As soon as the sheep and goats were safe, the children walked me back to where their parents were camped. A middle-aged couple and an old man warmly welcomed me, then rolled out a carpet on the stony ground, sat me down, and not far from the carpet made a small wood fire on which to heat water. They prepared some shai nana’a (spearmint tea), offered us each a cup, and then poured cups for themselves. As we sipped our tea, the children came around to entertain us. When we got up to leave the campsite, the old man offered me a sandstone carving of a striped hyena consuming the head of a luckless tourist. I took it without question, giving him a few pounds and a couple of paisley bandanas in exchange.
Returning to our lodging just before dark, I realized that I could see the lights of Eilat, Israel, across the bay. Immediately to the right of them were the lights of Aqaba, Jordan. Long before these present-day resort towns illuminated the northern horizon from Taba, historic port towns had existed along the coast, where goods that had come from as far away as India were transferred to camel caravans for their trip into the desert.
The coastal ranges of Saudi Arabia across the gulf were also visible. From my vantage point, I could see how the northern reaches of the Red Sea are divided into four countries today. Twenty centuries ago, they were all part of one legendary nation of spice traders, a desert country with amorphous boundaries that the Jewish historian Josephus called the Nabatene kingdom, and whose itinerant traders were known from Ma’rib to Rome as the Nabatu. We call them the Nabataeans.
There was something about the Sinai’s scrappy Tarabin Bedouins that echoed the little that I knew about the ancient Nabataeans. Although a Nabataean presence is first evident in the archaeological record at the start of the fourth century BCE, their small nomadic clans are hardly mentioned in written documents for another several hundred years. In 312 BCE, Hieronymus of Cardia offered one of the first recorded observations of them. He worked with them in the gritty business of mining bitumen from the near-sterile edges of the Dead Sea. The Nabataeans then loaded up camels with as much as they could carry and headed off across the barren desert toward the cities of Egypt, where they hoped to trade this asphalt for foods grown on the fertile floodplain of the Nile.4
The Nabataeans of that era forbid their own people to cultivate any crops and were said to abhor being engaged in any practice of agriculture other than herding. And yet, they had to eat, so they traded what they could, whether it was goat hides or wild medicinal plants. By the second century BCE, the Greek geographer Agatharchides reported that the growing Nabataean population had become so depauperate and desperate that they had switched from raiding the few caravans that came across their stretch of desert to preying on another kind of caravan, the fleets out in the sea.5 In essence, the Nabataeans left the desert to become pirates who looted sailing ships throughout the Gulf of Aqaba, where they particularly enjoyed pouncing on hapless Egyptian sailors.
Ten thousand nomadic raiders strong, the early Nabataeans played the role of the bad boys of the Red Sea, accosting ships out in the gulf or caravans along its coast rather than practicing any farming or building their own fixed abodes. Some historians suggest that most of the Nabataeans of this time were descendants of the Bani Nabatu, one of the earliest recognized Semitic tribes of Arabia Felix. They were a people who had survived scarcity for centuries if not millennia, and they had become lean and mean in the process.
But as they gained a modicum of wealth, they worked hard to develop unprecedented modes of communication across desert landscapes. Both the Arabic alphabet and the Kufic calligraphy still used today for writing the Qur’an appear to be derived from their lovely ornamented cursive scripts.
Some scholars have suggested that the Nabataeans did not remain a single ethnic entity for very long, but became a heterogeneous community that absorbed other tribes.6 Gradually they wove together many influences, including Roman, Greek, Egyptian, and Hebrew, into a larger cultural and economic fabric. Together, they created a distinctive “fusion cuisine” of harira and chorba (hearty stews), murrī (a salty fermented barley paste), and kāmakh rījāl (a somewhat rancid but sharptasting cheese spread made by keeping yogurt in an open vessel for several weeks).7
The ancient Nabataean names for these foods spread in Aramaic to nearby Arabic and Hebrew dialects and then became loan words in Persian, Greek, and Roman tongues. Over time, the Nabataean amalgamation harbored an eclectic mix of Aramaic, Hebrew, and Arabic speakers who joined together as bands of outlaws, “redistributing” all of the loot that could be had between Alexandria and Jerusalem. Diodorus, a Greek historian born in Sicily and active from about 30 to 60 BCE, thought them to be mostly Arab herders who turned opportunistically to the sea whenever they could easily retrieve some booty by raiding.
A great number among them bring incense, myrrh and the most precious perfumes which they receive from Arabia Felix, via the ocean. . . . This tribe occupies a large part of the coast and not a little of the country which stretches inland, and it has a people beyond telling and flocks and herds in multitude beyond belief. Now, in ancient times these Arab men observed justice and were content with the food which they received from their flocks, but later, after the kings of Alexandria had made the ways of the sea navigable for their merchants, these Arabs not only attacked the shipwrecked, but fitted out pirate ships and preyed upon the voyagers. . . . After some years, however, they were themselves ambushed on the high seas by some larger ships and then punished for all their bad deeds.8
FIGURE 6. Harira stews became vehicles for introducing savory spices to a range of Persian, Arabian, and Berber populations. This lunch was offered by Berbers at Siwa Oasis in Egypt. (Photo by the author.)
Whatever their origins, the Nabataeans gradually shifted from looting others to trading. But they didn’t trade in the way that their neighbors had. They sought to more systematically control the management of most, if not all, of the land and sea trade emanating from the incense kingdoms. By employing long caravans of camels along hard-to-trace routes supplemented by sophisticated ships equipped with oars and sails, they completely eclipsed the Minaeans in dominating the many Frankincense Trails. As observed by Walter Weiss, the Nabatene kingdom “was an unusually peaceful state geared solely to profit from trade, with no real borders, no taxation or social unrest and very few slaves. Its strength was that it consistently managed to keep a distance between the producers and consumers of the goods it transported.”9
In essence, the Nabataeans became the first cultural community to be comprised largely of middlemen. They became spice, incense, and perfume brokers who developed, maintained, and controlled transcontinental trade networks. In fact, hardly any of the goods they moved along the Frankincense Trails were from their own lands. Their ecological niche was to serve as obligatory intermediaries in the trade of frankincense, myrrh, Indian spices, and other aromatics across the seas and between the continents.
To do so, most of them opted to live in the “empty space” between the grounds where the aromatics were gathered and the urban markets where they were destined to be used. For them, the desert and the sea had become little more than space to be crossed, for they no longer eked out a living directly from its local resources. What mattered most was their control of the caravansaries and other safe harbors that could serve as way stations on their journeys across such vastness.
Their “strength,” as Weiss calls it, was their insistence that consumers have no direct contact with producers. As long as they kept harvesters clueless about who desired their goods, and never divulged to end users where the goods had actually come from, they controlled the value chain along the Frankincense Trails. This mandate allowed the Nabataeans to profit immensely from the spice trade, for all others in the supply chain had little means of understanding the value embedded in other links in the chain.
Pliny the Elder noted that while incenses, spices, and other products passed through Nabataean hands on their way from Arabia Felix to Gaza, their value accrued to a hundredfo
ld of what it had been when the goods first entered their hands, whether hauled by camel caravan or shipped by coconut-wood dhows with lateen sails.
But the true genius of the Nabataeans may have been their capacity to keep the incenses, spices, salves, and silks destined for Europe, Africa, and Asia Minor imbued with a sense of wonder. They were marketing mystique as much as they were materials. Perhaps they had learned this strategy from the Minaeans who came before them. It was neither the caloric content nor the antiseptic value of the seeds, gums, leaves, and barks that sold cumin, cinnamon, frankincense, labdanum, or myrrh. Instead, sales depended on their compelling marketing of the mythic dimensions of these exotic goods. They essentially did what promoters of amaranth, extra-virgin olive oil, ginseng, and magic mushrooms continue to do today. Beyond the physical properties of the plant or fungus, they brokered the “placebo effect” to their own economic advantage.
For starters, the Nabataeans got the Europeans to believe that frankincense had to be expensive because of the stealth that it took to harvest it from the protected groves of southern Arabia. As the Greek historian Herodotus explained to his fellow Europeans, “When gathering frankincense, they burn storax [a resin of sweet gum trees] . . . and this storax raises a smoke that keeps away the small flying snakes. Great numbers of them keep guard over all the trees that bear the frankincense. Smoking them out with storax is the only way to get rid of them.”10
Consider for a moment the paradox of those juxtapositions: to enjoy access to divine incense, one must use another smoky fragrance to snatch the sacred substance away from evil serpents that otherwise serve to protect it! Although this legend was possibly told to Herodotus by some Minaean spice trader in the fifth century BCE, the Nabataeans made sure that such stories continued to circulate for several more centuries in the countries remote from the spice kingdoms of Arabia Felix. No doubt the Nabataeans themselves generated equally luminous stories about the places and peoples from which their frankincense was obtained.
By this era, no outsiders were permitted to come near the places of origin of frankincense or myrrh, nor even enter the caravansary where they were temporarily stored. Even the heart of Petra, the temple and trade center that ranked among the greatest in the world by the end of the first century CE, was physically and metaphorically hidden away in the rock.
Petra was the perfect physical manifestation of how the Nabataeans went about their work: its power and beauty were cloaked in mystery until the last moment before arrival, and then they were suddenly revealed in a manner that could only generate awe. Oddly, virtually no archaeological remains of frankincense and other aromatics have been found anywhere near the temples carved into the cliff faces of Petra. Perhaps they were sequestered elsewhere, hidden in nearby slot canyons where foreign soldiers or raiders would be unlikely ever to find them.
For several centuries, Nabataean traders supplied Alexandria, Al ‘Arīsh, Gaza, Jerusalem, Basra, and Damascus with most of their spices, dyes, gums, balms, incenses, and exotic herbs. They had a knack for working with other middlemen to obtain camel loads of silk and ginger from China, true cinnamon and pepper from Ceylon and India, aloe and dragon’s blood from Socotra, and nutmeg from the Spice Islands. Although they did not necessarily visit all of these source areas themselves, they did deal directly with many of their harvesters of aromatics. For six centuries, the Nabataeans moved thousands of tons of goods out of Yemen and Oman, taking them across the Arabian sands and seas to their ports of Luce Come and Aila (later called Elath and then Eilat). From there, the precious cargo went overland to Syria, Canaan, Egypt, and beyond.
I had wanted to follow the Nabataean trade routes northward across the Negev, first to Jerusalem and later to Damascus. But the tense political realities of that moment made it impossible to move easily among these countries. Because I was a Lebanese American who had previously visited relatives in Lebanon and Syria on the same passport I was currently carrying, I was interrogated for three hours at the Israeli port of entry at Eilat. It did not help that I shared a surname with an al-Qaeda operative leader from Somalia. Customs officials told me that I could not enter if I was planning to go on to Syria, even though it was only to have an audience with a cousin who had become mother superior of a convent! I was told that I would have to leave Israel by the same port of entry and then return to Egypt before I could make my way into Jordan (toward Petra). Plus, Syria would not let me enter if my passport carried an Israeli stamp. It all seemed daunting, so Father Dave and I opted for the simplest solution: to focus exclusively on the trail to Jerusalem and reserve Jordan and Syria for other trips.
Once inside Israel, Father Dave and I were disappointed that there was little to see of the old Nabataean and Roman ports of Aila in present-day Eilat. When I later spoke with archaeobotanist Peter Warnock, he confirmed that neither the Nabataean port of Aila nor the hidden trade center of Petra has yet to render much evidence of the trade items that passed through them. This is in part due to poor archaeological preservation of the ground herbs, spices, and dyes recovered there, unlike the relatively rich evidence of grains and beans. Thousands of tons of incense and spices may have been carried through the Negev long ago, but they left not a trace.
Perhaps this is because the aromatics that were funneled into the Nabataean ports and caravansaries were slated to depart soon after their arrival. Spice traders seldom made much money holding on to their merchandise for very long, since the potency of aromatic oils fades with time. Instead, they learned to maximize the rapid turnover of goods. I have seen this where I farm near the largest port of entry for produce coming into the United States, mostly from Mexico. The bulk of the cilantro, cucumbers, peppers, and tomatoes reaching the brokerage houses along the border remains there for less than two hours before being whisked away by semitrucks that haul their cargo northward another five hundred to one thousand miles.
While still in Israel, I continued to puzzle over this paradox: here I was, traveling in the desert between two of the world’s greatest prehistoric spice trade centers, Petra and Aila, and no archaeologist or tourist guide could point to any remains of the aromatics that had made these two sites so famous. The fragrance of their perfumes had dissipated; the incenses had gone up in smoke.
With little to see in Eilat, Father Dave and I boarded a bus and headed for Jerusalem, hoping to catch a glimpse of the ancient desert homeland of the Nabataeans along the way and then to survey the Old City’s souks for the spices and incense that are still traded today. I knew that the Nabataeans had once maintained an archipelago of water holes and way stations in the Negev like so many buoys bobbing in an open sea.
I had imagined spotting them from the highway as we rode along with conservatively dressed Hasidic Jews and Bedouins on the bus from Eilat to Jerusalem. Instead, I could see little from my speeding transport, which was fully packed with sun-tanned teenagers. We were surrounded by young Israeli Jews and by other “liberal” Jews visiting from Europe and America, all of them dressed in the latest beach fashion: designerbranded bikinis, Speedos, T-shirts, tank tops, and flip-flops. And yet it was not their dress that was unsettling; it was their social behavior, or lack of it. Most of them sat on their bus seats, silent, text messaging acquaintances on their mobile devices or listening to music through their headphones.
Like many youths from around the world, they could have been anywhere doing the very same thing, because they were nowhere. In some two hours, I noticed only a single teenager even glancing out of the bus windows, as if the desert itself might be of some interest.
It was an odd way to spend my first few hours in the Negev, the legendary heartland of the Nabataean kingdom, a superficially barren stretch of land that spanned the entire distance from the Red Sea to the Dead Sea. While my fellow passengers listened to their reggae, rock, and hip-hop, I focused on the Negev itself, a desert perhaps as dry and formidable as the nejd in southern Oman.
Except for a few remarkably verdant kibbutzim and date groves
nourished by treated sewage effluent, the land was perhaps more barren than when the later eras of Nabataeans had known it.11 To help me visualize this desert prior to the construction of Israel’s resorts, I returned to the journals of Stephens, the first American explorer to reach Petra from the apex of the Gulf of Aqaba:
Standing near the shore of this northern extremity of the Red Sea, I saw before me an immense sandy valley, which, without the aid of geological science, to the eye of common observation and reason, had once been the bottom of a sea or the bed of a river. . . . The valley varied from four to eight miles in breadth, and on each side were high, dark, and barren mountains, bounding it like a wall. On the left were the mountains of Judea, and on the right those of Seir . . . ; and among them, buried from the eyes of strangers, the approach to it known only to the wandering Bedouins, was the ancient capital of this kingdom, the [partially] excavated city of Petra . . . lay before me, in barrenness and desolation; no trees grew in the valley, and no verdure on the mountain tops. All was bare, dreary, and desolate.12
What Stephens could not see from the back of an Arabian horse—and what I could not spot from a speeding bus—was that the Negev lands north of Eilat were littered with petroglyph-inscribed boulders and pockmarked with a scatter of hidden cisterns and “chains of wells.” The Nabataeans controlled the Frankincense Trails by virtue of the intimate knowledge of where the scant supplies of water might be found along the routes from southern Yemen to the Levant.
The Nabataeans and their Idumean neighbors were among the finest desert hydrologists and geomorphologists the world has ever known. The hidden waters of the desert seldom eluded them. Even in the seemingly hostile moonscape of Machtesh Ramon, the largest natural crater in the Nabataean kingdom, they found the artesian flows of Ayn Zaharan, the water source now known among the Jews as Ein Saharonim. If the Nabataeans could control access to freshwater, the most precious and scarce substance on the entire Arabian Peninsula, they knew that they would control its spice trade. They would have made good nanotechnologists, for they were fascinated by the little things that could leverage large gains in wealth.
Cumin, Camels, and Caravans Page 9