Blogger's note: I was away for the last week traveling to Izmir, Turkey to visit Ephesus, a truly amazing place and one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World. The facade of the library of Celsus at Ephesus is still standing and is spectacular. The library contained many scrolls that were made of hemp (per the US Hemp Museum). Evidence has been found of hemp fibers used for garments and rope as well as scrolls.

There is also a well preserved theater that could seat 24,000 people.

The copy below is from the US Hemp Museum website:

Spreading the Seed

Wherever the people of the ancient world roamed, they carried with them the seeds of the precious cannabis plant. From China in the east to the Rhone Valley in the west, the seeds were spread. Cold weather, hot weather, wet or dry, fertile soil or barren, the seeds were not to be denied. Except in India and China, most of the ancient world was completely ignorant of the intoxicating properties of the plant. Ancient European legends and herbals had little to say regarding its peculiar psychological effects. If Europeans saw any magic in cannabis, it was its fibers, not its intoxicating power that aroused their awe and admiration. Farther to the south, however, cannabis eventually inspired sentiments of a different kind in a people who challenged Europe for world domination.

A black ship of the Achaeans, painted by David Claudon, is based on an ancient Greek pottery painting. A major structure is the Library of Celsus that once contained hundreds of scrolls, many of hemp. Today, the two-storey front facade and part of the other walls remain. The farthest west hemp fibers have ever been found in the ancient world is Turkey. Archaeologists who sifted through artifacts dating back to the time of the Phrygians (a tribe of Aryans who invaded that country around 1000 B.C.) unearthed pieces of fabric containing hemp fibers in the debris around Gordion, an ancient city located near present-day Ankara. 

Although the Scythians had contacts with the people of Babylonia, who lived to the west of the Phrygians, no hemp fiber or definite mention of hemp (Cannabis sativa) to the west of Turkey can be found until the time of the Greeks. In the ruins of El Amarna, the city of Akhenaton (the Pharaoh who tried to introduce monotheism to ancient Egypt), archaeologists found a "three ply hemp cord"  in the hole of a stone and a large mat bound with "hemp cords", but unfortunately they did not specify the type of hemp. Many different bast fibers were called hemp and no one can be certain that the fibers at El Amarna are cannabis, especially since Deccan hemp (Hibiscus cannabinus) grows in Egypt.

The earliest unmistakable reference to cannabis in Egypt does not occur until the third century A.D., when the Roman emperor Aurelian imposed a tax on Egyptian cannabis. Even then, however, there was very little of the fiber in Egypt. While the ancient Greeks remained ignorant of the intoxicating properties of the cannabis plant, they were not slow to appreciate the durability and strength of its fiber. As early as the sixth century B.C., Greek merchants whose Milesian colonies served as a middle station between mainland Greece and the eastern coast of Asia Minor, had been carrying on a lucrative business transporting cannabis fiber to the ports along the Aegean.

The Thracians, a Greek-speaking people living in the Balkans who were likely more closely related to the Scythians than to the Greeks, were especially adept at working hemp. Writing around 450 B.C., Herodotus says of their clothes that they "were so like linen that none but a very experienced could tell whether they were of hemp or flax; one who had never seen hemp would certainly suppose them to be linen.”