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and children who scraped the congealed sap off wounds in the poppies with a small iron scoop.
    Yet the earliest find of opium itself comes from Egypt where a sample was discovered in the tomb of Cha, dating to the fifteenth century BC . At around the same time, the Egyptian city of Thebes was so famous for its poppy fields that Egyptian opium was known as Thebic opium. The alkaloid, thebaine, obtains it name from the city. In the Therapeutic Papyrus of Thebes, dated 1552 BC , and in other sources such as the Veterinary and Gynaecological Papyri from Kahun, dated between 2160 and 1788 BC , opium is prominently, listed with other natural remedies and drugs: in the former – sometimes known as the Papyrus of Ebers after its discoverer, Georg Moritz Ebers – opium is included in 700 remedies, one chapter specifically prescribing it as a paregoric to calm fractious children. The prescription demanded opium be mixed with fly droppings, pulped, sieved and taken for four days.
    For the Greek civilisation, opium was a commonplace. In the third century BC , Theophrastus referred to the sap of the pod as opion whilst he called poppy juice meconion, obtained by crushing the entire plant. This is an interesting fact for it suggests he had a specific knowledge that the sap contained a substance and that he may have been acquainted with separating it out although, at the time, the general method of taking opium was to crush the pod in wine or a honey and water solution. The method of incising the pod to gather the sap, developed by the Assyrians and used to this day, was lost until the technique was re-invented or rediscovered about AD 40 by Scribonius Largus, physician to the Emperor Claudius.
    In AD 77, Dioscorides wrote that opium was best obtained by the careful grazing of the pod, although he was just as familiar with other applications of the poppy. He recorded:
    Poppies possess as it were a cooling power, therefore the leaves and head when boiled in water bring sleep. The decoction is also drunk to remedy insomnia. Finely powdered and added to groats, the heads make an effective poultice for swellings and erysipelas. They must be crushed when still green, shaped into tablets then dried for storage. If the heads themselves are boiled in water until the liquid is reduced to half then boiled with honey until a syrup forms, they may make a sweetmeat with an anodyne action.
    Both Dioscorides and Theophrastus, whilst noting opium induced sleep and numbed pain, did not consider its effects upon the brain which were generally disregarded although the philosopher Diagoras of Melos was cognisant of the drug’s snare. Living in the third century BC , he declared it was better to suffer pain than to become dependent upon opium, a view shared earlier in the fifth century BC by Erasistratus who advocated the complete eschewal of opium.
    Apart from its medicinal use, opium also served the Greeks in a spiritual or occult capacity. It was most likely employed by initiates to the cult of Demeter for there is a legend which decrees that, in her search of her daughter Persephone, the goddess came to Sicyon, at one time called Mecone (the city of poppies), in the fields of which she picked the flowers and cut open their unripe pods. Tasting the gum which exuded from them, Demeter forgot her sorrows. Statues and portraits of the goddess frequently show her grasping a poppy instead of a sheaf of corn whilst the flower decorates her altars. There is a further suggestion: in her rites conducted at Eleusis, opium was taken to aid in the forgetting of the sadness of the death of the year, the short drug-induced sleep being a symbol for the passage of winter before the rejuvenation of spring. The medical priests of Aesculapeius administered opium to those who visited Epidaurus to seek a cure for illness. The sick slept in the sanctuary of the temple, the priests procuring healing dreams for them.
    As long as opium was in the hands of priests it was