Cumin, Camels, and Caravans. Gary Paul Nabhan

reach my hand out and gingerly lay it on the limber branches of a tree that is about as tall as I am. It has a voluptuous trunk covered in a jacket of ashy-hued bark. I reach farther into its canopy and grasp a thicker branch around its girth, as if I am feeling the bulging biceps of an iron-pumping friend. These sinuous branches are laden with small clusters of slightly crumpled but highly aromatic leaflets. I notice that the trunk is indelibly marked with scars, scorings in the bark made by intentional slashes with a knife, and on these scars are dried droplets of a pale white resin that forms perfect tears.

      Just beneath the bark are microscopic tear-duct-like structures that can be stimulated to shed their resin by scoring, the very same means used by our primate ancestors to obtain acacia gum, gum trag-acanth, mastic, or myrrh from other woody plants. Like them, this resin has long been valued as a medicine, vermifuge, flavorant, spice, and incense.

      But that is where the comparisons among gummy incenses stop. For close to four millennia, this particular gum has been regarded as the highest-quality incense in the world. It was once the most economically valuable and most widely disseminated plant product on the globe: frankincense, food of the gods.

      Even the stuffiest of scientists begrudgingly acknowledge the sacredness of this tree every time they recite its scientific name, Boswellia sacra. I have some familiarity with its distant relative, the elephant tree of the Americas, for I have often collected the copal incense from its trunk. And many winter days, when I suffer from inflammation and pain from an old horseback-riding injury, I rub my muscles with the salve of B. serrata, the so-called Indian frankincense, or salai.

      I dip beneath the canopy of the gnarly tree and pull a small but recently crystallized lump of gummy sap from a scar on its central trunk. It looks as if in the spring prior to my arrival the trunk’s bark had been scarified in two or three places, probably by a Somali migrant harvester. He likely slashed at the bark with a mingaf, a short-bladed tool that looks much like a putty knife, then came back a month later and cleaned the wound. At the end of spring, he did so a second time as well, and then the wound wept for several more weeks.

      The milky sap flowing out of the tree’s phloem has already begun to congeal into a semiliquid resinous latex. Frankincense tappers call the creamy sap “milk,” or lubān in Arabic, shehaz in mountain talk. But this is the sweetest, whitest, and milkiest of all frankincense, the internationally acclaimed hojari fusoos. Its quality is found nowhere in the world except here, in the highlands of Dhofar.

      During the height of its use in the Roman Empire, more money was spent on acquiring this superlative form of frankincense than was spent on any other aromatic—incense, spice, or herb—whether traded long distances by land or sea. In Babylon, those rich enough to afford it would bask in its smoke, purifying and imbuing their bodies with its fragrance prior to bouts of lovemaking.

      When I find another bit of sap that has begun to harden, I pinch the viscous substance until it pulls away from the trunk like taffy. I hold it in my hand and let the sun shine on the dried globule, which has turned amber. It shines dully back at the sun, a cloudy droplet of oleoresin resembling a freshly made curd of goat cheese. A bluish hue is hidden deep in the sap’s pearly clouds, as if shards of fallen sky are waiting to be sent up to join the rest of the heavens.

      For millennia, people have been doing just that: they have made a burnt offering of the sacred milk so that its smoke can rise beyond this world. Believers say that smoke from the best frankincense forms a single white column that flows straight into the sky. If its vapor trail is strong enough to ascend into the heavens, this gift will inevitably reach, nourish, and delight the Creator, the Prophet, or particular saints—whoever is meant to receive these fragrant prayers.

      Timidly, I place a tiny piece of the sap in my mouth and gnash it between my teeth as I might do with any chewing gum. Hints of honey, lime, verbena, and vanilla well up and spread through the juices of my mouth. I smile as I remember that pregnant Bedu women also chew on frankincense gum, hoping that it will encourage the child in the womb to live an intellectually and spiritually elevated life. Both Shahri and Somali harvesters chew on this gum while they “milk” more lubān from one tree after another, depositing their harvests into two-handled baskets woven from the fronds of date palms.

      I quickly warm to this world of incense, camels, and date palms, for it seems vaguely but deeply familiar to me. I belong to a bloodline that traces its origins back to Yemeni and Omani spice traders of the Banu Nebhani tribe. It is plausible that my own ancestors wandered these same hills more than fourteen hundred years ago, before they spread north across the Arabian Peninsula and beyond. This possibility alone suggests why I have felt motivated—even destined—to come to one of the driest and most remote parts of the world. But frankly, I am after something far larger than that.

      I have come here to dig for the roots of globalization, if the roots of such an ancient and pervasive phenomenon can be traced at all. I wish to track them back to the very first bartering for tiny quantities of aromatic resins like mastic, bdellium, frankincense, and myrrh; for the stone-ground seeds of cumin and anise; for the fragrant musk extracted from the glands of deer; for the bitingly sharp leaves of mint or oregano; for the bark of cassia from China and true cinnamon from Sri Lanka; for the sun-dried skins of kaffir limes; for the shavings carved off the egg-shaped seed of the nutmeg tree; for the withered orange-red stigma of the saffron flower; for the willowy pods of the vanilla vine and the pungent ones of a myriad of chile plants.

      Collectively, these various plant and animal products are ambiguously referred to as “spices” in English, just as they were rather coarsely lumped together as aromatikos by the ancient Greeks. Perhaps these references build on the ancient Arab concept of shadhan, a term used to describe a particularly pungent herb, but one that can also jointly refer to strongly fragrant and flavorful substances of both plant and animal origin. A related word, al-shadw, is used to comment on the intensity of pungency in a pepper, a piece of cinnamon bark, or a lump of the hojari fusoos grade of frankincense.

      

      A third Arabic word, al-adhfar, relates to any pungent smell, from musk to human sweat.⁵ Indeed, some scholars have suggested that musk, pungent ointments, and rose waters have been routinely used in hot climes to mask the odor of human sweat, which would otherwise be the most pervasive smell in desert camps and cramped cities much of the year.

      Historian Patricia Crone once offered this litany to circumscribe the many faces and fragrances of aromatics: “They include incense, or substances that gave off a nice smell on being burned; perfumes, ointments, and other sweet-smelling substances with which one dabbed, smeared or sprinkled oneself or one’s clothes; things that one put into food or drink to improve their taste, prolong their life, or endow them with medicinal or magical properties; and they also included antidotes.”⁶

      By the early fourteenth century, the Italian merchant Francesco di Balduccio Pegolotti documented the arrival of at least 288 varieties of spices into Europe, mostly through Semitic merchants who sometimes referred to their origin in particular Arabian, African, or Asian landscapes. These spices ranged from asafetida to zedoary and included everything from gum Arabic to manna to the madder of Alexandria.⁷

      Such spices are the sensuous signposts that can tell us where the trails and rustic roads of globalization first ran and remind us why we have been so engaged with these aromatic products in the first place. And so a quest to understand the semiotics of globalization must begin with reading spices as signs of deeper desires or diseases that have been embedded in certain segments of humankind for millennia.

      For many years now, I have been preoccupied if not altogether consumed with finding out why some individuals, communities, or cultures have been content with staying home and savoring what immediately lies before them, while others have an insatiable desire to taste and see or even possess that which comes from afar. I have wondered why certain peoples culturally and genetically identified as Semitic—Minaeans and Nabataeans, Phoenicians and other Canaanites, Quraysh and Karimi Arabs, Radhanite and Sephardic Jews—have played such disproportionately large roles in globalized trade, not merely over the short course of decades or centuries but over the long haul of many millennia.

      As I stand on the dry ridge, panting and sweating my bodily fluids