Old world Hash
There’s a Canadian at our office who will only smoke “real hash.” No melt or rosin for this guy, even at the 710 Labs office. Wild, right? But we don’t judge anyone for how they smoke — and in his defense, this form of hash has been around for centuries.
In fact, it dates so far back that there’s no substantial proof to support the very beginning of its use or extraction. Cannabis had long grown in Central Asia, used to make fabrics and herbal medicine. Most historians agree the first form of hash was charas, sifted from cannabis plants using woven sieves, which were foundational in agriculture approximately 10 thousand years ago. These sieves extracted hash via friction. Outside of Nepal and India, hash was mostly made by heating and drying cannabis, then sifting it with a screen, known as dry sift hash.
In its earliest forms, hash was eaten, not smoked. In fact, it wasn’t until the 16th century that hash was Nepal, China and north India were the first regions to produce texts mentioning the use of hashish around 3000 BC, for medicinal and religious reasons, respectively.
The Silk Road, a robust trade network which ran from the 2nd-15th century and connected Asia with the Middle East and Europe, was responsible for much of the global spread of hashish. Its use became commonplace in the Roman Empire, and had a stronghold in Greece and Egypt. Still, it wasn’t until the 10th century, as hashish grew to popularity in the Middle East, that this resin was first called “hashish” in a text. One Thousand and One Nights, a series of stories from the Middle Eastern world, commonly known as Arabian Nights, provided one of the initial features. Later, in the 12th century, a group of Nizari Muslim “hashish-eaters” who killed their political opponents were identified in a Cairo pamphlet. They were referred to as “Hashishins,” which some scholars believe led to the establishment of the word “Assassin.”
In Egypt and Turkey, bhang grew in popularity in the 14th through 17th centuries. Much like other hash use at the time, bhang extracted hash from cannabis leaves using a mortar and pestle, from which it was added to foods or infused into beverages.
With the rapid rise in popularity of smoking tobacco from the Americas in the 17th and 18th centuries came the introduction of hash-smoking in much of the Western world. This was soon thereafter frowned upon by the likes of Napoleon Bonaparte and accepted among many artistic groups.
After hundreds of years of importation, many regions, particularly the Mediterranean, became hash producers in their own right. A large shift in global production occurred in the early 20th century. Most hashish at that time originated in Afghanistan and Pakistan, but Greece and Morocco established trade empires of their own. After police intervention hindered Greece in the mid-1900s, Morocco came to have a massive presence in the global hash market at the end of the century, though today Afghanistan is generally regarded as the primary global producer of fine hashish.
Today, hashish has developed greatly, with refined extraction methods and more affordable means of production. The ironic end to the saga is legalization, of course, as Western nations who were the last to be introduced to cannabis and hashish are some of the first to legalize its use medicinally and recreationally, andregions regarded as the birthplace of cannabis, like China, have among the strictest anti-cannabis laws in the world.
