to find, around 1800 to 1750 BC, Cretan tin traders living many hundreds of miles from home, in the Syrian port of Ugarit, a major metal-trading centre. Not only are they there, they are there in some considerable numbers, enough for provisions to be made for both an overseer and a translator.27 And these traders were interested in more than basic living: imports of familiar home comforts such as beer, oils and weapons, as well as clothing and leather shoes, feature in the records.28
Their distinctive goods appear along the early trading routes, and the Minoan jugs known as lekythi, with their small bodies and narrow necks, indisputably depict scarified poppy heads. Scarification – the gentle cutting of the poppy head – releases the milky opium latex, which drips down the outside of the capsule before drying to form the teardrops known as the Milk of Paradise. The decoration on these lekythi demonstrate that the Minoans knew how to harvest opium latex. In the Bronze Age Mediterranean, snakes symbolized the underworld, but also health and healing, and one Minoan jug combines that with the poppy, indicating a medicinal use for the contents. A small toilet box, known as a pyxis, shows a bird tearing into a poppy capsule, enclosed by the Cretan ‘horns of consecration’, signifying that what the box held was holy and associated with immortality.29
In 1937, in a Minoan cult house at Gazi in northern Crete, the Poppy Goddess was discovered. Now in the Archaeological Museum of Heraklion, she is seventy-eight centimetres tall and her head is dressed with three moveable hairpins in the form of poppy capsules: they have been slit vertically five or six times, mimicking the harvesting of opium latex. Arms raised, eyes closed and with a beatific expression, she appears to be in a drugged state; the ‘passivity of her lips is also a natural effect of opium intoxication’.30 She has been dated to 1300–1250 BC and represents the earliest depiction of human opium use, and is generally believed to represent a state of ecstasy induced for religious ceremonies.31 Also discovered was a clay pipe, rather like a primitive Victorian ceramic steam inhaler, but with an open bottom and a hole in the side, so that it might be placed over coals and then opium gum held over them through the small hole, perhaps on a metal rod or stick. The size of it indicates it may have been communal, and used by the congregation during the ceremony, as well as the priest or priestess.32
At the same time as the Minoans held Crete as their stronghold, the Mycenae dominated the north-eastern Peloponnese. In their citadel, also called Mycenae, fifty-five miles south-west of Athens, bronze pins with brown crystal poppy heads have been found, overall too large for use on the clothes or in hair, but perfect for feeding opium into a pipe.33 A gold ring, now in the National Archaeological Museum of Athens, was also found. It depicts a goddess of fertility, reclining beneath a tree, holding three poppy capsules in her right hand, as she is presented with gifts, the first of which is another group of three poppy capsules. The goddess, derived from the pan-European Great Earth Mother figure, is surrounded by cult Cretan images such as the double axe, the sun and the moon, and the tree itself, depicting fertility. The ring and the image of the three capsules corresponds to the three cult symbols and the poppies’ symbolic meaning: wealth, health and fertility.34
The Mycenae and the Minoans represent the first concrete depictions of opium use, as well as strong evidence of early drug apparatus. They also show that opium had multiple meanings within early Greek culture, particularly medicinal, ceremonial and mystical. Both societies declined and disappeared at roughly the same time, but by then opium had already moved on.
Cyprus lies 783 km east of Crete, around seventy-one hours of constant pulling for a fully crewed and loaded Bronze Age ship of around 11 tons, depending on the weather.35 The ancient city of Kiteon lay on the south-east coast, where modern Larnaca now sits. Kiteon was colonized by the Mycenae, then by the seafaring Phoenecians, with the Egyptians arriving in 570 BC, only to be supplanted by the Persians in less than three decades.36 Five hundred years later, it was annexed by Rome, before earthquakes destroyed it in the fourth century. The first excavations at Kiteon were carried out in 1929 by the Swedish Cyprus Archaeological Expedition, and work has been almost continuous since then. The city’s immensely varied past is seen in the wealth of the archaeological finds: including the first known opium pipe.37 The ivory pipe was found, with other ivory objects, in the sancta santorum, or holy-of-holies, of Temple 4, under a pile of red bricks beneath a Phoenecian wall.38 This temple was dedicated to a goddess of fertility, and collapsed c.1190 BC during a raid by the Peoples of the Sea – the much-feared Aegean Sea Pirates – and the pipe, along with its compatriot
pieces, has been dated to 1300 BC.39 It is 13.75 cm long, with a small cup-like bowl displaying distinct burn marks and with the image of the mysterious dwarf god, Bes, carved upon it. Bes, an Egyptian god adopted by the Cypriots, and a consort of one of their goddesses, was often depicted wearing a bull mask during ceremonies, sporting a distinctly priapic posture, but he was also an attendant at childbirth and a guardian of mothers.40 Bes was associated with the renewal of life, as well as humour and music, and was something of a domestic god whose image featured frequently on everyday items such as knives or furniture.41 Soon though, the bright star of these early Greek Aegean cultures faded, yet almost 1,000 km to the south, Egypt had begun to venerate the poppy. The growing conditions in Egypt are particularly favourable to Papaver somniferum, with cold nights and long, consistent hours of sunshine. Egyptian opium, known as Theban, was soon the most desirable variety.
Opium had reached Egypt at roughly the same time as it reached Crete and Cyprus, around 1600–1500 BC. There was an unscored poppy capsule discovered in the Deir-el-Medina, the workers’ village close to the Valley of the Kings outside ancient Thebes modern Luxor on the east bank of the Nile River. Tomb 1389 dates from 1500 BC and contained the coffin of an elderly 1.75-m tall man, although his wife’s coffin was missing. Their grave goods, all the things it was presumed they would need in the afterlife, were organized neatly, and included scarab beetles, documents, a razor as well as Cypriot juglets.42
A small dose of opium for an elderly, possibly arthritic worker, of relatively high status, seems plausible, but the tainting of a disturbed gravesite is not impossible either, so it is other finds that locate opium more precisely within the culture. Two earrings, featuring rows of dangling poppy capsules, discovered in the tomb of the pharaoh Siptah and his queen Tausret, in the nearby Valley of the Kings, pre-date 1189 BC, the year she died, having ruled alone for a year after her husband’s death.43 A necklace of the same date featuring beads resembling incised poppy capsules and a vase of blue faience in the shape of a poppy capsule were found at Armana, 402 km north of Luxor, demonstrating the importance of the opium poppy in Egyptian daily life and death.44