By JOSEPH JARAMILLO
Modern water-pipes are distinctive, but their origins are not. Glass, though popular today, was not used for water-pipes until recently. Glass could always be found around volcanoes as natural obsidian, formed from the cooling lava, and historians suggest the mankind first made glass around 2500-1500 BC in coastal Mesopotamia. The Mesopotamian people used glass to create beads for jewelry and accessories, mostly blue but ranging to white and yellow, and through time to other colors. The techniques used in glass blowing continued to advance up into the Hellenistic period of ancient Rome where distinctive mosaic techniques, what we now call “millefiori,” Italian for “thousand flowers’ created unique patterns for pottery and beads. The millefiori technique was completely lost by the 18th century, but found a resurrection in the 19th century and became popular in waterpipes then.
It is difficult to pinpoint exactly where water pipes first came into being. It was long thought that they were invented in central Asia, where the most ancient record of cannabis use is found. This theory has since been challenged by the discovery of the world’s oldest water pipe coming out of Russia, dated 2400 years old. The tribal chiefs of the Iranian-Eurasian Scythe Tribe claim credit, whose ancestors the Scythians lived as nomads in Russia over 2,400 years ago. The water pipe set is made of solid gold and shows the image of what appears to be an old man with a beard killing other warriors much younger than himself and is decorated with battle scenes showing not people but mythological creatures such as a Griffon killing a horse. A warrior people, the Scythians are known to have ruled over large portions of Eurasia between the 9th century BC and the 4th century AD. Historians have long been aware of the fact that this nomadic warrior people was all too familiar with drugs and their effect on the human psyche. Even Greek historian Herodotus mentioned this habit in his writings on the Scythians. Supposedly Scythians used a plant “to produce smoke that no Grecian vapor-bath could surpass which made them shout aloud.” Archaeological evidence found in the 2400 year old bong indicates that Scythians preferred a combination of cannabis and opium, often smoking these drugs just before battle. Before the discovery of the ancient Russian water pipe, the oldest water pipes were found in Africa. 11 water pipes dating back all the way to 1400 BC were found in a cave in Ethiopia. Its unclear when Africans started consuming cannabis but some historians strongly believe cannabis was smoked long before tobacco, somewhere between 1400 BC and 1500 AD. Previous studies of African smoking devices wrongly assumed that all smoking pipes radiated from the west coast of Africa thus, whenever archaeologists found pipes in Africa they automatically thought that the pipes were from 1600 AD or later. If this were true it would mean that any African water pipe would be to young to have been invented before the hookah, completely missing African cultures in the east and south that had been developing smoking devices before the arrival of tobacco. the first African pipes were built into the ground. Lit embers were placed in a buried bottle and Cannabis was placed on top of the embers. An underground duct led from the chamber to a mouth tube a short distance away. Clearly the road to modern water pipes has been a long one. Very clear records of water pipe usage come from central Asia in the 16th century; the Thai word “buang” specifically refers to the bamboo water pipe that was common in central Asia at that time. It is theorized that the use of water in pipes was introduced during the Ming Dynasty to China via the silk road. The water pipe industry flourished on the silk road for many centuries, especially as tobacco became a cash crop following the European settlement in America. One Chinese reagent, Empress Dowager Cixi, was even found buried with her three prized water pipes during the Qing Dynasty. The glass industry flourished too, and resurfaced especially with the popularity of Louis Comfort Tiffany’s glass lamp shades in the 19th century. But the real industry boom culminated in the 20th century, with the water pipe renaissance of the 1960’s and 1970’s. Bob Snodgrass was at the fore front of the movement designing water pipes across the country while following the Grateful Dead. He developed a technique called fuming, which is the process that uses gold and silver to color borosilicate glass. In simple terms, he helped make the glass water pipes popular today look so colorful and cool. In 2003 the US government spent $12 million dollars to fund an overzealous campaign to try and completely ban water pipe sales. It was the same campaign that threw Tommy Chong in prison. Today, the glass water pipe market is estimated to be worth over a billion dollars and as becoming more popular everyday. It’s not to know the past was a little hazy, but our future is looking clearer then ever. Be Well Peace And Love
