Ancient Europeans Took Hallucinogenic Drugs 3,000 Years Ago

Post Reply New Topic

You mean like putting 100 people into a wicker man and burning them alive or sacrificing young maidens to ensure a good harvest? Don't see that happening too soon.

Taking LSD is not quite in the same basket somehow, particularly when there are millions of dollars being spent right now in clinical trials to investigate using micro-doses for the treatment of mental illness

Not exactly earth shattering news. Primitive peoples independently of each other have stumbled upon the mind expanding effects of ingesting local plants for thousands of years all around the world.

One thing that SEEMED earth shattering news was that time a few years ago when they gave Egyptian mummies the same routine drug tests they give you at the hospital emergency room...and found that most Egyptian mummies tested positive for cocaine!! !! !

No wonder they called him "Toot Uncommon"!

And other old world mummies (bog people in Europe, and Chinese mummies) also turned out to have some cocaine. But the Egyptian mummies had the highest concentrations.

Among the reasons that this was mindblowing is that cocaine is from coca leaves that only grow in the Andes of South America ergo Egyptians would have to have been getting coke from South America thousands of years before Columbus.

Most likely either some chemical in the Egyptian embalming process mimics cocaine, or there are local plants in the Old World that humans consume for whatever reason (food, cosmetics, maybe for a mild high) that have some chemical similarity to coca leaves.

Last edited by naturalplastic on 03 May 2023, 3:00 pm, edited 1 time in total.

They lived a long time ago, that doesn’t mean they were stupid. They were getting high af.

Somehow the Egyptians were using cannabis as a pain relief medication as far back as 3000BC. As the plant originated in the Tibetan plateau sp they likely obtained it through trade with the Indus Valley civilisation.

Cocaine is a little harder to explain, but archaeologists in 2023 like to make big assumptions and apply limitations to ocean going seafaring. If primitive pacific island people were capable of navigating by the stars from Easter island to Africa then it hardly seems that surprising that the coca plant could have made it's way from Peru to Egypt.

Hahaha! I'm sorry, but I can't get past this. It makes it sound like he was known for unusual farts!

Right. No one would have been skeptical about it UNTIL the year 2023 when those oppressive archeologists took over.

Polynesians were resourceful navigators who could cross oceans, but they only made essentially one way trips. They founded communities on far flung islands, but they didnt set up sustained trade routes across oceans.

There is no evidence of any kind of trade (direct, or indirect) between Egypt in the Americas in 1000 BC. One would expect other products to have shown up besides just coca leaves if that kind of trade were happening.

Trace concentrations of Nicotine found on linen mummy wrappings in the late 20th Century led some to conclude that that Pharoanic Egypt had access to New World compounds, before it was quickly determined that late 19th and early 20th Century Archaeologists had inadvertently contaminated specimens with Nicotine covered (and probably Nicotine stained hands) before sending them off the archives and museums decades before good analytical chemistry or the use of rubber gloves by Archaeologists. I remember seeing a photo of an empty pack of cigarettes that had been used to store necklace beads from a dig; they had been stored in the pack since the 1920s.

Yes. Recent contamination is another issue.

Nineteenth Century archeologist used tobacco, and used Victorian patent medicines that contained cocaine -while handling Egyptian mummies.

Greeks and Romans had access to Opium, which they used medicinally.

It's called indirect trade NP. Really not that difficult to have trading ports between multiple nations so Egyptians would not have had to meet a Peruvian. Thor heyedahl proved long ago that south american reed boats could traverse oceans, If they could make it from South America to Easter Island they could make the pacific islands. From the pacific cocaine could reach Asia. From Asia to the Indus Valley and we know already from the Indus there was a thriving trade with Sumer/Mesopotamia and then finally to Egypt. Quite plausible.

Modern European archaeologists are very fond of making up their own projections /visions of pre-history and the last 50 years has been an exercise in dismantling Eurocentric ideas (such Colombus was the first man to discover America or that ancient civilisations don't exist before ancient Sumer )

I have a particular interest in the Indus Valley civilisation and was watching a Harvard professor discuss the high levels of similarity in brickwork and stone masonry between Sumer/Mesopotamia and the Indus. He smugly concluded that it shows evidence that Sumer took their advanced civilisation to India...I mean really??

Why couldn't it be the other way around? after all nobody seems to be acknowledging the underwater cities of Dwarka of the coast of India which were submerged from rising sea levels which indicate India had advanced cities 9000 years ago, some 4000 years older than Sumer.

Its called "the first grade" CD.

Its when you learn to read.

I SAID "direct or indirect trade". Right there in the very sentence you quoted.

Can't you read?

Damn! I really need to wear my reading glasses

Graham Hancock provides an an answer to some of the questions you all have been asking. He says humans have amnesia of an ancient sophisticated civilization. Also, he says the Amazon was a garden full of cities.

He has a series on US Netflix called “Ancient Apocalypse”. I saw him first on Joe Rogan on YouTube. Apparently, he has been touting his ideas a while. I think his ideas make perfect sense especially the part about the “younger dry us” (wrong spelling). It actually doesn’t sound crazy if you watch the series.

Serious suggestion: hire someone else to make your posts for you on WP. You are simply unable to argue your own point without demolishing your own point and without defaming yourself at the same time. Reading your posts is like watching someone purposely chop off their own fingers with a meat cleaver. Painful to watch.

The Dwarka story is totaly unproven (despite what the Gaia network tells you).

Egypt, Sumer, and the Indus Valley were small enclaves of high civilization, when Europe and everyone else on earth were still all a bunch of savages, appearing at about the same time as each other around 3000 BC. And the three probably influenced each other. But there are no known comparable civilizations "9000 years older" than the three. Nor even any just a fortnight older than those three for that matter.

Archeologists are still trying to work out if and how each influenced the other. But claiming that any of the three had primacy of any kind over the others is not "eurocentric" because none of the three are European.


1) Heyerdahl proved that you could make a one way trip in a reed boat. Not that they had regular transatlantic trade routes.

2)I already dispensed with the Polynesians by saying that they could cross oceans but didnt set up regular transoceanic trade routes.

3) If you're gonna bring back the Polynesians then: how could the Polynesians help you when the Polynesians hadnt even reached most of Polynesia itself yet? In one thousand BC the Polynesians were still in the west central pacific near New Guinea. They would not reach the Eastern edge of modern Polynesia (places like Easter Island) until around 1000 AD, two thousand years after the period in question (1000 BC). Even those island are far from the west coast of South America, but they hadnt even gotten that close yet.

I am going to help you out. I am going to pretend to be you and argue your point for you.

Your hypothesis that "cocaine found its way to Egypt in 1000 BC" has a lot of problems but two main obstacles to get around.

One is the question of why didnt other commodities show up in this trade? Why didnt south American Indians get elephant ivory, or iron tools, or horses. Why didnt the Egyptians get corn and potatos and chocolate?

The other is that you're making cocaine go the less plausible long way around the world.

So here it goes. I am now roleplaying you arguing your point:

Yes NP (thats me pretending to be you addressing me ) both Andean Indians and Egyptians had to wait until after Columbus to get the epochal "Columbian exchange" in crops and livestock (horses to the Americas, potatoes to Eurasia) that remade the whole world starting five centuries ago.

But precisely because ships of this earlier pre Columbian age were primitive and could just barely cross the ocean they would not have traded in bulky commodities. But they MIGHT have transported commodities that were of HIGH VALUE relative to a tiny size and weight. Portable wealth like diamonds. And coca leaves might well have been such a commodity.

This would explain why coca crossed the ocean, when maize and horses did not at that early date.

There is evidence that the natives of the Amazon had cities centuries ago. The Amazon might have been a trade route from the Andes to the Atlantic coast of South America. Maybe mariners from either Africa or South America or both crossed the Atlantic (its relatively narrow at the Equator) and traded coca leaves into the African interior where it reached the Nile, and from there reached the market in question:the Egyptian elite.

Its a stretch, and there isnt yet a scrap of evidence to support it, but its not totally implausible.

Done.

Thats how to do it. State your pov without torturing the reader by sounding like a self defeating moron.

you're welcome.

Ancient civilizations also consumed poisons. Liquid mercury was drank with meals by the Greeks and Romans. They believed it helped in digestion. Hemlock potions were often used in certain ceremonies. The list goes on. That does not mean that it is safe nor smart to consume it when you know it damages the human body. I guess it is part of our nature for someone to want to win a Darwin Award while the rest watches.

As a chemist, i cannot approve of the non-medicinal consumption of drugs by those who want to get a high. That includes all drugs, legal and illegal, including and not limited to alcohol. All drug compounds can do harm when taken for the wrong reasons. Even innocent looking Aspirin pills can lead to an overdose death if taken in too high of an amount. Remember using drugs does not just affect the consumer. It affects everyone around them in some degree.

As for the war on drugs, there is a much different way that it can be fought: chemically at the molecular level. But then people would complain...