Cumin, Camels, and Caravans. Gary Paul Nabhan

Gulf and Arabian Sea, perhaps as high as fifty dollars per kilogram, or twenty to twenty-five times what a harvester might be paid in the desert for the same quantity. I decide to go into a souk to see if this is true.

      When I enter the souk, I realize that there is one secret of frankincense commerce that I have already surmised: such a little thing, as diminutive and nearly as weightless as a single grain of wheat, is the perfect commodity to trade over long distances. Of course its economic and mythic value must be made to loom larger than the trade item itself, as well. This, I guess, has been the trade secret shared by most spice traders over the last four millennia: if you can, carry to the far corners of the earth something as light as a feather that can linger in one’s memory forever, but eschew anything as dull and as heavy as lead. In other words, whenever feasible, trade in potent fragrances and flavors, for they are the tangible corollaries of visions and dreams. They are intermediaries between the physical and spiritual domains, reminding us that there is more to the world that what we can absorb through our eyes.

      

      These elusive things become deeply rooted in our imaginations, far more so than most material goods. For at least thirty-five hundred years, and perhaps for as long as fifty-five hundred years, incense, spices, and herbs have captured the human attention and imagination.¹² They have not only been worth trading for, for some they have been worth dying for.

      As the most protected harbor close to the Dhofar highlands, Salalah was one of those historic places where individuals lived for and occasionally died for frankincense. Its ruins sit on the edge of the coastal plain overlooking the Arabian Sea, sprawling over the site of the ancient trade center of Zhafar. Because it is just a short camel drive of eighteen miles from the highlands to this naturally protected harbor, the ports here have long attracted professions in addition to those of sailor and shipper. They have welcomed incense graders, incense makers, incense mixers, and carvers of incense smokers or censers called midkhān,¹³ as well as camel drovers and mule skinners of the kind that have brought aromatic goods in from the desert to the sea for upward of thirty-five hundred years.

      Once I arrive in the city, it does not take me long to find Salalah’s largest souk, where all matter of things sacred and profane can be bought and sold, but where frankincense has long been the featured attraction. How could it not be? Once I approach the dozen or so shops that are constantly sending smoke up toward the heavens and out toward their prospective customers, I could hardly resist lingering there for a while.

      The shops are small and rather gaudy and glitzy, but they are far more elegant than most spice shops in other Middle Eastern souks. Incense burns while some scratchy recordings of Arabic music play on loudspeakers. I had assumed that one could only purchase frankincense here, but myrrh, sandalwood, and musk are also on sale. In fact, I count dozens of kinds of incense, native perfumes, and aromatic herbs being offered, not merely to tourists but to Omanis as well.

      It may be a leap for a Westerner to make, but in the southern reaches of the Arabian Peninsula, incense is regarded as a form of nourishment. There are recipes for over two dozen incense mixtures and herbal scents included in Al-Azaf, the most popular Omani cookbook in shops and marketplaces.¹⁴ Those recipes bring together oud (aloe wood) oil with black musk, ambergris with sandalwood, saffron with snails, cloves with rose water, blending them into various divinely fragrant concoctions. But among all of the aromatics sold in the souk, frankincense is the one that they let stand alone. A soloist, its olfactory melody is too heavenly for Omanis to ever want it to be overdubbed.

      Synesthesia. As I walk in and out of incense shops that share the same open corridor, I begin to feel as if I am stoned, for my senses are being bombarded with a mix of images unlike anything they had ever experienced before. This is literally a land of smoke and mirrors. The mirrors are placed to make the shops appear larger, to multiply the colored lights, and to catch the whirls of smoke rising from clay incense burners. Nearly every incense shop is stocked with fashionably shaped aspirators and decanters of perfumes, censers and smokers, rustic bags of dried incense, and bowls with glistening samples of both. But added to that is the harmonic intensity of oud music, voices speaking a dozen languages, and the memorable profiles of women in brilliantly colored silk gowns, dazzling jewelry, and gorgeous scarves. As half a dozen kinds of smoke from incense gradually fill my lungs, the world glimmering before me begins to seem like an illusion.

      An elderly Somali Omani shopkeeper, her hands and lower arms aflame with intricate patterns inscribed with henna, notices my befuddlement. She smiles and with a fine British accent invites me into her little shop. She beckons me to come and sit so that I might learn to distinguish the five grades of lubān from one another. She says that she will show me how to vaporize them properly over glowing coals in a traditional clay incense burner rather than “burning away” much of their potency.

      She explains that the differences among grades may at first seem too subtle to the uninitiated tourist, but that they are worth recognizing. The top grade, hojari fusoos, commands prices three to four times higher than that of the next level of quality, the nejdi. The trick of the shopkeeper is to discern quickly how much—or really, how little—a visitor actually knows about frankincense.

      Feigning alarm, her almond-shaped eyes magnified by the delicate lines of kohl drawn around them, she notes how some of her competitors display low-grade “ore” that is roughly the same color and texture as hojari. In a whisper, she confides in me that there might even be some unscrupulous merchants who will try to market their nuggets of nejdi, or even lower-quality shazri, as hojari fusoos.

      “They are out to take the shirt off of your back for a few pebbles of frankincense,” she frowns. She then swears to me that she has never perpetrated such an impropriety, and that I can place my trust in her henna-colored hands.

      

      MAP 1. Spice trails of the Arabian Peninsula and Arabian Sea

      I begin to daydream then, not fully hearing the rest of her sales pitch, but instead remembering little fragments of what historians had compiled about frankincense and spices in the ancient economies.

      The best frankincense, hojari fusoos, or some comparable grade from the region of Yemen, cost the ancient Romans 6 denarii per pound. That was roughly the same as ginger, more than black pepper, and twice the price of cardamom. Myrrh was twice the price per volume at that time because it would dehydrate and thus shrink; however, it was never used in the quantities that the Romans transported and consumed frankincense. In late Roman times, the cost of transporting a camel-load of frankincense from the southern Arabian Peninsula to the Mediterranean was 680 to 1,000 denarii, more than five times the cost of living a year in Palestine during the same era. In exchange for frankincense, each year, goods worth close to 10 million denarii would flow back the seventeen hundred miles from the shores of the Mediterranean, or from Persia and India.¹⁵

      For a desert region where less than one-thousandth of the land’s surface could be used to grow crops, it was frankincense that stimulated the flow of goods from better-watered regions in to Dhofar and the Hadhramaut. The Semitic tribes of Arabia Felix would trade their lubān, which the Romans called olibanum, for a range of material items that were beyond their capability to produce: silk sashes, muslin sheets, medicinal ointments, dry white wines, emmer wheat, copper vessels, and silver plates. Of course, small irrigated oases were scattered across Arabia Felix that provided most of the tribes with their dates, cereals, and some other cultivated foods, but trade in frankincense was what leveraged access to them for the nomads.

      Until Arab and Phoenician seafarers gained a certain competence in maritime navigation, transport of frankincense and other goods over such long distances could be done only by camel. Dromedary camels appear to have been domesticated in the coastal settlements of eastern Arabia not far from present-day Salalah. They may have been initially managed as a wild resource for the medicinal value of their milk, which fends off microbial infections of the eye—just as frankincense offered its antiseptic lubān to treat irritations, cancers, and tumors in the eyes of the Semitic tribes there long before the era of Abraham. Clay figurines of camels made in Yemen close to three thousand years ago