Thanks to imports from Asia and Africa, such dishes were soon “peppered” with new herbs and spices, sweetened with honey and cane sugar, and laced with the astringent juices of sour oranges and kaffir limes. In addition, these newly abundant foodstuffs from other lands became perceived as so luxuriantly exotic that they dazzled nearly all those who traded with the Omanis, and soon they were lavishly expensive in the political and economic capitals of the Greek, Roman, Mesopotamian, and Ptolemaic empires. It was as if the power mongers of Athens, Rome, Alexandria, Lygos (Byzantium), and Babylon were uncontrollably smitten by the potent aromas and flavors, if only for the enhanced status they gained through the conspicuous consumption of the fashionable imports. Today, it is hard to imagine how makeshift camps of herders or small villages of peasant farmers were able to satisfy the demands of the city-states for such luxuries and novelties for several centuries running.
The unquenchable thirst of the sedentary gave Omani seafarers more than enough incentive to venture forth, to learn foreign languages in order to negotiate directly with spice producers, and to advance their navigating and provisioning skills so that they could survive months at sea without suffering from scurvy or being buffeted by cyclonic storms. Certainly by 100 BCE, and perhaps much earlier, they were regularly acquiring Chinese goods, if not through purchases in China, perhaps by meeting the Chinese themselves or their intermediaries on the Malabar Coast, in Malaysia, or in the Moluccas. The Chinese did not distinguish among Persian and Arab ships when they first encountered them near the Gulf of Tonkin; they simply referred to them as shang-hu, or “foreign merchants.” Black and white pepper, cassia and true cinnamon, nutmeg and mace, star anise and cloves all came into their hands and were stored in their holds. The geographic area from which they extracted aromatics expanded to include the farthest reaches of the known world.
Of course, by this time, various kinds of incense were no longer the only major product lines, nor even the ones determining exactly where most trade routes should run. Asian products such as silk, musk, and medicinal plants had become immensely valuable. Some of these traveled overland from Central Asia by camel to the southern or western ports of India.
Omani Arabs and even the Phoenicians had earlier traveled into the hinterlands by camel caravan to secure such products, but the ease of moving these goods as far as possible by sea began to trump other factors involving trade logistics and costs. Boats were built to be larger, stronger, and swifter; the caravans could never scale up in the same manner by simply increasing the size of load per animal or by recruiting additional donkeys, mules, horses, camels, or elephants. Beasts of burden did not become obsolete, however. Indeed, so-called camel bag teas can still be found in marketplaces today, because the long hours spent in the desert on the back of a camel imbue the tea leaves with an aroma unlike any other!
So it turns out that the question sometimes raised by the historically curious as to whether Arab and Jewish traders first got to China by land or by sea may not be that interesting or revealing. Many of the early (pre-Christian and pre-Islamic) traders from Oman probably used both means of transport on the same trip, as did their Asian counterparts. The trade crew likely included Arabs who practiced some rudimentary form of Judaism, along with others who remained polytheistic, whether guided by multiple gods or by shamanistic encounters with jinn.
The terms Arab and Jew were not used as mutually exclusive categories, for it appears that various Semitic groups, in addition to the Canaanites, had become followers of Moses (Moshe or Musa), the prophet who came out of Egypt and into Sinai, where he had his revelatory experience. Jewish sailors and traders remained integrated into Arab communities for many more centuries. With the advent of Islam, they, along with early Christians and Sabians, became known as the dhimmi, or People of the Book. The dhimmi were required to pay a tax to their Muslim hosts in exchange for right of residence and for protection that afforded the opportunity to practice certain rituals otherwise prohibited in Muslim communities. This special status of dhimmitude fostered tolerance over most of their shared history, and only began to erode with the rise of secularism in the seventeenth century.
While in Oman, I visited a UNESCO museum that celebrates the trade history of frankincense. There I was surprised to see a copy of an ancient manuscript written by one of the earliest documented Omani spice traders in the East. He was certainly not among the very first involved in the Sino-Arab trade I have just described, for such trade had begun centuries before he was born, but he had nevertheless arrived in China and written of his experiences there by 750, some five hundred years prior to the fanciful accounts of the illiterate Marco Polo, which were put down on paper by one of his prison mates, Rustichello.7
The name of Oman’s own Polo-like hero has never become a household word in the Arab world, let alone in the West: Obeida bin Abdulla bin al-Qasim. It is not that Arabs refrain from honoring their heroes and pioneers, but rather that Arab scholars know that he was but one of thousands of traders who reached China prior to the arrival of any Europeans. The only reason to single him out, perhaps, is that his record of early China in Arabic has survived intact. But because it is not as captivating as accounts of Asian trade written centuries later by the erudite and immensely colorful Ibn Battuta, it has never been highly regarded outside of Oman. As I looked through the glass of the protective case that held this precious manuscript, I realized that most of the Arabs around me in the museum were not impressed by the document. Indeed, many of them likely considered it run of the mill. Any true Arab scholar of maritime history could probably name a dozen such accounts.
Although the first entry date remains conjecture, it is well established in documents written in second and third person that Arab seafarers from Oman and Yemen were regularly arriving in what we now call Malaysia and perhaps in China by 500, some 250 years before Abu Obeida wrote extensively of his experiences. In the briefer and more casual reports by earlier Arab seafarers, China is known as the Middle Kingdom, perhaps because the Mongols were known to be to the north of them. Well before the adoption and spread of Islam, Omani seafarers (including Jewish merchants) set off from Sohar or Muscat, stopped briefly in Basra near the apex of the Arabian Gulf, and then headed south to Siraf (in present-day Iran) or to Qays, farther south in the Persian Gulf, and on to the Malabar Coast. During this era, the Omani Arabs were not alone in combining overland trade with shipping by sea through the Persian Gulf and Indian Ocean.
The Phoenicians and Persians (or Parthians) were there early on, as were the Chaldeans and Gujaratis. Many of the ports on both sides of the gulf were in fact multicultural and excluded only the Greeks and Romans. Semitic languages, Farsi, and Hindi were all spoken. The caravansaries above harbors like the Chaldean port of Gerrha had to accommodate camels as well as elephants and drovers as well as sailors. Pearls were as common as purple dyes, and central Asian deer musk was as much in demand as Yemeni frankincense. Coriander, cumin, anise, and sesame came in from several directions.
At some time prior to 140 BCE, the Chinese themselves had begun to arrive in these Indian and Chaldean ports to trade directly with the Arabs and Jews from Syria, Oman, and Yemen who congregated there. During the Han dynasty, from 206 BCE to 25 CE, Chaldea was known as T’iao-chih by the Chinese and was accessible by both land and sea, with the maritime route taking roughly one hundred days. The Chinese of this era were also familiar with Petra, which they called Li-chien. And yet, it appears that the Tang dynasty Chinese preferred the Semitic seafarers and traders to come to them, for they lamented that “there is something in the sea which is apt to make a man homesick, and several have thus lost their lives.”8
What this brief commentary reveals is that while other cultures such as the Chinese may have had immense seafaring capacity as early as the Semitic tribes, they were more prone than the Omanis, Nabataeans, and Phoenicians to get in and get out, to return to their motherland, the seat of their culture and religion. In contrast, the Semitic sensibiliti
es somehow allowed their merchants to establish satellite communities far from their holy places and shrines, to stave off any lingering sense of homesickness, and to adopt another tongue as their lingua franca, without a profound loss of cultural or personal identity. It seemed that they would adapt to any circumstance to ensure successful trade and have outstanding adventures to tell about later.
It was in the context of this trade network centered on the Persian Gulf and Indian Ocean that spice traders took the next big leap. According to the accounts in The Periplus of the Erythraean Sea, written between 50 and 60 CE, the Greeks began to sail directly across the open waters of the Indian Ocean both ways, by careful seasonal use of the monsoon winds. Others, including the Arabs, had either accomplished the same feat earlier, unnoticed by the Europeans, or had soon followed, leaving the shallows of the continental shelf for deeper, more dangerous waters. In both a physical and psychological sense, the seafaring spice traders were at last untethered, sailing for days beyond the sight of land with no shallow shoals beneath their rudders. They had achieved the maritime equivalent of leaving the earth’s gravitational pull to depart for the moon or for other planets.
Once they had sped from the Arabian Peninsula across the entire Indian Ocean in less than forty days, it was only a matter of time before they passed the Land of Serendip (today’s Sri Lanka) to thread the needle of the Strait of Malacca, where the greatly sought-after cloves, nutmeg, and mace awaited them. From Socotra or Yemen’s port of Aden, they would quickly pass over to the Horn of Africa, but once south of the horn itself, they would take to open waters again. In time, these Omani seafaring dynasties would colonize the Lamu Archipelago near Kenya and the islands off the Spice Coast known as Zanzibar. Once they had arrived at Zanzibar and had begun to procure products from the strangely exotic flora, the Arab seafarers may as well have reached an altogether foreign planet. Life there was simply not created under the same constraints and conditions as those in the nejd, where the sky rarely rains and the ground can hardly be called soil.
The possibilities for extracting novel natural resources and taking them to distant markets suddenly seemed boundless, as if some Dr. Seuss-like creator had fashioned altogether-different suites of bizarre species for traders to carry from one continent or island to the next. (This experience of discovering exotic flora would be echoed later in history, when Christians, Jews, and Muslims reached the Caribbean islands and American continents and extracted previously unforeseen plant products from them for the Columbian Exchange.) The Old World had at last become one large shopping mall with a panoply of “factory outlets” providing access to a seemingly infinite variety of plant and animal chemicals to sniff, savor, and consume.
FIGURE 9. Open-sea transport of spices catapulted regional delicacies into global markets. Cloves, once available only in the Spice Islands, began reaching India, China, and Rome. In the nineteenth century, Zanzibar became the world’s leading producer of cloves, shown here spread out to dry. (Courtesy Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, www.loc.gov/pictures/item/2001705556.)
But the task that lay ahead of the spice merchants was still a daunting one: how to consolidate these far-flung sources of goods into a cohesive system of trade, with shared systems of currency, valuation, and taxation that would stretch from Madagascar to the Maghreb to the Middle Kingdom.
• • •
• SESAME •
The raw or toasted seeds of Sesamum indicum offer a pleasantly sharp, somewhat nutty flavor that favors their use as both a spice and a cooking oil. In fact, the seeds are 60 percent oil by weight, and the sesame plant may be the source of the world’s first cultivated oil seed, having been domesticated on the Indian subcontinent well before the written records of all Eurasian and African civilizations. An annual herb with lovely tubular flowers, it produces small, teardrop-shaped seeds that come in all shades of white, beige, pale red, brown, and jet black.
Most of the wild relatives of sesame are found in Africa, but one particular wild ancestor, S. orientale var. malabaricum, is restricted to the Indian subcontinent. The oldest sesame seeds found in an archaeological context come from the Indus Valley site at Harappa, now in Pakistan, which dates back four thousand to forty-six hundred years. This discovery appears to indicate that sesame was domesticated more than four and a half millennia ago somewhere on the Indian subcontinent, and probably spread from there to Mesopotamia within five hundred years (2000 BCE). Sesame seeds were pressed into the only oil used by the Babylonians, and reached the Egyptians by 1500 BCE. By 200 BCE, sesame had been grown in China long enough to become a prevalent crop. Curiously, much of the remaining diversity of sesame’s ancient varieties occurs between India and China. The many Chinese varieties spread westward into Central Asia along the Silk Roads. And of course, black sesame seeds coat many forms of sushi in both Japan and the United States.
My fellow ethnobotanist and long-time friend Dorothea Bedigian has called sesame a wanderwort, for various forms of its name became so widespread through early trade that it is difficult to establish its linguistic origin. Oddly, sesame seems to have come out of the Malabar Coast to reach Mesopotamia during the Early Bronze Age as taila or tila, a generic term in ancient Sanskrit that was used in northern India to refer to the oiliness of any seed. Along the same line, the Akkadian term šamaššammû means “oily” or “fatty seed.” The later related Assyrian term shaman shammi may have given rise to the Aramaic shumshema (also written as šumšêm), the ancient Arabic as-samn, and the modern Arabic as-simsim. The Hebrew term, sumsum, is similar. All connote oily seeds.
Today’s Modern Persian konjed is derived from the Middle Persian kunjid, which may have its roots in the classic Armenian küncüt or the Turkic künji. The related Hindi gingi may echo the rattle of the seeds in their dried capsules, as well. It may also be related to the ancient Arabic noun for “echo,” jaljala, which undoubtedly gave rise to the Spanish ajonjoli and the Maltese gulglien.
In the eastern reaches of its historical range, the Chinese terms hu ma, or “foreign hemp,” and zhima, or “oily hemp,” have long been used. In Africa, benne, benniseed, and similar words are used in many dialects and languages, and in the southern United States, benne continues to refer to sesame plants as a cover crop and wildlife forage.
The nuttiness of the tiny waferlike seeds is intensified by toasting, and there are sesame oils for those who enjoy that intensity and those who do not. The oil pressed from the untoasted seeds is pale but fragrant and is good for baking and for stir-frying and other high-heat cooking because it has a high smoke point. Toasted sesame oil, which is amber and has a robust flavor, is ideal for dressing salads or for adding to already-cooked dishes. It is seldom used for frying, as it has a low smoke point. The third “oil” product from sesame is the viscous paste known as as-simsim bi tahini in the Arabic-speaking world and as tahini elsewhere.
One of my earliest memories is of watching my Lebanese grandfather carefully whip tahini together with lemon juice to coat some fish he was frying. When my grandfather died, my father took up this same ritual with equal diligence. Both men regularly gifted me the brittle but delicious candy made from toasted sesame mixed with caramelized sugar that was distributed by the Sahadi family out of Brooklyn, New York. My love for this candy was one of the motivations that prompted me to become a partner in farming sesame amid ten acres of heritage grains and beans in Amado, Arizona.
Crushed and sweetened sesame seeds are used for making another kind of paste that is dried and hardened into the popular confection known as halvah from eastern Anatolia through Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, and Palestine. That same term, however, is used for a broader range of confections—some with sesame and some without—from Egypt through Morocco.
Throughout the Islamic and Jewish worlds, sesame seeds are sprinkled on round breads made with bran—both leavened and unleavened—called semit, or in Spanish, pan de semita. They remain popular from Turkey through the Levant and to North Africa. During
the Spanish Inquisition, the consumption of these breads was officially banned because of their cultural importance to Jews and Muslims in Spain as well as in its Latin American colonies. Of course, the bakers and their sesame bread went underground, only to reemerge in places as distant and divergent as San Antonio, Texas; Magdalena, in Sonora, Mexico; Santa Fe, New Mexico; and San Ignacio, in Baja California, Mexico.
Although Jewish historians have claimed that the presence of sesame-laced pan de semita in Mexico and the American Southwest is an indicator of crypto-Jewish presence, this bread could have also been introduced and sustained as a tradition by crypto-Muslims and Catholics descended from the heterogeneous populace of Andalusia. Indeed, one might argue that sesame seeds have accompanied Semitic peoples and others wherever they have migrated. Perhaps I am living evidence of that phenomenon. After occasionally growing a few sesame plants in my garden over the years, in 2011, I grew a small patch of sesame in southern Arizona, as just described, so that its seeds could be offered to artisanal bakers in my own adopted homeland.
Bedigian, Dorothea. “History of the Cultivation and Use of Sesame.” Introduction to Sesame: The Genus Sesamum. Edited by Dorothea Bedigian. Boca Raton, FL: CRC Press, 2011.
Gambrelle, Fabienne. The Flavor of Spices. Paris: Flammarion, 2008.
• CLOVES •
The dry, unopened floral bud of Eugenia caryophyllus looks like a reddish brown wooden nail, and so, as early as the Roman Empire, it was given the Latin name clove, or “nail.” Its pungent but sweet flavor has been described as “intense enough to burn the palate,” though many also find it to be a good oral anesthetic and an aphrodisiac.
Cumin, Camels, and Caravans Page 13