Cumin, Camels, and Caravans

The Arabs who had intermarried with Persians, Sogdians, and Turks had lost any special status they may otherwise have had and were taxed as though they were lower-class mawali, without a single drop of Arab blood in their veins. Finally, there was the sense that the ruling family was hypocritical about all of this, for the last Umayyad caliph himself had married a beautiful Berber woman from Africa’s Maghreb.

  This time, it was largely the mixed breed or hybrid culture of Persian, Sogdian, and Yemeni Arab traders from Central Asia that struck with lightning speed. Before the decadent rulers of Damascus knew what was happening to them, their last caliph, Marwan II, was chased out of town, hunted down, and killed in Egypt in 750. Not long after that, in the same year, an entourage of imposing dissidents from Central Asia arrived at the Rusafa palace to share a meal with the caliph’s inner circle and ostensibly to put aside their differences.

  Not a single Banu Umayyah adult left that dinner table alive. Abd al-Rahman, the only other mature male descendant of the last Umayyad caliph, somehow escaped the palace grounds with a few guards. He was then taken as far from Damascus as possible, while the Rusafa palace was sacked and then burned to the ground.

  Within the coming years, the emerging Abbasid dynasty would attempt to redirect the destiny of Islam, return its control to descendants of the Prophet Muhammad, and better accommodate the formerly disenfranchised non-Arabs as well as the Shia in its inner workings. Once again, revolutionaries had spilled out of the arid and austere hinterlands to purge their society of its impurities. And so the Abbasids left the contaminated grounds of Damascus behind for good, first building up their power base in Haran, Turkey, and then founding a new capital entirely from scratch. Their newly planned circular capital would become known as Baghdad.

  The only luxury they took with them from the Rusafa grounds was the Damascus rose, in the vain hope that they could retain exclusive control over its cultivation and use. But despite their efforts to control the intellectual property rights of this favorite fragrance, they eventually realized that a rose is a rose, and beautiful, aromatic flowers soon find their way into many hands in many lands.

  It would take just a few years before the Abbasid caliphs would be accused of the same excesses that they had witnessed in the last days of decadence among the Umayyad rulers of Damascus. But one part of their revolution did stick.

  Islamic civilization, including its trade in high-end aromatics, could never again be the exclusive domain of Arabs. Islam as a religious and economic system could no longer extend privilege to the founding families of Mecca and Medina at the expense of Persians, Sogdians, Turks, or Berbers, or, for that matter, Muslims of mixed blood. Eventually, another kind of capitalist elite called the sahib al-mal would emerge, but their members would not belong to a single bloodline. By the tenth century, these economic titans had formed an exclusive mercantile guild of spice traders who accumulated enormous wealth outside the control of the state. Neither genetics nor language guaranteed membership in the Karimi guild of traders, for it was reserved for those who fully understood how economic power could be further concentrated along the various spice trails, Frankincense Trails, Silk Roads, and maritime routes. Long before most Western European Christians could even articulate, let alone fathom, the notion of a world economic system, the Muslims and Jews, among others, had set one in motion.

  • • •

  • MUSK •

  The most potent and enduring aromatic in the world comes from a rare substance held in the scent glands of several now-endangered Asian deer species in the genus Moschus. Because musk deer bucks have no antlers (though they do have sharp tusks), they attract mates and repel competing bucks in a unique way: they mark their territory by dropping grainlike secretions onto shrubs at its margins from an abdominal pouch that protrudes not far from their genitals. In the wild, a one-and-a-half-year-old buck might produce and “paste” twenty to twenty-five grams of waxy, blood-colored musk grains onto shrubs each mating season.

  When these pasty droppings are dried, they become charcoal black grains rich in the pheromone known to chemists as muscone. The fragrance of freshly harvested musk is so powerful that newcomers find it either repulsive or divinely pleasurable. After it has been diluted, musk has a warm, aromatic, earthy fragrance that some have likened to the scent of freshly cut wood or a baby’s skin just after a bath.

  There is some evidence that musk was traded extra-locally as early as frankincense was, around 3500 BCE. By the sixth century CE, musk had become the most widely sought-after and highly prized fragrance in the world, with a single kilogram of musk worth twice the value of an equal amount of gold. (Today, it is worth three to four times its weight in gold.) It has had many uses beyond its addition to perfumes and aromatic soaps. In India, it was valued as a cardiac cure for pulmonary diseases, and in Europe and Great Britain, it found culinary favor as an ingredient in baked goods, beverages, candies, ice creams, molasses, and puddings.

  When Marco Polo described the collection of amber musk grains off the forest floor for trade westward, they were probably being gathered in the natural habitats of the Siberian musk deer (M. moschiferus) in either the Tian Shan or the Altai Mountains. This widespread musk deer species ranged from Siberia and Outer Mongolia southwestward across the trade routes of the Gansu Corridor and Xinjiang, and then all the way to Kazakhstan. Mongolian and Huigu (proto-Uighur) harvesters knew how to obtain the grains without killing the deer, and no doubt passed them on to Sogdian traders, who, starting in the fifth century, annually delivered as much as fifteen hundred kilograms of musk westward as far as Constantinople, Athens, and Rome.

  But the demand for good-quality amber musk put pressure on nomadic hunters to kill and gut rather than sustainably harvest the deer. It took killing thirty to fifty sexually mature bucks to gather a kilogram of musk, and often yearlings and does were killed as well. By the nineteenth century, the range of the Siberian musk deer had contracted and the number of deer had declined dramatically. Today, the only surviving population in China remains in the most remote reaches of the Altai Mountains. By the time I reached the Gansu Corridor in search of musk deer, the situation was pathetic. The only known population remaining in the province was on the Xinglongshan Deer Musk Farm, where five hundred captive-bred bucks were offering up an average of only 8.8 grams of musk grains per year, less than onethird of what their wild counterparts formerly produced.

  As primary sources of amber musk declined, harvesters turned to Tonkin musk from the black musk deer (M. fuscus) living in the Tibetan highlands. In time, its fragrance became even more highly regarded than that of amber musk, but the black musk deer population soon rapidly declined, as well. Finally, poachers, hoping to meet the continuing demand, ruthlessly began hunting a third species, M. chrysogaster, from farther south in the Himalayas, and its numbers have also fallen. Now, all three species are considered vulnerable to extinction, and the sales of their products are banned through international treaties on wildlife trade.

  Nevertheless, an estimated two thousand kilograms of musk are traded on the black market every year. In the 1970s, a single kilogram fetched as much as forty-five thousand dollars. A recent report estimates a sixfold increase in the number of illegal musk hunters since then, implying that the black-market price per kilogram has continued to rise accordingly.

  Curiously, the terms for musk and musk deer in the Far East are for the most part quite different than those used in the Middle East, Europe, and North Africa. This suggests that some intermediaries—first the Sogdian traders of Central Asia, and later the Persians and Arabs—took pains to conceal the geographic and cultural origins of the musk that they disseminated as a way to maintain control over the markets in the West.

  She-hsiang is the Chinese term for “musk deer aromatic,” and shefu and hsiang chang refer to the deer that produce a “fragrant liquid.” The Chinese term she alludes to the fact that the deer sprays the musky aroma as a spurt or squirt. The Tibetan term for the musk deer (M. fuscu
s) is glaba and the scent of the musk is glartsi. Mongolian boasts two terms for the deer (M. moschiferus), küdäri and ciğar. In at least some Old Turkic dialects within the range of this same animal, the deer is called kin and the musk itself is yipar. The compound lexeme kin yipar appears on an ancient stele that was found in Mongolia and that I was able to see firsthand at the Xinjiang Provincial Museum in Ürümqi.

  According to the fine Asian historian and lexicographer Anya King, none of these terms made it very far west of the Tian Shan, Hindui Kush, and Himalayan ranges. Historical documents attributed to Sogdian traders in Central Asia indicate that musk was referred to as yys yaxs, or yxsyh when selling it to Westerners. Another ancient term, mus, originated in either Sanskrit or a related ancient Iranian dialect, and then spread. In both the classic and new Persian spoken in Baghdad over the centuries, the term musk was used in trade; this same term was spelled mwšk in the pre-Islamic Pahlavi likely used through much of the Sassanid Empire.

  Musk was clearly being traded to Arabs as far west as the emerging Islamic Empire of the seventh century. In ancient Arabic texts, several terms were recorded for musk, among them mis, misk, and nafijat. Misk, probably a loan word from Arabic, was used by Western Turks throughout the Ottoman Empire and remains in use in modern Turkish bazaars, such as the Spice Bazaar in Istanbul.

  Well outside of Baghdad and Istanbul’s bazaars, Armenians used the term mus, Syriac speakers used muška, and Ethiopians used mesk, suggesting that the Persian and Arabic terms were carried across their trade networks without much discontinuity. In Europe, the Russians called musk muskus, the Greeks called it móschos, and Latin speakers used muscus. In the Romance languages, this gave rise to the Spanish musco, the Italian muschio, and the French musc.

  Although we now think of musk merely as one of many ingredients in secular perfumes that ostensibly function as sexual attractants, it has long been used in religious contexts as a fragrance associated with immortality and purity. This spiritual quality of musk, noted by the Prophet Muhammad himself, is attested to at the musk-scented Blue Mosque of Sultan Ahmed next to the Hagia Sophia in Istanbul, the Kutubia Mosque in Marrakech, and the Iparli (Safa) Mosque of Diyarbakir; their walls are said to emit a musky fragrance to this day. For the Iparli Mosque, a wealthy Muslim spice merchant took seventy loads of musk he had obtained through trade with kingdoms in western China and mixed it into the mortar for the walls.

  Fagong, Kang, et al. “The Musk Production of Captive Alpine Deer (Moschus chrysogaster) from the Xinglongshan Musk Deer Farm of Gansu Province, China.” Acta Theriologica Sinica 28 (2008): 221–24.

  Garrett, Theodore Francis. The Encyclopedia of Practical Cookery: A Complete Dictionary of All Pertaining to the Art of Cookery and Table Service. Vol. 2. London: L. Upcott Gill, 1898.

  Green, Michael J.B. and Bihaya Kattel. “Musk Deer: Little Understood, Even Its Scent.” Paper presented at First International Symposium on Endangered Species Used in the Trade of East Asian Medicine. Hong Kong, December 7–8, 1997. http://archive.org/details/muskdeerlittleun97gree.

  King, Anya H. “The Musk Trade and the Near East in the Early Medieval Period.” PhD diss., Indiana University, 2007. www.gradworks.umi.com/32/53/3253639.html.

  Vaissière, Étienne de la. Sogdian Traders: A History. Leiden, Germany: Brill, 2005.

  Zhixiao, Liu, and Sheng Helin. “Effect of Habitat Fragmentation and Isolation of Alpine Musk Deer.” Russian Journal of Ecology 33 (2002): 121–24.

  • GINGER •

  Believed to have been first recruited from the wild in southern China, ginger root (Zingiber officinale) has become a world traveler. Despite its popular designation as a root, it is actually a pale silvery green to ivory brown rhizome shaped like a fleshy hand with pudgy fingers. It has an unforgettably zesty, citrusy fragrance, an herbal sweetness, and a piquant bite that have made it a signature of Chinese regional cuisines since ancient times. Ginger powder, perhaps because it is dry, is less pungent but has more prevalent citrus notes.

  The characteristic flavor of ginger is derived from a nonvolatile resin called zingerone that contains hydroxyaryl compounds. The same compounds are found in turmeric and galangal, two relatives of ginger. Zingiberene, the primary component of the rhizome’s essential oil, imparts the fragrance we identify as gingery, and cineol and citral provide the hints of citrus. Curcumene, zingiberol, linalool, cineol, and camphene are also present in varying degrees in different strains.

  The first written Chinese record on ginger, dated c. 500 BCE, is attributed to Confucius, who reported in the Analects that he was never without ginger when he ate. This spice may have first entered global trade networks through an arc of harbors reaching from Zayton (Quanzhou) in China through Southeast Asia all the way to Ceylon (Sri Lanka). Sometime after Confucius penned his observation, dried ginger was being traded from India to Arabia and then to Egypt. By the thirteenth century, Arabian ships carried either the rhizomes or potted plants down the east coast of Africa as far as Zanzibar. Ginger was popular in Morocco and Andalusia by the sixth century, and it is now propagated in tropical and subtropical climes far beyond Asia.

  I have seen freshly harvested ginger prominently featured on the bamboo tables of predawn fruit and fish markets in Denpasar, Bali; in handwoven baskets of Amharic-speaking women on the edge of the Abay River in Ethiopia; and in the produce sections of Chinatown groceries in Honolulu and San Francisco. It has sailed across turbulent seas and climbed over snowy passes in the highest mountain ranges of Asia to find new homes.

  Known as jiang in Chinese, ginger diffused southward along the Maritime Silk Roads via Champa traders from present-day Vietnam and Tamil traders from Ceylon and southern India. By the time the rhizomes reached the Indian subcontinent, they became known as shringavera in Sanskrit and singivera in several Indic languages; it has been speculated that these terms are derived from the Old Greek zingiberis. At the same time, Turkic-speakers such as the Uighur, who call it sansabil, aided its spread across Central Asia to Persia and the Middle East. Many of the terms used to label ginger may be cognates of this Turkic term, including zanjabil in Farsi, zanjabil in Arabic, and sangvil in Hebrew. (Although ginger is not mentioned in the Jewish Talmud or in the Christian Gospels, it does appear in at least one sura in the Qur’an.) The names for ginger in many European languages are ultimately derived from these same roots, including the Latin zingiber and the Modern Greek dzindzer. It is not surprising that the scientific name for the family that includes ginger, galangal, turmeric, and other spices became Zingiberaceae.

  Ginger is often deployed in combination with other fiery spices, as in Chinese five-spice powder and Indian curry powders. In the West, fresh ginger is considered so potent that it is usually finely chopped or minced before it is added to meat, poultry, fish, or tuber or other vegetable dishes. In many regional Chinese cuisines, however, fresh ginger is cut into large slices, which are then slowly simmered in a broth to soften them or stir-fried in concert with other ingredients. One such dish in Fujian features veritable slabs of ginger with duck and sautéed amaranth greens in a hearty broth. Kung pao (or gongbao, literally “palace guard”) chicken, a gingery favorite that also features chicken, peanuts, garlic, and chiles, is among the better-known stir-fried dishes of Sichuan Province. Pickled ginger is often served alongside sushi and sashimi in (and now far beyond) Japan. I frequently depend on pickled ginger to calm my nausea-prone stomach and keep a plastic pouch of its pinkish slivers readily accessible in my refrigerator.

  Although ginger is included in the dishes of various European and African cuisines, it is perhaps more commonly used to spice up beverages. Ginger is now a rather minor ingredient of ginger ale compared with the fructose and carbonated water that goes into it, but ginger-flavored kombucha is becoming the rage in the United States and can be quite potent. It continues to be used to flavor beers, breads, and cookies throughout the West, with gingerbread men and gingersnaps still legendary among youngsters of western Europe, the United St
ates, and Canada.

  Gambrelle, Fabienne. The Flavor of Spices. Paris: Flammarion, 2008.

  Green, Aliza. Field Guide to Herbs and Spices. Philadelphia: Quirk Books, 2006.

  Katzer, Gernot. “Gernot Katzer’s Spice Pages.” http://gernot-katzers-spicepages.com/engl/index.html. Accessed May 8, 2013.

  Sortun, Ana, with Nicole Chaison. Spice: Flavors of the Eastern Mediterranean. New York: Regan Books, 2006.

  Weiss, E. A. Spice Crops. Wallingford, UK: CABI Publishing, 2002.

  • OSHI PLOV •

  Persian-Tajik Rice Pilaf with Quince

  This is perhaps the quintessential meal of Central Asia’s segment of the Silk Roads, from Baghdad through Bukhara and Samarkand to Dushanbe and Kabul. It is embraced by both the Bukharan Jews and the Ismaili Muslims of Badakhshan and was no doubt held in high esteem by the Zoroastrians of the region. The pilav, pulao, palau, and plov of Central Asia probably hark back to the earliest introduction of rice into the area, though bulgur wheat or couscous may well have been there prior to the arrival of rice. Variations emerge in the Middle East with maqluba, khoresh-e beh, and kidra, and in Spain with paella. In most cases, these dishes include an aromatic rice that has been partially cooked in a seasoned broth with caramelized onions, then steamed with other ingredients layered or buried in the rice. Like a paella, a plov is often prepared in huge quantities for festivities such as weddings or holidays, and each cook contributes his or her own distinctive flair to the dish.

  In the fourth century BCE, Alexander the Great and his troops became so taken with Bactrian and Sogdian pilafs that they reportedly took the preparation back with them from the Sogdian capital of Marakanda (present-day Samarkand) to Macedonia. But the first detailed description of how to prepare a pilaf properly came to us during the tenth century from Ibn Sīnā, known to the Western world as Avicenna. Because of his enormous influence, Ibn Sīnā is considered by many culinary historians to be the father of modern pilaf preparation.