Research Provides Peek at Ancient Mesopotamian Drug use

[josip781]

Hello everyone,
I'm a new member here and I'd like to say hi

I've read this article about Mesopotamian drug usage and thought I'd share it.

"Medical usage? Ritual practice? Or perhaps the drugs served both purposes? Researchers are asking what the recently recovered psychoactive drug residues from ancient Mesopotamia mean. But not everyone is happy that scholars want to know more"

[us4-he2-gal2]

Hello Josip781:





Thanks for posting. Well it's certainly something to ponder, the history of drug use in the ANE. The source which you have linked is not so authoritative though and we should probably start with more authoritative sources before going very far with such an investigation.


The problem I see with ancient-origins.net link is that the author, Alicia McDermitt, is simply reporting the discussion of a sciencemag.org article on this topic. But her summary distorts and misrepresents the original article (which I read for comparison), offering bad summaries and quoting commentators our of context. Compare McDermitt's reference to what Glenn Schwartz said:

"Collard says that not everyone is interested in exploring the theme of ancient drug use in the region further because “The archaeology of the ancient Near East is traditionally conservative.” Archaeologist Glenn Schwartz at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, agrees, stating “Scholars have tended to shy away from the possibility that the ancient Near Easterners partook of ‘recreational’ drugs, apart from alcohol, so it's good that someone is brave enough to look into it.”


With the full Schwartz comment, originally found at sciencemag.org:

"But others are more cautious. “Scholars have tended to shy away from the possibility that the ancient Near Easterners partook of ‘recreational’ drugs, apart from alcohol, so it's good that someone is brave enough to look into it,” says archaeologist Glenn Schwartz at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland. But he says Stein's suggestions “seem to go too far on too little evidence,” a view echoed by many at the meeting."


The issue with the ancient-origins.net summary of the findings of the original article is that it shamelessly trims most of the critical or cautionary comments from the original, robbing the original of whatever (limited) academic value it had.



The most relevant piece of information for any possible use of recreational drugs was that data relating to the ancient site of Ebla (technically in modern Syria, but part of the great Mesopotamian cultural continuum). For a view of relevant finding from that site, a much better page to start with would that produced by the specialists who have studied the site, including Luca Peyronel, who is named in the articles you linked. Note the bibliography at the bottom of this link. Also note, these experts are much more sober / skeptical about any evidence for recreational use than either of the articles earlier linked.


asorblog.org/2017/11/07/affair-herbal-medicine-special-kitchen-royal-palace-ebla/