Thread by @UrsulaV

Now, like my friend @pecunium, that stem screams “papyrus” to me, not hemp. So I went digging about hemp use in Ancient Egypt and oh boy, is that a rabbit hole of wishful thinking.

https://twitter.com/ecusack4/status/1465223198836809731

Apparently—and a real scholar please correct me if I’m wrong—the story goes that there’s a plant called Shemshemet used medicinally in Egypt in Ye Very Olden Days. Nobody knows what it is. Then in 1934, a translator finds a reference to a hemp rope from Shemshemet in the Bible.

(Where? I dunno. I can’t find it, but I just work here and presumably translators know more than I do.) So this guy, Dawson, then goes to a Pyramid Text where the pharaoh “ties the strings” of the plant—which is actually the Smsmt plant, because vowels are for the weak.

Based on this, Dawson says “oh, Smsmt is Cannabis, case closed,” and presumably kicks off for a long weekend.

Other Egyptian scholars go “Are you high?!”

And apparently—here we get into languages I do not speak, so take with a grain of salt—“hemp” in the Bible in reference to rope may not necessarily have meant hemp, anymore than “corn” in Europe meant maize—and also the Egyptians primarily used papyrus and flax for ropes.

But nevertheless, we get one guy saying “Cannabis!” and the evangelical hemp crowd—which, no shade, I have been one in my time and god love them all—write ten thousand blog posts about how the Ancient Egyptians used Smsmt to treat their illnesses back in the day.

And now it is simply Known the Ancient Egyptians were stoners, because a guy in 1934 made an arguably somewhat dubious connection. (Our first documented use of cannabis that was definitely cannabis looks like Herodotus and the Scythians, a thousand years later, give or take.*)

*But I could be wrong, my days of enthusiastic stonerhood and my classics minor were long ago. Although they did coincide, ultimately culminating in me enthusiastically drawing a Scythian horse burial on a whiteboard and explaining how the socketed impaling poles worked.

Anyway, I got an A and it was a memorable class.

Right, anyway, thanks to fifthavegreenhouse.com for actually having a useful article on it that led me digging because I couldn’t read the one on JSTOR.

Also found in this rabbit-hole, supposedly—and frankly, much wilder, if you ask me—the electric Nile catfish was used to treat gout and migraines. We have a Roman doctor in 46 CE writing that you just stand in shallow water next to the fish and they zap your gout away.

Pliny also writes about this, but Pliny says a lot of shit.

I do not have time for an ancient electroconvulsive therapy rabbit hole, I have books to write, dammit.

Oh lord. Okay, I can do this and then I really AM gonna write.

https://twitter.com/actualerika1/status/1465392693828198400

So for your really fabulous royal Scythian burial, you want to send warriors and horses along with the deceased, right? So Herodotus—I think it was Herodotus, but like I said, it’s been awhile—writes about how they do this.

Now, you want your youths riding your horses in the afterlife, right? So after everyone’s been strangled, you put the youths on horses and ring the tomb with them. Except that corpses get floppy and the horse isn’t gonna stand up and nobody wants a floppy escort to the afterlife.

So okay, you impale your dead youth vertically on a pole and then run the pole through the horse, kinda like using a toothpick to hold hors d'oeuvres together, except that your dead horse is gonna slide down the pole and again, look floppy.

So the solution is that you run a pole lengthwise through the dead horse, with a socket in the middle. Then your vertical pole fits through the socket, holding your impaled youth onto the saddle. To prevent sliding, the horizontal pole fits onto a pair of cartwheels.

Imagine it’s placed like an axle between the wheels, basically. (I think Herodotus said they only used a half-cartwheel, actually, which makes sense, you don’t want your dead horse d’oeurve rolling away.) Then you drape the horse’s legs dramatically over the cartwheels.

Voila! Your dead horse appears to be leaping dramatically, your dead rider is sitting upright in the saddle with the fantastic posture that only an oak pole can provide, everybody is stuffed with sawdust and your go into the afterlife with a non-floppy escort.

Did the Scythians actually do this? Fuck if I know. Herodotus isn’t as bad as Pliny, but he still had histories to sell. Nevertheless, SOMEBODY put a lot of thought into socketed impaling pole design, and I salute that historical weirdo, whoever they may be.

NOW IF YOU’LL EXCUSE ME, I HAVE A FLUFFY ROMANCE TO WRITE