Henbane contains Scopolamine which is, in my opinion, the best drug available for long term motion sickness prevention.
Makes sense the Norse had it on a ship.
You can get patches of it today, one on the neck lasts 3 days, transforms a person who gets seasick easily to one with the stomach of a seasoned sailor. Never used the stuff myself but have had to get it prescribed for buddies who couldn’t keep their dinner (or water) down after dark.
The doses are perfect too apparently. Put on 2 patches and you'll hallucinate pirate ships on the horizon, one patch and you're immune to seasickness with just a bit of dry mouth.
With ethnobotanically medicinal plants there's almost always many uses for them:
> Henbane is used in traditional herbal medicine for ailments of the bones, rheumatism, toothache, asthma, cough, nervous diseases, and stomach pain. It might also be used as analgesic, sedative, and narcotic in some cultures
Like I said this isn't that surprising. In ethnobotany if a plant is medicinally important across many cultures like this it's usually a sure bet that there's a ton of interesting secondary metabolites with interesting properties being produced by that plant. These "highly medicinal plants" are actually quite common
Some other examples of highly medicinal plants from PFAF:
Ammi visnaga[^0]
Visnaga is an effective muscle relaxant and has been used for centuries to alleviate the excruciating pain of kidney stones[254]. Modern research has confirmed the validity of this traditional use[254]. Visnagin contains khellin, from which particularly safe pharmaceutical drugs for the treatment of asthma have been made[254]. The seeds are diuretic and lithontripic[46]. They contain a fatty oil that includes the substance 'khellin'. This has been shown to be of benefit in the treatment of asthma[238]. Taken internally, the seeds have a strongly antispasmodic action on the smaller bronchial muscles[254], they also dilate the bronchial, urinary and blood vessels without affecting blood pressure[238]. The affect last for about 6 hours and the plant has practically no side effects[254]. The seeds are used in the treatment of asthma, angina, coronary arteriosclerosis and kidney stones[238]. By relaxing the muscles of the urethra, visnaga reduces the pain caused by trapped kidney stones and helps ease the stone down into the bladder[254]. The seeds are harvested in late summer before they have fully ripened and are dried for later use[254].
Cinchona pubescens[^1]
Red bark has a long history of native use, especially as a treatment for fevers and malaria. Modern research has shown it to be a very effective treatment for fevers, and especially as a treatment and preventative of malaria. The bark contains various alkaloids, particularly quinine and quinidine. Up to 70 - 80% of the total alkaloids contained in the bark are quinine[ 418 ]. The bark is a bitter, astringent, tonic herb that lowers fevers, relaxes spasms, is antimalarial (the alkaloid quinine) and slows the heart (the alkaloid quinidine)[ 238 ]. The bark is made into various preparations, such as tablets, liquid extracts, tinctures and powders[ 238 ]. It is used internally in the treatment of malaria, neuralgia, muscle cramps and cardiac fibrillation[ 238 ]. It is an ingredient in various proprietary cold and influenza remedies[ 238 ]. The liquid extract is useful as a cure for drunkenness[ 418 ]. It is also used as a gargle to treat sore throats[ 238 ]. Care must be taken in the use of this herb since excess can cause a number of side effects including cinchonism, headache, rash, abdominal pain, deafness and blindness[ 238 ]. The herb, especially in the form of the extracted alkaloid quinine, is subject to legal restrictions in some countries[ 238 ].
Hamamelis virginiana[^2]
Witch hazel bark is a traditional herb of the North American Indians who used it to heal wounds, treat tumours, eye problems etc[254]. A very astringent herb, it is commonly used in the West and is widely available from both herbalists and chemists[222]. It is an important ingredient of proprietary eye drops, skin creams, ointments and skin tonics[238]. It is widely used as an external application to bruises, sore muscles, varicose veins, haemorrhoids, sore nipples, inflammations etc[238]. The bark is astringent, haemostatic, sedative and tonic[4, 14, 21, 165, 171, 222]. Tannins in the bark are believed to be responsible for its astringent and haemostatic properties[222]. Bottled witch hazel water is a steam distillate that does not contain the tannins from the shrub[222], this is less effective in its action than a tincture[238]. The bark is used internally in the treatment of diarrhoea, colitis, dysentery, haemorrhoids, vaginal discharge, excessive menstruation, internal bleeding and prolapsed organs[238]. Branches and twigs are harvested for the bark in the spring[238]. An infusion of the leaves is used to reduce inflammations, treat piles, internal haemorrhages and eye inflammations[213]. The leaves are harvested in the summer and can be dried for later use[238]. A homeopathic remedy is made from fresh bark[232]. It is used in the treatment of nosebleeds, piles and varicose veins[232].
Pueraria montana[^3]
The kudzu vine, known as Ge Gen in China, is commonly used in Chinese herbalism, where it is considered to be one of the 50 fundamental herbs[218 ]. Recent research has shown that compounds called 'daidzin' and 'daidzein', which are contained in the roots and the flowers, are a safe and effective method for treating alcohol abuse[238 ]. They work by suppressing the appetite for alcohol, whereas existing treatments interfere with the way the alcohol is metabolised and can cause a build-up of toxins[238 ]. The plant is often used in combination with Chrysanthemum x morifolium in treating alcohol abuse[254 ]. The flowers and the roots are antidote, antiemetic, antipyretic, antispasmodic, demulcent, diaphoretic, digestive, febrifuge, hypoglycaemic and hypotensive[174 , 176 , 218 , 222 , 238 ]. A concoction of the flowers and tubers is used to treat alcoholism, fever, colds, diarrhoea, dysentery, acute intestinal obstruction etc[174 , 176 , 218 , 222 ]. It is useful in the treatment of angina pectoris and migraine[218 ]. The root is frequently used as a remedy for measles, often in combination with Cimicifuga foetida[254 ]. The root contains puerarin. This increases the blood flow to the coronary artery and protects against acute myocardial ischaemia caused by the injection of pituitrin[176 ]. The root can be harvested from the autumn to the spring and is used fresh or dried[238 ]. The flowers are harvested just before they are fully open and are dried for later use[238 ]. The stems are galactagogue and are also applied as a poultice to incipient boils, swellings, sore mouths etc[218 , 222 ]. The seed is used in the treatment of hangover and dysentery[218 , 222 ]. The leaves are styptic[218 ].
Ethnobotany is still the main source of new drug discoveries. Culturally medicinal plants like these are easy to identify and then it's just a matter of isolating the active ingredients and investigating ways to manufacture it or increase its effects. We often think of drugs as being single dimensional or serving a single use-case but I think this is mostly a product of how the modern scientific and legal process works and how much work it takes to approve a drug for a particular use-case.
Imagine you're a big pharma company, are you going to lose market share to a plant? Cheaper to pay a media outlet to start a fear campaign, and hire lobbyist to pass laws against "The dangerous plant" that killed little Toby.
Pharma guarantees exact amounts of the active compounds each single time. Herbal medicine can't, because 5 grams of this plant harvested at shadow is radically different than this other 5 grams of the same species but growing in a colder place, or in a sunnier place or in a short summer year, etc.
Therefore with herbal medicine there is always a risk of overdosing or receiving an useless (too low) dose. The importance of this fact when people deal with such evil things as Scopolamine shouldn't be dismissed.
To be fair most herbal medicinalists tout the decreased potency of an herbal drug as a major benefit. You're usually instructed to, for example, drink some amount of some tea for a month. It might be hard to predict the content of a dose but with most herbs even if you tried to overdose you'd probably just puke out all that plant matter rather than actually die
Every year there's between 10 and 60 total fatalities due to plant and mushroom poisoning annually in the United States. But more than 106,000 persons in the U.S. died from drug-involved overdose in 2021. Obviously many more people take pharmaceutical drugs than take herbal medicines, but I do think that even if you adjusted the numbers to account for that you'd still see a huge difference
The fact is humans have been eating plant matter for millions of years and even though secondary metabolites of plants can be unique, they still often have certain chemical properties that our digestive system can evolve to account for. For example oxalic acid (rhubarb, brown rice, almonds, etc) and saponins (beans, asparagus, spinach, etc) are two very lethal poisons that will kill your cat but that us omnivores have evolved to neutralize and most of us consume daily. In comparison, pharmaceutical drugs are specifically isolated and optimized for potency and it's simply much more difficult for our bodies to adapt to individual chemicals like this (especially if they have novel chemical properties not seen in other parts of nature)
That's true to a large extent with pharmacological drugs, since you have huge variability between people's weights, life style and diets (alcohol use for example). Usually the problem can be mitigated by starting with a safe low dose and adjusting until a benefit is seen in either case.
The profit motive of pharmacological companies is to have repeat customers. So no real incentive to cure.
You can't really dismiss this as a concern, as it's reflected in reality. Americans are some of the most drugged people in the world. The number of drugs Americans are now taking is growing exponentially. Yet this hasn't translated into life expectancy gains at all.
If anything, chances are you will be given the most drugs in the last year of your life. The risk of complications from taking so many drugs, will probably be working against benefit. As you get worse, the doctors will try to increase the dose. A feedback loop of sorts.
Hey, it's not like I'm against modern medicine. It's just it's a little more complicated, when game theory comes into play and individuals/companies have incentives that aren't always aligned with your best interest.
Lots of medicine is not just historically derived from plants but actually manufactured from them - extracting and purifying an active ingredient from plant mass often is cheaper than synthesizing it chemically, so lots of widely used products from 'big pharma' effectively are herb-based.
However, this 'extracting and purifying' step is one that must be done, you don't want to give the patient the whole 'cocktail' of active substances that happen to be in the herb along with the one thing that does have the desireable effect; so skipping that step and using the herb directly often is not appropriate; sure, it can work and have some beneficial effect as it was used historically, but that's something you stop doing once you have the practical ability to do it better by properly extracting the appropriate component.
Fair point. It's not really analogous to "dropping acid" as I put it, but we do have clear evidence of its use specifically for its hallucinogenic properties:
> In the Norwegian tradition, women put an ointment contain mixture of some plants such as BH on parts of the body with thin skin and became hallucinated
> It Soothsayers applied BH as a component of their hallucinatory mixture
Henbane was used for all sorts, including brewing.
As for the trip… we have it growing wild at our place, and I’ve been schooling myself as a herbalist/botanist, mostly for practical purposes. I’ve smoked it and had it in tea. It’s not a “oh wow I want to do that again!” but it’s also not “oh sweet Jesus no”. Floaty, tranquil, visuals not unlike DMT, and a terrible stomach upset.
Some locals still use it, as an alternative to hemlock, to stun fish.
To build in the brewing part, before it was replaced by hops, it was the plant that gave its name "Bilsenkraut" to the city of Pilsen. So not just occasionally used, but significant enough that places where named for it
Very interesting, thanks. I think there's often a cultural "plant blindness" we have nowadays, but it's hard to overstate how influential many plants have been on all human cultures.
One fun thing I found out today: Linnaea is a genus of honeysuckle named after botanist Carl Linnaeus whose name derives from the Swedish lind or linden tree. So it's a plant named after a person named after a plant!
I bet I could find a lot more examples like this if I kept digging. I only recently realized how common it is for names to derive from plants and I've had a lot of fun digging into it
> Some locals still use it, as an alternative to hemlock, to stun fish.
Why is anyone using Hemlock to stun fish? Given there are dozens of plants that stun fish, it seems odd that folks would use one that's also absurdly toxic to humans.
Makes sense. I wonder if pawpaw would work. It seems like it might if rotenone works, since they both have the same mechanism of action, but I’ve never seen it listed as a fish poison.
Interesting. I've read it was used in cigarettes in part for its narcotic effects (and to treat asthma) and was wondering if that meant it's hallucinogenic or not
From what I understand it can be poisonous if consumed directly. You'd probably get poisoned from directly consuming tobacco leaves too so I wonder if this is a similar situation where smoking is safer than direct consumption
Would you describe the experience as a "trip" like other psychedelic plants and fungi?
You can get poisoned just by handling tobacco leaves - Green Tobacco Sickness. I had it as a kid after playing in a wet tobacco field - I honestly thought I was going to die.
And yes, it was a trip - but mild in the grand scheme of things.
It's used in parts of Latin America by thieves to rob people. They become delirious and detached from reality and will do whatever the thieves want.
Circe also used it in the Odyssey to turn Odysseus's men into pigs. Odysseus prevented succumbing to Circe's poison by taking galantamine from the flowers of Galanthus nivalis, which is an acetylcholinesterase inhibitor. Galantamine counteracts the effects of anticholinergics by inhibiting the enzyme that breaks down acetylcholine.
> Circe also used it in the Odyssey to turn Odysseus's men into pigs.
What's that based on? I can't seem to find any mention (in this translation at least) of what Circe used. Beyond just "evil drugs", "baneful drugs" etc.
For some reason, in the humanities, especially with "pop" stuff like this, you can find a lot of extremely strong claims with basically zero backing.
At any rate it's not a translation issue. You can see in your link, which also has the original Greek, that the phrase used is "pharmaka lugros", which means precisely what the translation said. Maybe there is some other tradition besides Homer that handed it down, but it's healthy to have a lot of skepticism with claims like this.
Crazy but there is no historical evidence (text or images) of psilocybin mushroom use in Europe, prior to 1957. So hard to believe, but we simply don’t have evidence otherwise…
What exactly does this even mean? The very origins of "Christmas" are from people drinking the piss of reindeer who have consumed Amanita muscaria. Amanita muscaria, while not of the Psilocybe genus, ~~contains psilocybin~~ (EDIT: it contains other psychedelic substances but no psilocybin) but (unlike Psilocybe mushrooms) is poisonous. The poison is neutralized in the reindeer piss so you can consume it to have a fun trip
And Psilocybe themselves are global in distribution with hundreds of species. Almost all hallucinogenic and none are poisonous.
A quick google search shows we have evidence for magic mushroom use in Europe for at least up to 6k years ago:
> The very origins of "Christmas" are from people drinking the piss of reindeer who have consumed Amanita muscaria
I never heard of christmas deriving from reindeer, it is commonly associated with winter solstice, but given the first record of the festivity is in Rome in 336CE it seems odd.
Maybe you mean the "association of reindeer with christmas", but that seems likely to have originated in the 19th century.
> the Siberian shamans’ use of (red and white) fly agaric mushrooms to enter the spirit world is believed to be the source of the Father Christmas myth.
but the "Father Christmas" in english tradition was green.
Perhaps that prehistoric cave painting does show psilocybin mushrooms. That makes it even more crazy that there is no historical evidence for their use again until 1957– even though, as you point out— multiple species of psilocybin mushrooms grow pervasively in Europe.
Honestly, it would be groundbreaking if one grandma told stories about how her mother used to make mushroom tea. But we don’t have those stories. And, there is nothing in all of the Latin and Greek texts of the past 2500 years. It is a real enigma.
I have no idea where the claim that there's "no historical evidence for their use" comes from and would like to see a source (or just evidence that you've done any amount of research before making this claim). I think you might be confused because the term "hallucinogenic" only came of use around the 1950s
For example, this paper[0] explores the ethnobotanic use of hallucinogenic mushrooms in Slovenia says
> Use of hallucinogenic plants and fungi, believed to extend back thousands of years, is an important part of the human experience
> The term hallucinogen first became popular in the 1950s and was originally used as the substances were said to produce hallucinations, though we now know that this is often not the case at lower doses
Ancient Greeks drank psychoactive concoctions that contained a mix of psychedelic mushrooms and even reports from the Middle Ages document their use. Clusius (1525-1609), a physician and botanist, discovered ‘bolond gomba’, a mushroom known in Germany as Narrenschwamm or Fool's mushroom, which was used in rural areas to concoct a love potion. ‘Fools mushrooms’ were also documented around the same time in Slovakia, Poland, and in England
Yes, you can find our investigation here. We scoured the literature for historical reference to psilocybin mushrooms. Also investigating art! That’s what led us to the 118 prehistoric mushroom carvings on Stonehenge. But even these are not psilocybin!
https://research.tudelft.nl/en/publications/the-enigma-of-mi...
Alcoholic beverages existed for as long as agriculture itself. Cannabis use is found in many ancient civilizations. Just because you consider recreational drugs to be sanctimonious doesn't mean ancient humans shared the same arbitrary moral values as you.
If you're European you should know your ancestors likely settled down to practice agriculture in large part so they could drink a massive amount of alcohol
We have this notion of historic times that people largely stayed in place. We find evidence repeatedly that this just isn't the case.
A good example is the spread of wheat cultivation across Europe. We can get fairly accurate reads on this because of DNA sequencing of wheat and it was a new crop. There is cultivated wheat at the bottom of the English Channel, meaning it was farmed there before the English Chanel was flooded by the North American ice sheet melting.
Another example is the from the Bronze Age (>3300 years ago). There was a vast trade network at this time that we have direct evidence for [1], being a ship carrying goods from all across the known world from modern day Afghanistan to Europe.
The Bronze Age spectacularly and suddenly ended, which is a whole other story. It's still speculated as to what caused this. One interesting aspect are the so caled "Sea Peoples", that were directly documented (and drawn) by the Egyptians at the time. There's speculation that the "Sea Peoples" themselves were refugees from some other disaster. This too hints at great mobility that so many people could migrate so far.
Trade and human movement in historic times was way more extensive and common than you might otherwise assume.
None of that debunks the reasonable assumption that a random individual from any previous century, particularly those before there were widely available means of travel other than walking and perhaps horseback, would have moved around a lot less in their lifetime than one from today. Further, I just recently watched a video of essentially an animated map showing the spread of humanity and human civilization across the globe compressed into 19 minutes, and even if you only consider "history" as beginning around 2000 BC it really did take an awful long time for trading populations to spread out from the near east+Egypt region to the rest of the world, first gradually taking in most of modern day Europe and then with a massive acceleration starting sometime around the 1600s that led to our modern idea of a world where almost no matter where you're born, you have a reasonable chance of being able to travel to another country, and of course for those of us in the developed world, a decent chance of travelling around the globe multiple times within a single lifetime. Even just 100 years ago that privilege would have been restricted to the very few.
> those of us in the developed world, a decent chance of travelling around the globe multiple times within a single lifetime. Even just 100 years ago that privilege would have been restricted to the very few
I think you’re forgetting how expensive international airfare was even in the 1980s. Traveling around the world multiple times in the 1960s, 70s, and 80s would have been very expensive compared to today (note: I’m considering airfare only, not accommodations)
Remember though, these spices were not carried by, say one trader, from origin to destination. The trade occurred along known routes that were relatively fixed, so trading communities grew. It was there that you got the goods - not at the origin. So you can say the spices traveled, but the fixed traders didn't have to.
Cloves have been found at Syrian 4th millennium B.C. sites, Tel Mozan I think, indicating an unbroken route to Indonesia. Our ancestors were not unsophisticated.
When I was a student and wanted to visit a cryptographic workshop in 2004, I traveled Prague to Barcelona and back for, then, some 700 eur. That was by far the cheapest option, bought months in advance.
Looking at the options now, 200 eur is very doable, although there will be extra fees for luggage. But there have been almost 20 years in between! In 2004, 700 eur must have been around the average net monthly salary in CZ; now, the average net salary is almost twice as high.
So, from a purchasing power point of view, costs of flying have gone down about 7x for a Czech person, in mere 19 years.
Our family was basically middle class growing up but we traveled to Europe (from Australia) twice within a few years, both times in the 80s. But sure, you don't have to go a full 100 years back for that sort of luxury to be a rare thing even in wealthy countries - still, there were quite a few that made one-time journeys across half the globe at least, and many of us today have parents and even multiple grandparents that did just that of course.
Most people tend to think of themselves as "middle-class". Your family may have been. Or maybe that's what you grew up with and was normal in your community but not "middle-class".
That point aside, the 1980's was the beginning of cheaper travel. In the 1950's it was the modern equivalent of $45,000 (all 'modern' prices are pre-COVID inflation adjusted Perth-to-London). It decreased by by 82% by 1980. It pretty much leveled out in the mid-1980's to today, inflation adjusted. Although the same rates your parents paid probably would have gotten them business class tickets now.
It is the case for most of the settled people and civilizations. Just because a few traders, monguls and sea peoples exist doesn't mean most people don't live and die within a few miles of their birthplaces. This is even true today.
A few north Korean traders does not make north Korean people an international trading culture.
Assuming than implies "somewhere between 45-50%", that's higher than I would have thought. But a much higher percentage would have traveled 100s if not 1000kms over land surely.
The vast majority didn't have a choice, sir. Ever been to a really poor country? Even Moldova will do, you don't have to go to Niger.
But people from poor countries actually do travel a lot, as gastarbeiters, to send remittance back to their families. They do so using buses, though. Lots and lots of buses.
If the hangul emperor married a perisan princess and got Persian goods, it doesn't change the status or the lives of average people. On the Indian subcontinent traders had participation from all walks of life so I'd call it way more culturally international. I'd argue royalty getting preferential treatment isn't culturally relevant for a people.
> We have this notion of historic times that people largely stayed in place.
Good rhetorical technique, I’m sure a lot of people have a relatively ‘naive’ preconception about such things - but I also think a lot of people do have an understanding that these kinds of things were possible as it is.
> There is cultivated wheat at the bottom of the English Channel, meaning it was farmed there before the English Chanel was flooded by the North American ice sheet melting.
Citation? I'm no expert but I had thought that the introduction of farming to the region post-dated the inundation of the channel by millennia.
I wonder if we'll ever chance across some silphium with enough genetic data to revive it in one of these archeological finds. I've always found that story fascinating and I'd love to see the mystery solved one day.
Interestingly, even many of the plants with modern descendants were very different in centuries previous. Ryan North gave a talk at the Long Now Foundation recently with an interesting bit on how much selective breeding has changed food. It starts here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pQg9YPSfAxg#t=29m
Especially interesting to me were the images of watermelon from painted still lifes over the centuries. It was clearly a very different fruit to the one we know today.
Wow, I hadn't heard of that, but what a fascinating plant. Apparently, it's seeds or fruits may have been heart-shaped, and it was used as an aphrodisiac, which may be the reason why we associate the heart shape with love.
My understanding is that we don't even know for sure if it went extinct. We just don't know what it actually was/is. There's been a number of extant species that people have proposed as being silphium, but it's very hard to say if any of them actually are, and if so, which.
> The researchers found spices such as nutmeg, cloves, mustard and dill. They also found samples of other plant material, such as saffron and ginger, peppercorns and almonds. Some of the spices would have come from as far away as Indonesia, suggesting that King Hans had developed an advanced trade network. The researchers also found snack items, such as dried blackberries, raspberries, grapes and flax, each find showing just how rich and powerful Hans had become. The researchers also found one non-edible plant, henbane, which, in the past, was used for medicinal purposes.
Can we determine where the spices came from? Did he trade with the Mughal empire or an agent of theirs? All of them sound South Asian, except I don't know where almonds came from.
It's possible there was centuries-long trade between Vikings and Arabs that stopped at the Horn of Africa, because Arabs kept the route to India, Malacca and the Moluccas a mostly well-guarded secret against Europeans.
That being said, it's possible for the Scandinavians to have indirectly acquired these spices from the Arabs, because the Arabs certainly resold a lot of them from the Vijayanagara Empire and the Srivijiya Sultanate (both which existed around that time). But the lack of any outposts or major presence like the Arabs did, means that the Europeans did not have direct access to Greater Asia (India, China, SEA) until the Portuguese opened up the routes.
As you can expect, the number of middlemen involved meant that the prices commanded by these goods was extremely high.
Edit:- Denmark had an outpost in Tuticorin (Southern India) much later though
Thanks, I mixed up my centuries. It's very impressive how far these spices went. Pre Mughal India is very interesting, I listened to a podcast about the Vijayanagara empire on fall of civilizations.
Honestly, in those days, a trip from Stockholm to Malacca in those days would have been much faster than a trip from the Kara sea through Siberia. Not to mention, much safer - you don't have to worry about nomadic raiders stealing your goods (which was a very significant concern in the Silk Road overland route vis a vis the Spice Route).
Most probably via the Mediterranean, this being 1495 that meant Venice, with some chances of the Southern French doing the transport itself across some part of Mediterranean as the Venetians were already beginning to not be that much interested in sailing. The Venetians themselves were purchasing the spices either from Alexandria or from Beirut.
There's a 1963 presentation by Ruggiero Romano, Alberto Tenenti and Ugo Tucci called Venise et la Route du Cap: 1499-1517, which has this table [1] of imports of spices in the Mediterranean Sea and Southern Europe going from the late 1490s to the early 1500s. One can see that the Portuguese only started bringing spices in Europe in 1501, and they started rivalling the Venetians in terms of quantities in 1503.
> The researchers also found snack items, such as dried blackberries, raspberries, grapes and flax
Some can be snacks but its main purpose could be very different. Flax seeds are tiny and really not so valuable as snack, but you can powder them and obtain a very fine oil to use in lamps. In a six month dark winter or in a ship this can be more than a luxury. You could also save them for culturing at home and obtain a source of fine and durable clothes. Almond oil can be used in skin care to alleviate the effect of the cold in the face. Can be used also in candles.
Flax oil can be used also in another very important thing in a wooden ship, to protect the wood and made it shiny, more durable and waterproof.
Henbane is the outlier but could be used externally and its purpose in navigation is fascinating. Rare in the North but can be found in central and southern Europe if you know what to look for. Is not a creature that you should underestimate or play with but Vikings really don't need to navigate a lot to find it.
The dried berries are all European crops. Maybe their purpose was to acquire valuable varieties of crops. May be used also to dye clothes.
I am also curious if it is possible to determine if the spices were pure (given technology/cultivation constraints of the day). Seems like there would be an enormous incentive to dilute the product as much as possible when the buyer likely has very limited opportunity to contrast quality.
I have trouble imagining how you would "dilute" something like flaxseeds or nutmegs (the seeds are the size of a small egg). Do you make fake seeds that look the same and just mix them in with the other seeds?
I was thinking more along the lines of something like salt to which you could theoretically add an adulterant. Now what that would be without making the end result unpalatable is beyond my knowledge, but with the right financial incentives, I assumed someone could identify something.
The Arab trade into South and Southeast Asia dates back to the 7th century. Arab merchants also traded with Vikings. Trading relationships amongst different tribes and regions developed by land and sea from the 7th century onwards into what we can probably classify as international trade (although they weren’t defined as nation-states then).
The state of Russia is a result of the trade between Vikings and Arabs and Vikings and and the East Roman Empire. The Vikings built fortified ports along the trade ways and eventually came to rule the surrounding Slavic tribes (the Slavs invited Rurik to rule them, according to the Primary Chronicle).
Not really. The capital of Rus moved from Lagoda to Novgorod to Kiev to Vladimir to Moscow. The rulers of Moscow up until the end of 16th century were members of the Rurik dynasty - the same one that conquered Kiev in 9th century.
Every time I hear about treasure troves of spices, I wonder, are they really that good and valuable? I mean we have the same spices today, we don't particularly use a lot of them and even when we do, the taste is better, but not extremely so. Perhaps if you just had salt to season your food, anything that'd make it taste better would be valuable.
Spices are compact, storable, highly concentrated, and hard to counterfeit. You and I eat them daily in everything either directly, or as artificial flavors that have been designed to replace the expensive stuff. They are a good choice for long-haul trade.
Because the alternative is starvation. It's not like great food is available for much of the winter in many places. If you couldn't eat the somewhat rotten pie, you didn't eat.
Yes, I give up, you are right. As winter progresses in Norway, everything starts to go off in the heat and the only way to avoid starvation is to season the rapidly decomposing food supply with spices worth more than their weight in gold. I withdraw my erroneous comment.
"Spices can also exert antimicrobial activity in two ways: by preventing the growth of spoilage microorganisms (food preservation), and by inhibiting/regulating the growth of those pathogenic (food safety; Tajkarimi et al., 2010)"
People don’t make a bunch pies in fall and then store them for winter. They’ll store rawer ingredients, like flour, live animals or dried and pickled veggies and meats that don’t perish as easily.
People would often make a pot pie, which got it's name from literally being the pot they cooked the food in. Everyday they'd remove the top, add more ingredients, and cook it again.
I'm unsure of which regions did this, but I didn't mean they baked a bunch of pies in the fall.
One reason spices were treasured may be because back then, European food was much more bland that it is today. Think of all the foods of American origin which weren't known about (potatoes, sweet potatoes, corn, chili peppers, cocoa etc).
it might be a genetic thing or even an epi-genetic thing.
as a vegetarian spice is essential. a lot of indian vegetarian cuisine is about spice use such as frying seeds in oil, add some other powdered spices to make a paste, adding certain other spices near the end. etc etc.
Lol, I'm Indian, I am very well familiar with spices and "foreign" (by which you likely mean non-Western) foods in general. My point is that while spices are good, they are not mindblowingly good, like some drug. It's probably more a factor of me eating spices all my life and thinking that's normal, rather than eating bland food instead.
Your "charitable" ad-hominem is instead "severely lacking" in substance.
They always dance around hallucinogenic plants. Just admit people have basically been dropping acid for centuries