Frankincense and myrrh acquired their status as premier luxury items for reasons both sacred and profane. Although our imagination allows us to conceive the sights and sounds of ancient civilizations, their smells are well beyond modern comprehension. In cramped cities lacking effective sanitation, the nose discerned location as well as any map: the odor of feces from main sewer lines and slaughterhouses; the scent of urine surrounding government buildings, temples, and theaters; or the particularly offensive olfactory assaults of the tannery, the fishmonger, and the cemetery.
Amid such stenches, and where regular bathing in clean water and regular changes of clothes were reserved for only the wealthiest citizens, few substances were as prized as myrrh oil, easily applied as a body lotion and capable of hiding the rank smells of everyday life. Physicians used myrrh liberally in medicinals, and it was also the ancient world’s embalming fluid of choice. In addition, incense was the aroma of eros, as attested in this come-on from a well-known, wicked, and deadly biblical adulteress:
I have decked my bed with coverings of tapestry, with carved works, with fine linen of Egypt.
I have perfumed my bed with myrrh, aloes, and cinnamon.
Come, let us take our fill of love until the morning: let us solace ourselves with loves.
For the goodman is not at home, he is gone a long journey:
He hath taken a bag of money with him, and will come home at the day appointed.11
Frankincense, while also fragrant, possessed more mystic qualities. This even-burning gum produced delicate, wispy curling smoke that, as envisioned by the ancient world, slowly rose to the heavens, where its appearance and scent pleased the gods. In China and India, funerary rites required the burning of frankincense. In the tabernacles of the early Jews, its opaque tendrils were said to veil the Almighty’s very presence.12
Pliny wrote that Alexander the Great was particularly fond of burning large amounts of incense on holy altars. Alexander’s tutor Leonides admonished him that “he might worship the gods in that manner when he had conquered the frankincense producing races.” According to Pliny, Alexander then subjugated Arabia, whereupon “he sent Leonides a ship with a cargo of frankincense, with a message charging him to worship the gods without any stint.”13
Pliny also gives us a vivid description of the frankincense trade in Arabia Felix. The trees secrete a slick, foamy liquid which collects under the bark. Growers incised the tree, and the fluid spurted onto the ground or onto palm mats, where it dried and thickened. This was the purest, most desirable frankincense, whereas the residual product, stuck to the tree and contaminated with bark, was of second quality. The integrity of the growers amazed Pliny:
The forest is divided up into definite portions, and owing to the mutual honesty of the owners is free from trespassing, and though nobody keeps guard over the trees after an incision has been made, nobody steals from his neighbor.14
Today, bedouin men and women still harvest trees marked to indicate ownership, in accordance with Pliny’s observations. Before the Common Era, the growing of incense was confined to the trees’ natural habitat in southwest Arabia, and local peoples tapped them only during the hottest part of the year, in May, before the arrival of the cooling, moist southwest monsoon. After drying for a few weeks, the final product either began its northward journey by camel to markets in the Fertile Crescent and Mediterranean, or else was stored for a few more months until the worst of the monsoon storms had cleared and was then sent by sail east to India. The Greek naturalist Theophrastus described the highly trusting “silent trade” transactions that characterized the initial purchases:
And that when they have brought it, each man piles up his own contribution of frankincense and the myrrh in like manner, and leaves it on guard; and on the pile he puts a tablet on which is stated the number of measures which it contains, and the price for which each measure should be sold; and that, when the merchants come, they look at the tablets, and whichsoever pleases them, they measure and put down the price on the spot whence they have taken the wares, and then the priest comes and, having taken the third part of the price for the god, leaves the rest where it was, and this remains safe for the owners until they come to claim it.15
The freshly dried frankincense, a fragile, gummy substance, was packaged in protective wooden cages; myrrh oil, more prone to evaporation, was transported in animal hides. For thousands of years, these two precious substances, produced in remote and secretive kingdoms, traversed a complex route from the southwest corner of the Arabian peninsula to their ultimate destinations in Babylon, Athens, and the ancient Egyptian capital of Memphis. The historian Nigel Groom writes, “One can visualize the camels of the ancient caravans with frankincense baskets bulging on either side of their saddles or swinging to the weight of myrrh in more compact, tightly closed goatskins.”16
The Pax Romana changed this pattern. A significant part of the Roman booty went toward the purchase of incense. The earliest Greeks and Romans had probably propitiated the gods with human sacrifice, but in classical Greece and the early Roman republic, this had been replaced with animal offerings. Alongside the sacrificial altar, standing on a tripod, was the acera, in which frankincense was placed.17 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. (The Arch of Titus in the Forum depicts the emperor carrying a balsam shrub in his triumphant march through the capital after the conquest of Jerusalem in AD 70. This plant yielded one of the most expensive aromatics.)18 With the prosperity of the empire grew its demand for incense, and the gradual extension of Roman control south toward Arabia Felix during the first and second centuries AD made both the maritime and the camel routes safer and cheaper.
As demand rose, growers added a second and third annual crop, which yielded a lower-quality product than the traditional May harvest. Cultivation spread eastward to Zufar, in modern Oman.
This expansion shift added inhospitable distance to cargoes bound for Rome. Some of the frankincense and myrrh from these new growing areas was shipped directly from the eastern Arabian ports of Qana and Moscha to Berenice on the Red Sea and thence to Alexandria. But most of the incense trade was conducted by camel; the king of Arabia Felix, wishing to control the lucrative market, saw that the bulk of it passed overland through the city of Shabwah, in the east of Arabia Felix.
Pliny described how the incense, after being collected, was carried to Shabwah, where “a single gate is left open for its admission.” Failure to use the assigned gate—a sure sign of smuggling—was punishable by death. The land route seems to have been the monopoly of a single tribe, whose priests oversaw the harvesting and transport of the crop. Pliny variously identifies the tribe as the Gebanitae or the Minaeans.
Incense Lands and Routes
The priests at Shabwah took 10 percent of the cargo as an import tax. The incense then had to travel to Thomna, the capital of the country of the Gebanitae or Minaeans, who controlled the onward trade. Pliny records that the journey from Thomna to Gaza, about 1,500 miles, took sixty-five days, about twenty-three miles per day. Along the way, expenses were incurred. Among others:
Fixed portions of the frankincense are also given to the priests and the king’s secretaries, but beside these the guards and their attendants and the gate-keepers and servants also have their pickings: indeed, all along the route they keep on paying, at one place for water, at another for fodder, or the charges for lodging at the halts.19
Each camel’s load to Rome incurred a total purchase and transport cost of approximately a thousand denarii, or about two denarii per pound. The highest-grade frankincense—so judged by its whiteness, brittleness, and ease of burning—sold in Rome for six denarii per pound. The lowest grade sold for three denarii per pound, about the same price as black pepper. (The denarius, a small silver coin weighing one-eighth of an ounce, roughly corresponded to a day’s wage of a skilled laborer. Thus, a pound of frankincense
represented roughly a week’s worth of wages for a skilled laborer; a pound of myrrh, about two weeks’ worth.) By comparison, the most precious aromatics, such as balsam from Palestine, sold for up to 1,000 denarii per pound.
What frankincense lacked in price, it more than made up for in quantity. Alone among the aromatics, frankincense was shipped in camel-load (about 500 pounds) quantities and was therefore by far the most important trade commodity of the era. If we take Pliny’s accounting at face value and estimate the total cost of transporting a camel load of incense from Arabia Felix to Rome at approximately 1,000 denarii, then, at an average retail price of five denarii per pound, a total profit of 1,500 denarii per camel load was possible.
Incense generated prosperity all along its supply chain. This wealth was distributed among middlemen, those who serviced the caravans, and the camel drivers themselves, each capable of guiding up to six animals at a time. Snaking their way slowly along the western (Red Sea) coast of the peninsula, these caravans connected the incense sources of Arabia Felix with well-off consumers in the Fertile Crescent, and later, in Greece, Rome, and Byzantium. All along this route, great marketplaces prospered, particularly at the Sabaean-Gebanite cities of Shabwah, Thomna, and Marib. Another group, nomadic tribesmen, also prospered by plundering the rich incense supply chain. The product that arrived from eastern Arabia via Gaza and Alexandria on the wharves of Puteoli had traveled as much as four thousand miles.
The confusion over exactly who controlled the trade is in large part due to the difficulties of doing research in modern-day Yemen and Saudi Arabia. For most of the twentieth century, the key ancient Minaean-Gebanite town of Marib was off-limits to Westerners. When in 1951 the imam of Yemen finally granted permission to the renowned American archaeologist Frank Albright to visit Marib to help solve this mystery, his party was immediately driven off at gunpoint by unhappy locals. Archaeologists have found fragmentary but tantalizing Minaean inscriptions as far away as Memphis in Egypt and Delos in Greece, suggesting the presence of Arabian trade diasporas thousands of miles from their homeland.
As the domestication of camels for transport spread north and east, other legendary inland hubs, such as Palmyra, Samarkand, and Shiraz (in modern-day Syria, Uzbekistan, and Iran, respectively), swarmed with camel traders, caravan drivers, and the merchants of many nations. Each city became, in its turn, wealthy and powerful. Today, perhaps the most visible remnants of the incense trade are the magnificent stone temples and tombs at Petra, the capital of Nabataea, in what is now southern Jordan.
This mysterious kingdom of sun worshippers flourished between 300 BC and the fall of Rome, and their prosperity hinged on their control of the northern third of the Arabian incense track. Likewise, the Mediterranean terminus of the camel route at Gaza also thrived on the trade. The incense sent by Alexander to Leonides—fifteen tons of frankincense, three tons of myrrh—came from Gazan warehouses plundered by Alexander on his way from Tyre to Egypt in 332 BC. By that date, Gaza was already a very old and wealthy place, sitting on a large funeral mound and having been besieged several times in the preceding centuries by the Assyrians.
By the time the incense reached Egypt, the easygoing honesty of Arabia Felix had completely disappeared. Again, Pliny:
At Alexandria, on the other hand, where the frankincense is worked up for sale, by Hercules, no vigilance is sufficient to guard the factories! A seal is put upon the workmen’s aprons, they have to wear a mask or a net with a close mesh on their heads, and before they are allowed to leave the premises they have to take off all their clothes.20
The ancient incense trade was thus no different from the modern cocaine and heroin trades: relatively safe around the raw agricultural source, but highly risky around the finished product and its ultimate consumers.
The effects of incense in its ultimate destination, Rome, were less salutary. Along with silk, aromatic imports drained the empire of silver; Nigel Groom estimates that about fifteen million denarii per year were spent on the ten thousand camel loads of incense bound for the capital. As long as plunder from abroad arrived on the wharves, there was no problem; Seneca’s fortune alone was reputed to be almost one hundred million denarii. But in the second century, as the conquests ceased and Romans became ever more extravagant, those more poetically than economically inclined may be forgiven for concluding that the power of the empire evaporated in a haze of incense.21
Although frankincense and myrrh spread prosperity to cities and towns all along the caravan route, one place among them—a small western Arabian oasis situated about halfway between Yemen’s producers of incense and its consumers in the faraway eastern Mediterranean and Fertile Crescent—would mesmerize the civilized world. There, the incense trade catalyzed the birth of Islam, whose military, spiritual, and commercial impacts transformed medieval Asia, Europe, and Africa. Riding on a rising tide of global trade along the land and sea routes of Asia, Islam came to dominate that continent’s spiritual as well as its commercial life.
The saga of the new religion begins with the ancestors of the desert Arabs, who were sedentary farmers working marginal oasis plots. About 3,000 to 3,500 years ago, they first mastered camel domestication, which gave them the ability to challenge the stark, terrifying Arabian wilderness. Even with this newfound mobility, their situation was precarious, huddling in oases during the deadly, rainless summers and foraging the desert fringes with goats and camels the rest of the year.
This grim nomadic existence afforded them a precious geographic remoteness that spared them conquest. The two great western predator states of the post-Roman era, the Byzantine and the Persian Sassanid empires, both sought to regain the past glories of Trajan and Darius from each other: Byzantium endeavored to grab Mesopotamia from Persia, while Persia in turn hoped to regain Syria and Egypt from Byzantium. Locked in a continuous life-and-death struggle, these powers devoted no significant attention to the exotic, impoverished desert dwellers to the south. There was one exception to Arab remoteness and independence, and that was the monsoon-swept, fertile, incense-producing Arabia Felix, which became a luckless pawn in this ancient version of the Great Game.
The harsh and lawless environment of the desert shaped both economic and religious life on the Arabian Peninsula and has to this day left its mark on the culture of the Muslim world. Survival in Arabia, with its lack of a central authority, was, and remains, utterly dependent on the good efforts of the family and the tribe.
Western notions of individual autonomy and rule of law simply do not apply in the desert. An attack on one tribesman is an attack on all, and in a landscape where a murderer can quickly and quietly slip away, it matters little whether the accused is guilty or innocent. His entire clan is held accountable for thar—retribution. The resulting skein of honor and revenge, so familiar in the modern Middle East, is eternal, seemingly without beginning and without end. When the first recourse of victims is to their cousins, and not to the police or to an independent judicial system, poverty and political instability are the usual outcomes.
In such a barren and impoverished landscape, a major source of sustenance is often theft from the tents and caravans of neighboring tribes. The signal military operation of the desert is the ghazu—a raid mounted on horses (which are both faster and easier to control at a full gallop than the camel). The raiders swiftly and deftly execute these attacks so as to avoid causing casualties that would trigger thar.22 Recall the trilemma of trade: whether to trade, protect, or raid. In the absence of any authority beyond the tribe, entrepreneurs will invariably choose to raid.
The pre-Islamic desert dwellers prayed to many gods, and Islam appropriated many early Arab religious beliefs and practices. The early Arabs erected shrines to numerous deities; the holiest was Kaaba at Mecca, a large granite block in one corner of which was embedded black stone, probably of meteoric origin. It is not certain if the Kaaba was dedicated to the main Arab deity, al-Llah, or to one of the lesser Arab deities, Hubal. The people of the ancient Middle E
ast commonly worshipped meteoric fragments; the silk-loving Roman emperor Elagabalus, described in the Introduction, was a Syrian who began his career as the high priest of a temple housing such a celestial remnant in the town of Emesa (modern-day Homs in Syria). When he became emperor, he dismayed the Romans by bringing the rock along with him and building another temple for it in the capital.23 (Twenty-two years after the death of Elagabalus, the leadership of that most ecumenical of empires would fall to Emperor Philip, an Arab.)
By AD 500, the desert Arabs had come into frequent contact with Christians and Jews. The Jews likely had migrated south after the conquest of Jerusalem by Nebuchadnezzar in 586 BC and established palm plantations in the Hejaz. Similarly, Christianity diffused into Arabia both from Byzantium in the north and from the south across Bab el Mandeb in Coptic Christian Abyssinia. Christians and Jews often taunted the Arabs about their polytheistic beliefs and their lack of an overarching creed and an afterlife. Consequently, a sense of religious inferiority arose among the desert dwellers, along with a pent-up desire for a comprehensive belief system of their own.
Exactly how Mecca became a bustling commercial center is something of a mystery; it produced nothing of value, was not a great center of consumption or of government, and had little strategic worth. Some historians have suggested that its main advantage was its position: Mecca lay approximately midway on the two-month journey up the Arabian Peninsula, so far from both Byzantium in the north and Abyssinian-run Yemen in the south that it was relatively safe from the depredations of both. This cannot be the major reason for its prominence, however. The role of the incense trade in the city’s rise is also uncertain: there is controversy as to whether or not the main caravan route bypassed the town (in contrast to Medina, through which the incense highway almost certainly ran).24 Mecca sits in a dry and barren valley, and during the pre-Islamic period was utterly dependent for its food on the gardens and farmlands of Taif, seventy-five miles away.25 In a narrow sense, Mecca may be thought of as a miniature, parched, landlocked Arabian version of Venice, whose food supply and rhythms of daily life hummed to the tunes of trade, whether or not it actually sat on the main incense route.
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