Opium Traces Found in 3,500-Year-Old Pottery Suggests the Ancient Canaanites Were the First Humans to Use Psychoactive Drugs | Artnet News

Opium Traces Found in 3,500-Year-Old Pottery Suggests the Ancient Canaanites Were the First Humans to Use Psychoactive DrugsSeptember 22, 2022

“This is the first empirical physical evidence of the use of opium in the Levant in the Late Bronze Age,” Vanessa Linares, the project’s lead archaeologist and a fellow at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, told the. “This is the first identifiable without-a-shadow-of-a-doubt opium use in the Levant—and I would say even in the Old World.”

The gas chromatography and mass spectrometry analysis, conducted as part of her doctoral research at Tel Aviv University and the Weizmann Institute in Rehovot, found that eight of the vessels had stored opium alkaloids, which come from the poppy plant. There was morphinan, which comes from morphine, as well as opianic acid and other compounds in the chemical signature of opium.

Mourners also might have “attempt[ed] to summon the spirit of their dead relatives… and enter an ecstatic state by using opium,” Ron Be’eri, an archaeologist with the Israel Antiquities Authority, told theThe four ceramics that had the highest concentration of opium were Base-Ring juglets imported from Cyprus as part of a thriving long-distance trade network during the Late Bronze Age.

It’s possible that Canaanites then used their own pottery to dilute the highly concentrated drug so that it would last longer, or to reduce its potency—which would explain the smaller traces found in the other vessels that didn’t come from Cyprus. “These vessels are very unique and special and the locals put their best product inside them,” Linares added. “I believe they came over with opium and if they were reused, just like you reuse your Tupperware, they reused them for other unique and exotic products.”

first human to use such a substance. it is joke, right?

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