Cumin, Camels, and Caravans

by Nabhan, Gary Paul

  Only through the use of aerial photography have archaeologists been able to realize how richly the Nabataeans had transformed the Negev into a network of signposts marking trade routes and outposts replete with freshwater reserves. The signposts take the form of isolated boulders and cliff faces where Nabataeans scratched their pale messages into the dark desert varnish that had accumulated over the millennia. These messages were mostly left in their Kufic-like script, but it appears that others were left in Safaitic, Thamudic, Aramaic, and even Greek alphabets, for perhaps they were used as “code languages” by Nabataean polyglots. Some of their signs are directional, such as “Go east, over the ridge and into the wadi for water.” Others document a missed rendezvous: Sa’id ma shaf Sud plaintively reports that “Sa’id didn’t get to see his friend Sud” after all the work it took to arrange and attempt an illfated reunion.13

  FIGURE 7. Wells in extremely arid landscapes such as the Negev were critical to keeping Nabataean traders alive. (Courtesy Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, www.loc.gov/pictures/item/mpc2004005723/PP.)

  By 50 CE, these signposts also pointed to another, unprecedented set of developments in the Negev: islandlike vineyards, orchards, and flood-water fields of fodder and staple crops.

  Yes, crops. As noted earlier, at first, all Nabataeans adhered to a taboo against cultivating the soil; instead, they traded, raided, herded, or reaped the wild harvests that the desert offered. Although they flourished because of their tenacious control of certain trade routes, it was perhaps inevitable that the Romans and others would try to capture or circumvent those routes. At some point during the first century CE, anticipating that the larger armies and arsenals of the Romans might bear down on their trade centers, the Nabataeans lifted their selfimposed ban on farming. They then used their extensive knowledge of water harvesting to grow crops in some of the driest places that agriculture has ever been practiced. To avoid domination by their Roman competitors, the Nabataeans began to target their agricultural production to provide the foodstuffs in scarcest supply throughout the Roman Empire. As archaeologist Douglas Comer has explained,

  Wealth from agriculture became more important as what had been a spectacular source of wealth from trade attenuated. For hundreds of years before the time of Christ, the Nabateans enjoyed a virtual monopoly on the trade of spices, incense and other precious goods from Southeast Asia and Africa, transporting them from the southern tip of the Arabian Peninsula to the Mediterranean, over which they were shipped to Rome. Only the Nabateans knew the routes across the Empty Quarter. But beginning with Pompey’s war on the pirates in 66 BC, sea lanes were gradually made safer, finally breaking the hold that the Nabateans had on the transportation system of the Arabian Peninsula. . . . [And so, they turned to exporting transportable cereals.] Agricultural producers would have found a ready market in the Roman Empire, which suffered a shortage of grain that has been compared to the chronic shortage of oil throughout much of the developed world.14

  The Nabataeans suddenly shifted from trade in wild spices and incense to the production and trade of agricultural commodities. They became some of the world’s first cereal commodity brokers, holding or dumping grains into markets to profit from drought, plagues, famines, or inflation in one part of the empire or another. They not only offered the grains themselves to the Romans, Greeks, and Persians but also introduced certain cereal-based condiments, such as the fermented balls of barley dough that became widely known as bunn.15

  In some ways, Nabataean grain traders played an economic role much like that of Glencore International, a multinational brokerage firm that today controls a quarter of the world’s barley, rape, and sunflower-seed supply and a tenth of its wheat supply. Although Glencore is far from a household word, the transnational firm and its subsidiaries are valued at more than $60 billion and hold assets worth over $79 billion, including half of the world’s available copper supply, a third of the aluminum supply, and a quarter of the thermal coal supply. When its shares went public on the London Stock Exchange in the summer of 2011, its chief executive officer made an estimated $9 billion in a matter of weeks. Without Glencore ever actually holding large stores of these commodities in its own facilities for very long, it is, according to Al Jazeera, “profiteering from hunger and chaos.” As Chris Hinde, a mining industry analyst, told Al Jazeera’s Chris Arsenault, “They are the stockbrokers of the commodities business [that operate] in a fairly secretive world. They are effectively setting the price for some very important commodities.”16

  The Nabataean shift in roles from desert traders, herders, and foragers to irrigation farmers ultimately transformed the desert in which they had lived, but the extent of that transformation was not realized until centuries later. Around 1870, the archaeologist E. H. Palmer began to map the thousands of intentionally shaped mounds of cobbles where grapes once grew—the enigmatic tuleilat el-anab.17 They were moisture catchers, agrohydrological structures that were engineered to condense, capture, and deliver fog and dew to fuel the growth of the vines, wheat, and fruit trees. Not long after Palmer, others discovered lengthy alignments of cobbles that channeled the infrequent storm runoff from square miles of desert down into fertile terraced grain fields on the floodplains.

  Just twenty-five miles north of where my bus sped out of Eilat, archaeologists noticed a series of round features on the ground near Ain Ghadian. They looked at first like bomb craters, and then like prayer beads strung on a necklace.18 It took considerable effort by a desertsoil scientist who had once worked with hydraulic engineers to identify these features and definitively determine their function.

  These later Nabataean innovations were clandestine water catchments linked through well-like shafts connected to a horizontal tunnel that tapped into groundwater and harvested rainwater and stored them both in underground cisterns. The scientist who discovered their efficacy and extent, Berel Aisenstein, referred to these ingenious Nabataean creations as “artificial springs.”19 These chains of wells were so effective in providing a steady flow of fresh drinking water that Nabataeans were able to survive in areas that received as little as a single inch of rainfall in a drought year! They are called qanats in several Semitic languages, and that term may be at the root of a tree of words now widely used in water management. The related words canal, channel, cane, and alcantarilla are in use around the globe.20

  I knew that such water-harvesting techniques had also been employed by the Nabataeans some one hundred miles away from Eilat, in the canyons where their capital of Petra was wedged into a mountain range accessible only through a slot canyon. But just how could a prehistoric city of twenty thousand to thirty thousand inhabitants ever be supported by a climate this dry? Certainly, spices did not suffice. Man cannot live on cinnamon, saffron, or sage alone. The average annual rainfall recorded in the Negev varied from three to nine inches among sites, and from one to thirteen inches among years. As I considered the possibilities for self-sufficiency there from a farmer’s perspective, I realized that was not much to work with to support a family, let alone a civilization.

  Of course, the answer depends on what is meant by “support.” The Nabataeans did indeed improvise some astonishing means of securing water and food from wadis that ran with floods only a few times each year, and they did so through hydraulic public works projects paid for by the profits from their spice trade. Perhaps with labor provided by the newcomers to their mercantile culture, they moved thousands of tons of stone, built water catchments, and hid their drinking water cisterns in ways that amazed travelers who accidentally stumbled on them.

  After centuries of lucrative trading, they had gained enough wealth to employ countless workers to lay out rock alignments and construct check dams that harvested the runoff from the stony slopes of ridges, funneling it into their fertile floodplain fields, thereby “multiplying” the rainfall available to their plots of arable land. In these ways, they were apparently able to grow enough dates, stone fruits, figs, grains, and leg
umes to keep their camel drovers and warriors well nourished.

  But they were also growing a highly stratified society, as most nations with a wealthy mercantile class have done since that time. Unfortunately, they had taken up fixed abodes and invested considerable infrastructure in certain caravansaries, which made them more vulnerable to forces competing for control of the spice and incense trade.

  As with the Minaeans, it was not primarily their local food production that supported the development of their sophisticated culture. Instead, it was the wealth and bargaining power they accumulated as the preeminent traders in the entire Middle East during their era. They rigorously managed all spice trade along several routes, each with its own string of hidden outposts. Their franchises of protected caravansaries stretched from the oases of Yemen, down through Yathrib, and on to Gaza, Petra, and Mount Houran. Through them, for a moment in time, the Nabataeans gained control of the price of frankincense, labdanum, cumin, cinnamon, and other aromatics all the way up to Rome and Athens, despite some initially futile attempts by the Romans and Greeks to wrest control away from them.

  Ultimately, when a well-equipped Roman army swarmed into the oasis of Egra on the Red Sea coast, the entire Nabataean army was devastated while attempting to fend off the invaders, and their trade monopoly was dissipated. By 80 CE, the Nabataeans had permanently lost their exclusive access to Yemen’s bounty because they had become far too dependent on a single source of wealth. The Romans realized that they could easily establish alternative trade routes that altogether circumvented the Nabataean kingdom.21 Within a matter of decades, the Romans had annexed Nabataea and Idumaea, and the Nabataean identity gradually withered and died. It is therefore quite remarkable that more than six centuries later, Persian cookbook writer Ibn Sayyār al-Warrāq attributed certain hearty stews of Syrian Christians to their ancestors among the Nabataeans, calling the recipes nabātiyyāt.22

  But until that moment in time, the Nabataeans had greatly profited from the wealth developing in the city-states of Mediterranean Europe, just as today’s Latin American cartels ultimately depend on drug addicts with access to the wealth of the north. The Roman elite had become obsessed with the fragrance of frankincense and other precious aromatics, squandering much of their gross metropolitan product on purchase. According to economic historian William J. Bernstein, the Romans wrapped up a considerable portion of their wealth in the conspicuous consumption of aromatics: “A significant part of the Roman booty went toward the purchase of incense. . . . Alongside the sacrificial altar, standing on a tripod, was the acera in which frankincense was placed. So central was the burning of this aromatic to Roman ritual that it was admitted into the empire duty-free, in contrast to the 25 percent duty on most other imports.”23

  Although many history books credit the Greeks and Romans with being the primary sculptors of Western civilization, perhaps it was really the Nabataeans who exercised the greatest control over the world trade of the era. They also influenced culinary practices and demonstrated a remarkable capacity to access the rest of the world’s treasures. And yet, except for their graffiti casually left as petroglyphs on the boulders of the Negev’s regs, we know very little about the private and spiritual lives of these Semitic spice traders. It can only be conjectured that the earliest-recognized Nabataeans worshipped multiple gods, including the sun god Dushara and the fertility goddess al-Lãt. Both of these deities were first recorded among the Arab tribe known as the Banu Thaqif. But as the Nabataeans became more conversant in the Aramaic language and its sensibilities, it appears that their religion was transformed into one that was more monotheistic.

  They soon realized that their own practice of any religion could be linked to making social and political alliances that could then provide them with more economic opportunities. As their territory expanded into Idumaea and they established trade partnerships with the Jews, the Nabataeans converted to Judaism. Later still—after 70 CE and the fall of the Temple in Jerusalem—some of them became Christians, hoping perhaps that this change would facilitate their trade with the Catholic elite of Rome. And yet, as time went on, and their own language gradually returned to its Arabic roots, their writing and bartering in Aramaic were abandoned, and their descendants converted to Islam.

  The Nabataeans had become shape-shifters, first nomadic herders and foragers, then pirates, then skippers of ships, then merchants, and then cereal commodity speculators and public-works administrators. Within a matter of centuries, they changed their beliefs from pantheism to polytheism to monotheism, perhaps to secure stronger social relationships with power brokers along their trade routes and their destination points. They learned and absorbed other languages and sequentially adopted Judaism, Christianity, and then Islam. Up until their final era, each time that they outwardly shifted religions, they gained opportunities to strengthen their intercontinental trade alliances.

  They had learned to put a “spin” on the stories of the spices they marketed, and in doing so, perhaps they learned to do a makeover of their own lives and beliefs whenever it seemed needed. In fact, they may have been among the first great cultures on the planet to succumb to the mind games of economically driven spin doctors. Incense and other psychotropic plants were the medications they offered to placate the masses.

  Those masses, for the most part, were situated in the coastal ports of the Mediterranean and the marshlands of Mesopotamia. I have been particularly struck by the abundance of archival documents from Rome and Athens that confirm that frankincense, pepper, and cinnamon were not merely the curios of the elite.24 Nearly every household in these city-states regularly burnt incense, if only to disperse the horrendous scents that emanated from the bodies of the seldom bathed, the butcher shops, and the sewage reservoirs. Heavenly scents kept the masses from being constantly repulsed by the stench and stupor of their everyday labors. Just as the urban poor today may purchase cell phones or designer jeans as status symbols, whether they can afford them or not, the poor of the ancient Mediterranean sought out fragrances, flavors, and infusions to assert their worldliness even as these extravagances drained them of their little wealth.

  It came to be understood, at least by a few, that trade can impoverish, just as surely as it can enhance or enrich. Julius Caesar himself attempted in vain to regulate the Roman culture of excess that was consuming his empire’s wealth. He went so far as to send out SWAT teams of food and incense police into markets and private homes to ferret out those who were so fixated on conspicuous consumption that they were not only bankrupting themselves but the empire as well.25

  Of course, I had arrived in this dry land far too late for a chance to speak to Nabataean traders about their notion of globalization, or to hear them articulate their marketing strategies for spices. But I could, through the glass darkly, see how their legacies have continued to spin in the souks of Jerusalem.

  The bus had begun to climb up out of the Negev, past the Dead Sea, and into the better-watered hills of Jerusalem and Bethlehem. When it arrived at last in the so-called Holiest of Cities, Father Dave and I found a place to stay, and then I set out on foot to its oldest quarters, the ones that Nabataean traders had once frequented. At least eight hundred merchants still hawk their wares within the Old City.

  The walls surrounding the Old City were completed in 1538, but some of the sections of cut stone were first put into place more than two thousand years ago. Walking through the Damascus Gate, the northfacing entrance to the Christian and Muslim quarters, I went down some stairs and along Souk Khan Ez-Zeit Street until I arrived at Souk al-Attarin, the market where spice trade had occurred in Jerusalem for the longest duration.

  There were virtually no spices to be seen. The site had become populated by dry-goods vendors, with their stalls full of sneakers, sandals, satchels, and duffle bags.

  I moved away from the stacks of factory-made materials and meandered down the crowded paths of the Christian Quarter until I spotted the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. Regaining my orie
ntation, I turned toward the three stone arches forming the entry to Souk Aftimos, once reputed to be the largest spice emporium in Jerusalem.

  I visited one stall after another of Armenian and Jewish spice merchants. They stood behind pyramidal piles of speckled brown za’atar, yellow turmeric, beige cumin, and red sumac powder. Some stalls offered thick chunks of incense, not only frankincense and myrrh, but jasmine and rose and specialty blends mixed on the spot to satisfy the customer’s desire.

  But these improvisational spice blenders were few and far between. Most of the vendors offered prepackaged “souvenirs” of three to four kinds of incense, hermetically sealed in cellophane or plastic bags and embedded in carry-on-the-plane boxes branded as “Jerusalem incense” or “gifts of the Magi.” Needless to say, I could not smell a thing through all the layers of protective packaging. I noticed that most of the tourists took digital photos of the spice vendors and gave them cheap tips, but few took any spices and incense back home with them. Instead, they headed toward the Jewish Quarter, where the “real” souvenirs were: Dead Sea body-care products and olive oil soaps, Jesus sandals and Druse hand bags, anointing oils, postcards, and T-shirts. Most were made in China, but that did not seem to bother the shoppers. These were the items most sought after by the million or so “religious tourists” who venture into the Old City in the average year.