If you haven't read it I highly recommend The History. Herodotus can be very entertaining. He pretty clearly lays out things he personally saw, things he heard from firsthand accounts, and things he heard secondhand. It's fun to see how things get more fanciful the farther you get away from the Mediterranean he knew.
One thing that randomly sticks in my head is he said the Ethiopians were there most beautiful people in the world because they drank so much coffee, but beyond Ethiopia the land is uninhabitable because of all the flying snakes.
> One thing that randomly sticks in my head is he said the Ethiopians were there most beautiful people in the world because they drank so much coffee, but beyond Ethiopia the land is uninhabitable because of all the flying snakes.
Maybe a thirdhand accounts of the flying snake (?)
I'm a historian and I recently cited Herodotus in one of my forthcoming papers. Is he reliable? We certainly can't assume so. But the same goes for Thucydides and every other source from the ancient world. It's all about triangulating between different sources rather than relying on any one account.
In my case, Herodotus was describing a Scythian practice (the use of cannabis) that we've been able to corroborate, in its broad outlines, using archaeological finds, which to my mind makes it reliable enough to use.
If anyone's interested, this is a quote from the paper, which is a work in progress and not published yet: When Herodotus described the purification practices of Scythians following elite burials, he wrote of a ritual involving the construction of a tent-like enclosure of “wool mats.” At the center of this enclosure, the Scythians threw cannabis onto “red-hot stones, where it smoulders and sends forth such fumes that no Greek vapor-bath could surpass it.” According to Herodotus, “the Scythians howl in their joy at the vapor-bath.” The term Herodotus used here – κάνναβις, or kánnabis – was a loan-word from Old Persian (kanab). From Greek, it made its way largely unchanged into Latin (cannabis) and from thence into the Romance languages and English." [Citing A. D. Godley, trans. The Histories of Herodotus (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1920), 4.74-6.]
This is probably outside your wheelhouse, but do you happen to know why the Persian word with a single N would have come into Greek with a reduplicated N?
Not only am I interested to hear that "hot boxing" is an ancient practice, but also the sense of immediacy that I now have with ancient Persia over our shared etymology of kanab.
I love history for that. Just knowing about the past gives me a feeling of connection to places I've never been to or times I'll never get to witness.
As an aside, the Scythians were not in what we'd today consider Persia (Iran). They originated around the north coast of the Black Sea, and extended east and southeast from there along the Eurasian steppe.
It truly is fascinating to follow the flow of cultures through time - sometimes coexisting, sometimes crashing against one another, yet other times melting together.
For a look at the least assimilated remaining descendants of Scythians (who were largely absorbed by early Slavs by the early middle ages) see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ossetians
“Reading the literature on the word for ‘Cannabis’ in the languages of Eurasia soon puts one in mind of what one is told frequently happens when the authorities conduct a raid to confiscate Cannabis and attempt to identify to whom it belongs: everyone involved says it belongs to someone else, generally someone conveniently not present at the moment.” [0] Some dictionaries claim a Scythian origin.
0 - Miller, R. A.: Korean Evidence for Three Eurasian-Altaic Wanderwörter Scenarios, Acta Orientalia Academiae Scientiarum Hungaricae 51/3: 296.
A word that was spread among numerous languages and cultures, usually
in connection with trade, so that it becomes impossible to establish its
original etymology, or even its original language.
Interestingly even back in Egyptian times there was a corroded version with H instead of C:
𓎛 𓆰 𓈖 | H.n | cannabis
If the Ethiopians had had coffee in the time of Herodot then the Romans would have taken to it enthusiastically, and Pliny would have mentioned it. Unfortunately, he doesn't!
One thing that randomly sticks in my head is he said the Ethiopians were there most beautiful people in the world because they drank so much coffee, but beyond Ethiopia the land is uninhabitable because of all the flying snakes.