Cumin, Camels, and Caravans

  I have been blessed with generous support over the years from the Agnese Haury Fund at the Southwest Center, the W. K. Kellogg Foundation, the Christensen Fund, the C S Fund, and projects or residencies associated with Slow Food International, the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa, and the United States Embassy cultural and scientific exchange program for Palestine. I thank them all for their work and their generosity.

  No spice plants were injured in the making of this story.

  Notes

  INTRODUCTION

  1. Charles C. Mann, “The Dawn of the Homogenocene: Tracing Globalization Back to Its Roots,” Orion magazine 30 (May/June 2011): 16–25.

  2. Alfred W. Crosby, The Columbian Exchange: Biological and Cultural Consequences of 1492 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1973), and Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe, 900–1900 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986).

  3. Gary Paul Nabhan, Arab/American: Landscape, Culture, and Cuisines in Two Great Deserts (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2008), 32.

  4. Felipe Fernández-Armesto, 1492: The Year Our World Began (London: Bloomsbury Books, 2009).

  5. William J. Bernstein, A Splendid Exchange: How Trade Shaped The World from Prehistory to Today (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 2008); see pp. 20–21 for copper, pp. 58–59 for spice and incense.

  6. Walter W. Skeat, An Etymological Dictionary of the English Language (Oxford: Oxford University Press/Clarendon Press, 1946).

  7. Adina Hoffman and Peter Cole, Sacred Trash: The Lost and Found World of the Cairo Geniza (New York: Nextbook Schocken, 2011).

  8. Paul D. Buell and Eugene N. Anderson, eds., A Soup for the Qan: Chinese Dietary Medicine of the Mongol Era as Seen in Hu Szu-Hui’s Yin-Shan Chengyao (London and New York: Kegan Paul International, 2000).

  9. Cleofas M. Jaramillo, New Mexico Tasty Recipes (Layton, UT: Gibbs Smith, 2008).

  10. Stanley Hordes, To the End of the Earth: A History of the Crypto-Jews of New Mexico (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005).

  11. Darío Fernández-Morera, “The Myth of the Andalusian Paradise,” The Intercollegiate Review 41, no. 2 (Fall 2006): 23–31.

  1. AROMAS EMANATING FROM THE DRIEST OF PLACES

  1. Herodotus, in George Rawlinson, Histories (London: Wordsworth Classics, 1996), bk. 1, chap. 17.

  2. Gary Paul Nabhan, Desert Terroir: Exploring the Unique Flavors and Sundry Places of the Borderlands (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2011).

  3. Lilia Zaouali, Medieval Cuisine of the Islamic World: A Concise History with 174 Recipes, trans. M. B. DeBevoise (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), 145.

  4. Beta diversity is the rate at which species accumulate as a plant or animal collector moves in a straight line away from any particular point. See Michael L. Rosenzweig, Species Diversity in Space and Time (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 33.

  5. Anya H. King, “The Musk Trade and the Near East in the Early Medieval Period” (PhD diss., Bloomington: Indiana University, 2007).

  6. Patricia Crone, Mecca Trade and the Rise of Islam (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1987).

  7. Francesco di Balduccio Pegolotti, “The Practice of Commerce,” trans. from Italian, in Medieval Trade in the Mediterranean World: Illustrative Documents, ed. Robert S. Lopez and Irving W. Raymond (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001), 109–14.

  8. Pliny the Elder, Natural History, trans. H. Rackham (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press/Loeb Classic Library, 1942), vol. 10, bk. 43, p. 64.

  9. Mohamud Haji Farah, “Non-Timber Forest Product (NTFP) Extraction in Arid Environments: Land-Use Change, Frankincense Production and the Sustainability of Boswellia sacra in Dhofar (Oman)” (PhD diss., University of Arizona, 2008), 45.

  10. Ibid., 45–46.

  11. Gary Paul Nabhan, Singing the Turtles to Sea: The Comcaác (Seri) Art and Science of Reptiles (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003).

  12. William J. Bernstein, A Splendid Exchange: How Trade Shaped the World from Prehistory to Today (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 2008), 53; and R. P. Evershed, P. F. van Bergen, T. M. Peakman, E. C. Leigh-Firbank, M. C. Horton, D. Edwards, M. Biddle, B. Kjølbye-Biddle, and P. A. Rowley-Conwy, “Archaeological Frankincense,” Nature 390 (December 18, 1997): 667–68.

  13. James P. Mandaville, Bedouin Ethnobotany: Plant Concepts and Uses in a Desert Pastoral World (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2011).

  14. Lamees Abdullah Al Taie, Al-Azaf: The Omani Cookbook (Muscat: Oman Bookshop, 1995).

  15. Caroline Singer, “The Incense Kingdoms of Yemen: An Outline History of the Southern Arabian Spice Trade,” in Food for the Gods: New Light on the Ancient Incense Trade, ed. David Peacock and David Williams (Oxford, UK: Oxbow Books, 2007), 20–21; and Bernstein, A Splendid Exchange, 62–64.

  16. Hilde Gauthier-Pilters and Anne Innis Dagg, The Camel: Its Evolution, Ecology, Behavior, and Relationship to Man (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981).

  2. CARAVANS LEAVING ARABIA FELIX

  1. Peter Matthiessen, The Tree Where Man Was Born (New York: Collins / Picador, 1972).

  2. “Land of Frankincense,” UNESCO, whc.unesco.org/list/1010/; and “Al Baleed 2009,” Lilian and Jan Schreurs, www.home.kpn.nl/∼janm_schreurs/AlBaleed.htm. Both accessed April 21, 2011.

  3. George Fadlo Hourani, Arab Seafaring in the Indian Ocean in Ancient and Early Medieval Times (Beirut, Lebanon: Khayats, 1963), 6.

  4. William J. Bernstein, A Splendid Exchange: How Trade Shaped the World from Prehistory to Today (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 2008), 26–28.

  5. Stelios Michalopoulus, Alireza Naghavi, and Giovanni Prarolo, “Trade and Geography in the Economic Origins of Islam: Theory and Evidence,” Working Papers 700, Department of Economics (Bologna, Italy: University of Bologna, 2010), www.feem.it/userfiles/attach/2010631044NDL2010–075.pdf.

  6. Hourani, Arab Seafaring, 4–5.

  7. Paul Shepard, Nature and Madness (San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1982), 51.

  8. Abraham Joshua Heschel, The Sabbath: Its Meaning for Modern Man (New York: Farrar, Strauss and Young, 1951), 4 and 16.

  9. Patricia Crone, Mecca Trade and the Rise of Islam (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1987).

  10. Caroline Singer, “The Incense Kingdoms of Yemen: An Outline History of the South Arabian Spice Trade,” in Food for the Gods: New Light on the Ancient Incense Trade, ed. David Peacock and David Williams (Oxford, UK: Oxbow Books, 2007), 12–13.

  11. Ibid., 11.

  12. Vicenzo M. Francaviglia, “Dating the Ancient Dam of Mar’ib (Yemen),” Journal of Archaeological Science 27, no. 7 (July 2000): 645–53.

  13. Ibid.

  14. Albert Hourani, A History of the Arab Peoples (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010).

  15. John Noble Wilford, “Ruins in Yemeni Desert Mark Route of Frankincense Trade,” New York Times, January 28, 1997.

  3. UNCOVERING HIDDEN OUTPOSTS IN THE DESERT

  1. Berta Segall, “The Lion-riders from Timna,” in Archaeological Discoveries in Southern Arabia, ed. Richard LeBaron Bowen and Frank P. Albright (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1958), 155–75.

  2. John Lloyd Stephens, Incidents of Travel in Egypt, Arabia, Petræa, and the Holy Land (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1837), 241.

  3. Ezra Marcus, “Early Seafaring and Maritime Activity in the Southern Levant from Prehistory through the Third Millennium BCE,” in Egypt and the Levant: Interrelations from the 4th through the Early 3rd Millennium B.C.E., ed. Edwin C. M. van den Brink and Thomas Evan Levy (London: Leicester University Press, 2002), 403–17.

  4. Jane Hornblower, Hieronymus of Cardia (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981).

  5. Stanley Mayer Burstein, ed., Agatharchides of Cnidus on “the Erythraean Sea,” Hakluyt Publications, 2nd ser. (London: Hakluyt Society, 1989), 172.

  6. Ofra Rimon, preface to The Nabateans in the Negev, by Renate Rosenthal-Heginbottom et al. (Haifa: Hecht Museum, 2003).
Exhibition catalog.

  7. Charles Perry, foreword to Medieval Cuisine of the Islamic World: A Concise History with 174 Recipes, by Lilia Zaouali, trans. M. B. DeBevoise (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), xi.

  8. Diodorus Siculus, Library of History, bk.2, trans. Charles Henry Oldfather (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1935).

  9. Walter M. Weiss and Kurt-Michael Westermann, The Bazaar: Markets and Merchants of the Islamic World (London: Thames and Hudson, 1998), 27.

  10. Herodotus, cited in Andrew Dalby, Dangerous Tastes: The Story of Spices (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 113.

  11. Nelson Glueck, Rivers in the Desert: A History of the Negev (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1959).

  12. Stephens, Incidents of Travel in Egypt, Arabia, Petræa, and the Holy Land, 237.

  13. Michael Evenari, Leslie Shanan, and Napthali Tadmor, The Negev: The Challenge of a Desert, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982), 23.

  14. Douglas Comer, “Monumental Tether: Why Nomads Built Petra, One of the Greatest Monuments in the World,” unpublished manuscript cited in Douglas C. Comer, ed., Tourism and Archaeological Heritage Management at Petra: Driver to Development or Destruction? (New York: Springer, 2013).

  15. Charles Perry, foreword to Medieval Cuisine of the Islamic World, xi.

  16. Chris Arsenault, “Glencore: Profiteering from Hunger and Chaos,” Al-Jazeera News, May 9, 2011, www.aljazeera.com/indepth/features/2011/05/20115723149852120.html.

  17. Edward Henry Palmer, The Desert of the Exodus: Journeys on Foot in the Wilderness of the Forty Years’ Wanderings (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1871).

  18. Nelson Glueck, Rivers in the Desert (London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1959).

  19. Berel Aisenstein, “The ‘Kahrez,’ An Ancient System of Artificial Springs,” Journal of the Association of Engineers and Architects of Palestine 8, no. 5 (1947).

  20. Evenari, Shanan, and Tadmor, The Negev, 178.

  21. Jack D. Elliot Jr., “The Nabatean Synthesis of Avraham Negev: A Critical Appraisal,” in Retrieving the Past: Essays on Archaeological Research and Methodology in Honor of Gus. W. Van Beek, ed. Joe D. Seger (Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbraums, 1996), 47–60.

  22. Charles Perry, foreword to Medieval Cuisine of the Islamic World, x.

  23. William J. Bernstein, A Splendid Exchange: How Trade Shaped the World (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 2008), 62.

  24. Jack Turner, Spice: The History of a Temptation (New York: Vintage, 2004), 58–67.

  25. Ibid., 79–80.

  26. Brent Landau, Revelation of the Magi: The Lost Tale of the Wise Men’s Journey to Bethlehem (New York: HarperOne, 2010), 118–19.

  4. OMANIS ROCKING THE CRADLE OF CIVILIZATION

  1. Aruna Shaji, “Seafaring and Trade in Omani History: The Call of the Sea,” Oman Observer, February 17, 2002.

  2. Gary Paul Nabhan, Arab/American: Landscape, Culture, and Cuisine in Two Great Deserts (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2009).

  3. Vincenzo M. Francaviglia, “Dating the Ancient Dam of Ma’rib (Yemen),” Journal of Archaeological Science 27, no. 7 (July 2000): 645–53.

  4. Albert Hourani, A History of the Arab Peoples (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010).

  5. Shaji, “Seafaring and Trade in Omani History.”

  6. H. D. Miller, “The Pleasures of Consumption: The Birth of Medieval Islamic Cuisine,” in Food: The History of Taste, ed. Paul Freedman (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), 136.

  7. John Larner, Marco Polo and the Discovery of the World (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999).

  8. George Fadlo Hourani, Arab Seafaring in the Indian Ocean in Ancient and Early Medieval Times (Beirut, Lebanon: Khayats, 1963), 16.

  5. MECCA AND THE MIGRATIONS OF MUSLIM AND JEWISH TRADERS

  1. Adam Davidson, “Company’s Takeover of U.S. Ports Raises Security Concerns, National Public Radio, February 14, 2006, www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5205334.

  2. Daniel Peterson, Muhammad: Prophet of God (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing, 2007), 15.

  3. Hugh Kennedy, The Great Arab Conquests: How the Spread of Islam Changed the World We Live In (Philadelphia: Da Capo Press, 2007), 43–44.

  4. Peterson, Muhammad: Prophet of God, 16.

  5. Ibid.

  6. James P. Mandaville, Bedouin Ethnobotany: Plant Concepts and Uses in a Desert Pastoral World (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2011).

  7. Patricia Crone, Meccan Trade and the Rise of Islam (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1987).

  8. George Fadlo Hourani, Arab Seafaring in the Indian Ocean in Ancient and Early Medieval Times (Beirut, Lebanon: Khayats, 1963), 53.

  9. Peterson, Muhammad: Prophet of God, 17.

  10. Lilia Zaouali, Medieval Cuisine of the Islamic World: A Concise History with 174 Recipes, trans. M. B. DeBevoise (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009).

  11. Peterson, Muhammad: Prophet of God, 43.

  12. Ibid., 44.

  13. Michael Hamilton Morgan, Lost History: The Enduring Legacy of Muslim Scientists, Thinkers, and Artists (Washington, D.C.: National Geographic Society, 2007), 9.

  14. Peterson, Muhammad: Prophet of God, 106.

  15. Ibid., 93.

  16. Ahmad Ghabin, Hisba, Arts and Crafts in Islam (Wiesbaden, Germany: Harrassowitz, 2009).

  17. W. N. Arafat, “New Light on the Story of the Banu Qurayza and the Jews of Medina,” Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland 15 (1976): 100–107.

  18. M. J. Kister, “The Market of the Prophet,” Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 8 (1965): 272–78; quotation is from p. 273.

  19. This poem fragment is my free translation. For a more conventional translation into English, see Karen Armstrong, Muhammad: A Western Attempt to Understand Islam (London: Orion Publishing, 1991), 182.

  20. Peterson, Muhammad: Prophet of God, 108.

  21. Stelios Michalopoulos, Alireza Naghari, and Giovanni Prarolo, “Trade and Geography in the Economic Origins of Islam: Theory and Evidence” (draft dated May 22, 2010), 2; http://ssrn.com/abstract=1613303.

  22. Peterson, Muhammad: Prophet of God, 159–60.

  23. Karen Farrell et al., TED Case Studies 5: “Arab Spice Trade and Spread of Islam” (June 1996): 4, www1.american.edu/ted/spice.htm.

  24. Natalie Zemon Davis, Trickster Travels: A Sixteenth-Century Muslim Between Worlds (New York: Hill and Wang, 2007).

  25. Ross E. Dunn, The Adventures of Ibn Battuta: A Muslim Traveler of the Fourteenth Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005).

  26. Hugh Kennedy, The Great Arab Conquests: How the Spread of Islam Changed the World We Live In (Philadelphia: Da Capo Press, 2007), x–xi.

  27. S. M. Ghazanfar, “Capitalist Tradition in Early Arab-Islamic Civilization,” History of Economics Society Conference (Exeter, UK: University of Exeter, 2007).

  28. Nigel Cliff, Holy War: How Vasco da Gama’s Epic Voyages Turned the Tide in a Centuries-Old Clash of Civilizations (New York: Harper, 2011).

  29. Kennedy, The Great Arab Conquests, 217.

  30. Marc Eliany, “A Brief Social History of the Jews in Morocco: A Synthesis of Oral and Documented Accounts,” in Mind and Soul: Jewish Thinking in Morocco, www.artengine.ca/eliany/html/mindandsoulinjewishmorocco/historyofjewsinmorocco.html.

  31. Kennedy, The Great Arab Conquests.

  32. Ibn Abd al-Hakam, “The Mohammedan Conquest of Egypt and North Africa,” trans. Charles Cutler Torrey, in Biblical and Semitic Studies, vol. 1 (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1901), 279–330; and Ahmad ibn Yahya al-Baladhuri, The Origins of the Islamic State [Kitāb futāh al-Buldān], vol. 1, trans. Phillip Khuri Hitti (London: P. S. King & Son, 1916).

  6. MERGING THE SPICE ROUTES WITH THE SILK ROADS

  1. Christopher I. Beckwith, Empires of the Silk Road: A History of Central Eurasia from the Bronze Age to the Present (Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 2009).

  2. Hugh Kennedy, The Great Arab Conquests: How the Spread of Islam Changed the World We Live In (Philadelphia: Da Capo Press, 2007), 63.

  3. Kennedy, The Great Arab Conquests, 61.

  4. Beckwith, Empires of the Silk Road.

  5. V. V. Bartold, “Tajiks: Historical essay,” in Korzhenevsky, N. L., ed., (1925) Tadzhikistan: sbornik stateĭ (Tajikistan: ) Obshchestvo dlia izucheniia Tadzhikistana i iranskikh narodnosteĭ za ego predelami, Tashkent, pp. 113–150, OCLC 21620342, in Russian; republished in a revised version as A. A. Semenov and V. V. Bartold (1944) Material’nye pamiatniki iranskoĭ kul’tury v Sredneĭ Azii Gosizdat pri SNK Tadzhikskoĭ SSR, Stalinabad, OCLC 30576295, in Russian.

  6. Beckwith, Empires of the Silk Road.

  7. Subhi Y. Labib, “Capitalism in Medieval Islam,” Journal of Economic History 29, no.1 (1969): 79–96.

  8. Lilia Zaouali, Medieval Cuisine of the Islamic World: A Concise History with 174 Recipes, trans. M. B. DeBevoise (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007); and Tamim Ansary, Destiny Disrupted: A History of the World through Islamic Eyes (New York: PublicAffairs, 2009).

  9. Charles Perry, foreword to Zaouali, Medieval Cuisine of the Islamic World, xiv.

  10. Ibid., and Zaouali, Medieval Cuisine of the Islamic World, 188n52.

  11. Ansary, Destiny Disrupted, 80.

  12. Beckwith, Empires of the Silk Road.