Cumin, Camels, and Caravans

  The extraordinary reach of the Central Asian Muslim spice traders made for both good eating and memorable stories. Their impassioned poetry and music became incorporated aesthetically into Muslim feasts across a wide geographic range, with Persian and Arab sensibilities and folk stories fused into masterworks like One Thousand and One Nights. Later, Sufi poets such as Rumi and Hafiz would spread the metaphor of the caravansary around the world, their feast of words inspiring spiritual pilgrims and spice merchants alike from many cultural backgrounds. The trading of both stories and recipes from all over the empire ensured that poetic and gastronomic innovation went hand in hand.

  I have belatedly come to recognize that my Banu Nebhani ancestors are frequently mentioned in the Persian renditions of the corpus of stories known to Westerners as the Arabian Nights, although they are not always favorably portrayed. In several episodes, they come across as the nouveau riche from the Arabian Peninsula trying to buy or bludgeon their access to anything of interest in Basra or Mosul. Around the 640th night, the Banu Nebhani sheikh al-Hamal bin Májid, who had gained some wealth as a merchant of aromatics in the south, hears of the charms of a Persian emir’s beautiful daughter, Madhíyah. He offers to bring her “great company” in immediate exchange for her hand, and then dumps extravagant gifts on her doorstep, including a hundred slave girls and a hundred female camels laden with loads of ambergris, aloe, camphor, and jewels, as well as the rare faunal aromatic we now call musk. Not amused, Madhíyah categorically dismisses him as a yokel. Infuriated, al-Hamal kidnaps her while the emir is away at a friend’s wedding feast, killing many of her guards and forcing the others to flee.

  Of course, al-Hamal ultimately had to pay for his arrogant and impulsive actions, and his meaty head ended up skewered by a sword as if it were no more than another kebab made for roasting. Madhíyah, the beautiful maiden, was freed to live out her days feasting, fasting, and praying among Persians and Arabs who respected one another.

  In the regions to the north and east of their ancient peninsular homelands, the Arabs began to intermarry with the Persians who had fled from the sinking Sassanid Empire. Then, as they reached eastward into Central Asia, they established colonies and arranged marriages with other Farsi speakers, especially those Sogdian merchants who had already been dominating the trade among China, India, and Mesopotamia since the second or third century BCE. The musk that the Banu Nebhani sheikh had dumped at Madhíyah’s feet in the Arabian Nights had likely come west by way of Sogdian caravans.

  The Sogdians (who called themselves Turanians early on) have never been given much notice, let alone respect, by the Western world.12 That is odd, for the Chinese have long acknowledged the pivotal role Sogdians played in Eastern trade over the course of a thousand years. They remind us, as do the Gujaratis, Hindus, Berbers, and Italians, that Muslims and Jews were not the only innovators in spice commerce. The Sogdians first appeared on the world stage in a bit part as sedentary inhabitants of the fertile valley flanking the Zeravshan River. But as the riverside crossroads of Samarkand and Bukhara began to flourish as trade centers in the semiarid lands we now call Tajikistan and Uzbekistan, the Sogdians moved into the limelight. When Bactrian camels made their historic debut on the Central Asian stage, the Sogdians took on the lead role of the sabao, or caravanner. It was then that they took their very good show on the road, impressing even the most-seasoned Arab trader of aromatics.

  Like the Arabs, the Sogdians knew how to leverage global value out of some rather obscure product from the arid hinterlands. They drew on the Uighurs of the Taklimakan Desert, the Mongols of the Gobi, and the Tibetans of the high, dry plateaus to provide them with some of the world’s most potent aromatics, such as musk, camphor, and Sichuan pepper. They knew how to conceal the origins of such treasures and poetically heighten their mythic power and appeal. Fortunately, they had recruited a capable and resilient ally who could help them transport these precious substances out of the hinterlands and into the bazaars of the Islamic empire. That ally was none other than the Bactrian camel. Wherever I have come across these two-humped wonders, from Izmir, Turkey, to Turpan, China, I have immediately sensed that they are a force to be reckoned with.

  It would be difficult to overestimate how much the symbiosis of the Bactrian two-humped camel with Sogdian, Persian, and Arab caravanners changed the course of human history. The Bactrians do not simply carry one more hump than the dromedary of Arabia and Africa; they are stronger and sturdier and able to shoulder several hundred more pounds of goods. They are also highly adaptable and able to endure the extraordinary range of weather extremes, given that they evolved around the Gobi and the Taklimakan,13 where temperatures have been known to shift by as much as eighty degrees in a single day. I have witnessed them nonchalantly sitting below sea level in the Gobi at the foot of the Flaming Mountains on a 106-degree day in July; six months later, those same camels might be crossing the snowbound passes of the Tian Shan range fifteen thousand feet above the barren desert floor.

  Although they are named for the Bactrian region of present-day Afghanistan and Iran, it appears that they were first domesticated farther east around 2500 BCE. But as beasts of burden, Bactrian camels may not have been available as far west as the nursery grounds of the Bactrian and Sogdian peoples along the Zeravshan River for another millennium. Once the Sogdian traders and Bactrian camels joined forces, however, they were carrying loads twice as heavy and twice as far as the most durable dromedaries the Sabaeans, Minaeans, and Nabataeans had ever known. As camel historian Daniel Potts famously noted, if the Silk Roads became the bridge between the cultures and cuisines of the East and the West, the Bactrian camel became the locomotion across that bridge.14

  With the logistical dilemmas of moving large loads for long distances lessened by the Bactrian camels, the Sogdians transformed their trading hubs in Samarkand and Bukhara into just two of the many links in the chain that erroneously became known as the Silk Road.15 In truth, there were many paths that formed an interlinked network of corridors between the East and the West. No less than five camel routes led north or south of the Taklimakan and Gobi where they edge the Turpan Depression of western China. Along those stretches, the Sogdian sabao and their Bactrian camels may have carried more musk than silk or tea. Farther west, in the Sogdian heartlands, the Zeravshan became known as the River of the Sabao, and its sumptuous fruits became renowned as the Golden Peaches of Samarkand as far east as coastal China and Korea.16

  As the Sogdians enlisted Persian and Arab capital to build and secure other caravansaries along the trade routes emanating from Central Asia, they used these strongholds for more than just occasional stays while passing through. They took to harboring colonies of Muslim, Orthodox Christian, Nestorian, and Bukharan Jewish merchants far beyond their original homelands. Regardless of who ruled the steppes at any particular moment, the Arab-Persian-Sogdian alliance stayed in charge of trade at least as far east as the Chinese capital of Chang’an. Now known as Xi’an, and still home to more than fifty thousand Muslims of Arab, Persian, and Sogdian descent, Chang’an served for many centuries as a terminus for the Silk and Musk Roads of the north, and tapped into the Tea and Horse Roads that began far to the southeast.

  During the medieval era, Chang’an grew to be the largest city in the world.17 By 742, when its thirty square miles of trading grounds engaged some two million inhabitants, no fewer than five thousand of its residents were foreign-born traders and caravanners called Franke. Most of them were Sogdians, with a handful of Persians, Indians, Arabs, and Turks in the mix. The foreigners from Asia Minor with eyes of blue, hazel, green, or gray were nicknamed the Simaren or Suma on account of their unusual eye color. Their odd appearance amused the likes of Hanshan, the great hermit poet of the Tang dynasty.

  Of course, when compared with the Sogdians, the Arabs were latecomers to Central Asia. Centuries before Islam reached that far eastward, Sogdian merchants, who practiced Zoroastrianism, had become the primary go-betweens linking China, Mongo
lia, Central Asia, India, and the Middle East. Without a doubt, Arab merchants had much to learn from them.

  By throwing their lot (and genes) in with the Persian and Sogdian merchants, Arab entrepreneurs rather suddenly gained access to, if not control of, most of the “interstate” commerce across half of Asia. Through a series of mergers and hostile takeovers, they wove together the many braids of the Silk Roads into one unbreakable network of trade.

  In doing so, they not only promoted Islam and extended its power, but they also seeded their own magical stories of heavenly fragrances and flavors. They introduced their mercantile ethics and economic theories into the archipelago of colonies stretching from the Empty Quarter of Arabia all the way to the Gobi Desert. But it was in the southern Gobi, along the Gansu Corridor, where their desert-adapted seeds germinated into the most lucrative economic opportunities. For the next several centuries, various Chinese dynasties demonstrated an almost insatiable appetite for all things Western, which for them implied the fashions and flavors of Persia and Arabia. The people of the Middle Kingdom became captivated by all the pretty horses, exotic spices, and fabulous ideas that visionaries from more westerly arid regions had to offer them.

  Perhaps the most remarkable testament to this early fascination with the West comes not from a Tang dynasty poet or merchant but from a Buddhist monk. A contemporary of the Prophet Muhammad, Xuanjang was a young monastic apprentice and linguist when he took off from Chang’an, the terminus of the Silk Roads, in 629. He set out to learn whatever he could about the spiritual and secular presences looming on the western horizon. Before returning to China some sixteen years later to tell his tales, Xuanjang had covered more than ten thousand miles on foot, camel, and horse, surveying the people, spiritual practices, and landscapes of outposts in the countries now called Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, the Kyrgyz Republic, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and India.18 Reaching as far west as the Zeravshan River and its trading center of Samarkand, he seemed less impressed by the military power held by the great khan of the Western Turks and more intrigued by the entrepreneurial skill of the Sogdians, Persians, and Jews he encountered: “The merchandise of [these] many countries was found and the craftsmanship of [their] artisans appeared superior to that of other countries.”19

  I catch a glimpse of the profile of Xuanjang, the spiritual pilgrim, carved in stone on the third tier of an ancient pagoda in Quanzhou, a city in Fujian Province that has as much Islamic history as it does Buddhist. I have seen where he traveled through the lost cities of the Turpan Depression below the Flaming Mountains on his way from Chang’an to Samarkand. I have hiked along the Yellow River up near its headwaters in the tawny-colored steppes of the Gansu Corridor, where Hui and Mongolian Muslims have traded with Tibetan Buddhists for many centuries. In the town of Linxia in Gansu Province, I have visited Islamic mosques and Buddhist temples adorned with many of the same sacred symbols: the napa cabbage, the dragon, the lotus, and the pomegranate.

  All these encounters have made me wonder whether being among people of other faiths enriches rather than threatens that of our own. Why do some people, like the Hui Muslims or the Bukharan Jews, frequently choose to live with or near the more economically and politically dominant Han? Why have they persisted in the roles as vendors and traders of foodstuffs and spices, even when others around them have opted to become computer programmers, electricians, or plumbers? What do they inevitably gain by living as filter feeders on the very edge between desert and river, earth and sky, the Buddha and the Prophet? What do we ourselves miss by staying clear of these tension zones, these interfaces where new innovations frequently arise?

  FIGURE 14. Spices from Central Asia became regularly available to Muslim, Christian, and Jewish traders via Bactrian camel caravans and maritime trade routes. Shown here is a camel train in Mongolia, 1902. (Courtesy Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, www.loc.gov/pictures/resource/cph.3b03982.)

  As I pondered such questions, I turned my attention to the ways in which Persian and Arab sensibilities had been united by Islam such that they began to generate intellectual curiosity about the East. Silk, musk, ginger, camphor, star anise, cinnamon, and blue ceramics now extended beyond China proper, into the Indian subcontinent, into Central Asia, and, on occasion, all the way back to Mecca on the Arabian Peninsula. Many cultures contributed to the mélange of spices reaching markets, but a few dominant groups had captured the role of catalyst in their global dispersal.

  Just as the Chinese were led to believe by the Sogdians and Arabs that cotton could only be obtained by shearing an animal unique to the West, the Han of China had a few of their own secrets. Although trade in silk cloth had reached the Western frontier at Niya by 206 CE, and silk cocoons were produced at Astana in the Turpan Depression by 420, it took centuries for the knowledge of silkworm production to penetrate west of the Tian Shan. With some of the harshest deserts in the world physically isolating Europe and Asia Minor from China, traders teamed up to perpetrate myths and intrigue about the people living on one terminus of their trade routes to shock and awe those living at the other terminus.

  This is the mix of fantasy, fact, and literary elaboration of true-life adventure familiar to anyone who has ever sat down to read the fables in One Thousand and One Nights. Perhaps this genre emerged more from Farsi oral traditions than it did from the stories told by speakers and singers of Arabic, but no matter. It served as the imaginative bridge between the East and the West—between the so-called Oriental and Occidental sensibilities—in ways that have continued to shape our impressions of “the other” through international policies and prejudices to this day.20

  Perhaps that first century of Arabian-Persian-Sogdian intermingling brought about more unprecedented innovations in the arts, architecture, hydraulic engineering, agriculture, and cuisine than any other period in history. After the Banu Umayyah had relocated their caliphate from Mosul to Damascus, they enhanced the productivity of its irrigated fields and terraced orchards along the Barada River with knowledge that they had brought from visiting the Ma’rib oasis in Yemen. The recently converted Persians and Sogdians also introduced food-producing technologies to the mix. It appears that they fostered investment in the water harvesting, transfer, and storage technologies known as qanat and qarez among their Muslim allies. These techniques spread to the desert mountains of Oman, where they are now known as falaj, and to the Gobi, where they are known as kares.

  Damascus had become not only the gateway to the Fertile Crescent but also an experimental marketplace of ideas, technologies, and goods attractive enough to lure Persians, Sogdian, Indian, and even Chinese merchants to come for a quick look-see. In Damascus, the Diwan al-Kharaj of the caliphate had anchored its network of tithing and taxation in order to create a magnitude of wealth that dwarfed anything earlier Semitic peoples had witnessed either at the Ma’rib oasis or the stronghold of Petra.

  With wealth pouring in from all directions, the Banu Umayyah elite surrounding the caliph no longer restricted themselves to living and eating as frugally as the Prophet had lived in Mecca and Medina.21 Instead of merely enjoying the relative abundance of agricultural goods found in their islandlike oases amid the surrounding sea of austere desert scrub, the Banu Umayyah began to reshape and reclaim desert landscapes with larger and larger public works for water transfer and lavish irrigation of food crops. They transformed the once-arid landscape into their own image of paradise.

  And so, the Barada River valley became dense with plantings of annual staple crops; prolific orchards of pomegranates, dates, stone fruits, and olives; aromatic gardens of Damascus roses and mints; lush pastures of dairy cattle, sheep, and goats; and vineyards heavily laden with muscat grapes. The feasts hosted by the Banu Umayyah royalty went far beyond what the Prophet himself might have consumed in his day, incorporating animal and vegetable delicacies and aromatic spices imported and transplanted from nearby Anatolia and Mount Lebanon, as well as from every other part of the Islamic world. Remarkably
, lavish displays of Arabian-Persian-Sogdian cuisine were not restricted to the ruling class. Other Arab inhabitants of Damascus were exposed to them, as well.

  The modest bread-and-stew diet of the Prophet became embellished beyond anything that the cave-dwelling hermit would have recognized. As Lilia Zaouali tells it, “Mu‘awiya ibn Abī Sufyān, the first Umayyad caliph at Damascus, was little inclined to deny himself the pleasures of food. Having discovered the refinement of Syrian [and Persian] cooking, he was able, thanks to the wealth of his office, to give free rein to every wish. . . . The Arabs’ predilection for Persian cuisine, evident since the pre-Islamic period, increased still more owing to their fondness for sweet desserts such as fālūdhaj, a confection made from sugar, starch, and nuts and flavored with musk and rose water.”22

  Perhaps it was this very extravagance that led to the downfall of the Umayyad dynasty, for it bred jealousy and discontent in the hinterlands, where many of the Islamic faithful still struggled to put bread on their table and into the bowls of their humble tharīd stew. It was not simply that the Banu Umayyah had paid for their lush paradise at the Rusafa palace near Damascus with the taxes collected throughout the empire. Others had done that before them, and it would still be done after they were gone. What enraged the emerging corpus of dissidents was that only full-blooded Arabs were given first-class-citizen status in Damascus, despite the pretense that the Muslims were all alike under Allah.