Ancient Egyptians Prescribed Hemp 3,500 Years Before the Farm Bill

The hemp industry would like you to believe this all started in 2018. A piece of legislation, a signature, and suddenly hemp was legal, legitimate, and ready for business. The brand decks were printed. The influencers were hired. The gummies started shipping.

None of that is where this story begins.

That document predates the United States by roughly 3,300 years.

The Plant Had a Scientific Name Before Europe Had Universities

The Chinese pharmacological text Shennong Ben Cao Jing, attributed to the mythological Emperor Shennong and compiled around 100 CE from oral traditions stretching back to 2700 BCE, classifies cannabis among the "superior herbs." Superior herbs in Chinese medical taxonomy were substances appropriate for long-term use, associated with general vitality, and considered safe enough to consume without a physician's specific instruction.

The text describes cannabis preparations for more than a hundred distinct conditions. It describes the difference between the plant's seeds, leaves, and flowers. It notes that different parts produce different effects. This is not mysticism. This is empirical observation accumulated over generations of use and passed down in writing because it was too useful to lose.

India Wrote the Taxonomy. Greece Wrote the Pharmacology.

The Atharva Veda, one of four ancient Indian sacred texts, references cannabis as one of five sacred plants and describes preparations for ceremonial altered states and what translators have interpreted as anxiety. This text dates to approximately 1500 BCE. The Sanskrit word for the preparation was "bhanga." It has been in continuous use across the Indian subcontinent, in one form or another, for three and a half thousand years.

The ancient Greeks were less ceremonial about it. Herodotus, writing in the 5th century BCE, documented Scythian funeral practices involving cannabis vapor in enclosed spaces, noting that those present made sounds of pleasure and described it as functioning as a bath. Dioscorides, the Greek physician whose five-volume pharmacological text De Materia Medica served as the primary reference for European medicine for fifteen centuries, described cannabis seed preparations used for earache and documented that the plant's juice, applied topically, could suppress inflammation.

Dioscorides wrote that in approximately 70 CE. The formulation in Rooted Relief Cold Pain Cream is built on the same basic principle, delivered with 3,500 milligrams of full-spectrum CBD, CBC, and CBG, frankincense, myrrh, and a modern understanding of why all of it works.

The Part Where Western Medicine Decided to Forget

Cannabis was listed in the United States Pharmacopeia from 1851 until 1942. For nearly a century, American physicians prescribed cannabis tinctures for conditions ranging from muscle spasm to migraine. It was stocked in pharmacies. It was manufactured by major pharmaceutical companies. Eli Lilly produced it. Parke-Davis produced it. The dosing was documented. The effects were observed. The clinical record existed.

Then it was removed. Not because the research said it didn't work. Because the political machinery of the 1930s and 1940s decided, for reasons that had nothing to do with pharmacology, that it should not exist. The Marihuana Tax Act of 1937 came first. The Pharmacopeia removal followed five years later. Decades of accumulated clinical knowledge went into a drawer that stayed locked for the better part of a century.

The hemp industry did not invent this. It rediscovered it.

What the Farm Bill Actually Did

The 2018 Farm Bill did not create hemp. It did not discover cannabinoids. It did not introduce the world to terpenes or the entourage effect or the relationship between CBD and the human endocannabinoid system, which had already been mapped by researchers at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 1992.

What the Farm Bill did was open a legal door that had been closed by politics, not by science. The plant that walked through that door had a longer documented track record than aspirin. Aspirin was synthesized in 1897. Cannabis was in the Ebers Papyrus in 1550 BCE.

The honest version is that this plant has been used by human beings across every major civilization for approximately five thousand years, studied by physicians from China to Greece to colonial America, removed from Western medicine by political fiat, and returned to shelves through a piece of agriculture legislation that the people who wrote the Ebers Papyrus would have found genuinely baffling as a concept.

The plant was always here. We just stopped letting it be.

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