| Field | Value |
|---|---|
| Kingdom | Plantae |
| Clade | Tracheophytes |
| Order | Rosales |
| Family | Cannabaceae |
| Genus | Cannabis |
Industrial
Hemp, a variety of Cannabis sativa, is grown for industrial uses including:
- Fiber production
- Seed oil extraction
- Building materials
- Biofuels
- Paper
Hemp Uses Throughout History
Herodotus (5th c. BCE, Histories 4.74–75) – describes Scythians using hemp-seed on hot stones in a covered tent (a kind of steam bath / fumigation).
Dioscorides (1st c. CE, De materia medica) – explicitly notes hemp’s everyday utility for “the strongest ropes” and also gives medical notes (e.g., juice instilled for ear issues).
Pliny the Elder (1st c. CE, Natural History) – treats hemp as an agricultural/industrial plant (fiber, cordage/nets; cultivation notes) and also includes medical remarks; the Latin text is preserved and widely indexed.
Galen (2nd c. CE) – describes culinary use of hemp seed cakes served in Italy and comments on their physiological effects.
Classical China (Warring States → Han and later) – hemp (“má”) appears in major classical literature; modern scholarship surveys its prominence across early texts and culture (fiber, food, medicine contexts).
China, papermaking tradition (Eastern Han, ~105 CE attribution to Cai Lun) – a standard “recipe” explicitly includes hemp waste (with bark/rags/fishnets) as a papermaking input; good reference points are Britannica and Oxford’s Cabinet of Curiosities write-up quoting the traditional account.
Japan, early Holocene archaeology (~10,000 cal BP) – direct archaeobotanical evidence of Cannabis fruits at Okinoshima (doesn’t prove how it was used, but it’s a hard data-point for early human association).
Ancient Egypt (disputed identification) – medical and religious texts include a plant written as šmšm.t (“shemshemet”); Dawson (1930s) argued it’s hemp/cannabis partly because it’s described as a plant “from which ropes are made,” but the ID is still debated in later discussions.
Mesopotamia/Assyria (secondary-literature pointer) – some scholarship reports medical use on cuneiform tablets (often glossed as azallû in Akkadian), but the exact botanical identification is less “clean” than Greco-Roman/Chinese references unless you chase the tablet editions.