PhilPaine.com

Cana­dian Press car­ried an item about the pub­li­ca­tion of this paper, which was sub­se­quently picked up by oth­er news agen­cies. The folks at CP appar­ently scan the Jour­nal of Exper­i­men­tal Botany on a reg­u­lar basis. Good on them. The dis­cov­ery of a 2,700 year old mar­i­juana stash, which 18 sci­en­tists sub­jected to thor­ough analy­sis, is a cheer­ful item of news in these gloomy times. Appar­ently, it was potent chron­ic, clear­ly grown for its psy­chotropic qual­i­ties (female only, high in THC) and accom­pa­nied by appro­pri­ate paraphernalia.

The stash was dis­cov­ered in Xin­jiang, the Cen­tral Asian province of Chi­na which is cul­tur­ally Uighur (a Mus­lim, Tur­kic-speak­ing group) today, but in those times was inhab­ited by the blond, blue-eyed Tokhar­i­ans, who spoke an Indo-Euro­pean lan­guage. To this day, many of the Uighurs are blond and blue-eyed, though they also show East Asian fea­tures, so the old­er Tokhar­ian genes sur­vive in them. The stash was found with the skele­tal remains of a male of high social sta­tus of an esti­mated age of 45 years, whose accou­trements includ­ed bri­dles, archery equip­ment, a kon­gou harp, and oth­er mate­ri­als sup­port­ing his iden­tity as a shaman.

I’ve always been fas­ci­nated by the Tokhar­i­ans, the east­ern-most exten­sion of the Indo-Euro­pean speak­ing peo­ples, who once dom­i­nated Cen­tral Asia. They played a sig­nif­i­cant role in the trans­mis­sion of Bud­dhism from India to Chi­na. Some appear to have been Manichaeans, as well. They were not mere illit­er­ate nomads: they were a thriv­ing urban com­mer­cial peo­ple. Their writ­ten lan­guage sur­vives in many texts pre­served by the dry desert air, most­ly Bud­dhist scrip­tures, but also include monastery cor­re­spon­dence and accounts, busi­ness doc­u­ments, car­a­van per­mits, med­ical and mag­i­cal texts, and a love poem. Sur­pris­ingly the Tokhar­ian fam­ily shows more resem­blance to the far dis­tant Celtic fam­ily than the near­er Indic fam­ily of Indo-Euro­pean. The bur­ial dates from a peri­od before the arrival of Bud­dhism, when the Tokhar­i­ans prob­a­bly fol­lowed a shaman­is­tic faith in which mar­i­juana played a sacred or div­ina­tory role.

The cities of the Tokhar­i­ans lie buried in the sands of a remote and life­less desert, near the cours­es of lost rivers and with­ered orchards. Read­ing any­thing about them gives you a pleas­ant H. Rid­er Hag­gard feel­ing. To know that they appre­ci­ated a good toke adds to the pleasure.

Image: “Tochar­ian donors”, pos­si­bly the “Knights with Long Swords” of Chi­nese accounts, depict­ed with light hair and light eye col­or and dressed in Sas­san­ian style. This is a 6th cen­tury AD fres­co, from Qizil in Xin­jiang. Graph­i­cal analy­sis reveals that the third donor from left is per­form­ing a Bud­dhist Vitar­ka Mudra gesture.