Cumin, Camels, and Caravans. Gary Paul Nabhan
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members of a foreign cultural community in a distant land might be touched by the mythic dimensions of the merchants’ peregrinations in the foreigner’s own tongue. After all, the best spice merchants knew full well that they were not merely selling calories, cures, or scents but also the stories that came along with them that might magnify the value of each item.
One of the first of these merchant cultures that we can put a name to is that of the Minaeans from the land of Punt, the place name that certain Europeans used for the Sayhadic incense kingdoms that once spanned most of present-day Yemen and the Dhofar region of southern Oman. Punt is where Biblical scholars suggest that the legendary Queen of Sheba resided, though that particular incense kingdom is correctly referred to as Saba, not Sheba. Although most of the finest frankincense came from the Hadhramaut and Dhofar highlands, the Minaeans who lived to the west of these regions in their own kingdom of Ma’in were among the pioneers who moved it into broader trade. At first, they likely swapped frankincense for the cultivated food crops farmed in the irrigated oases closest to their seasonal camps. Later, they traded it for other products from the world at large.
Of course, little doubt exists that they and others had long been trading locally in wild fennel seeds, cinnamon-like barks, indigo dyes, and even myrrh, all items within a few days’ reach of the more northerly encampments in the kingdom of Ma’in. These wildcrafted goods could be bartered for the grain, pulses, dates, and herbs grown in the oasis villages in the more southerly, better-watered kingdoms of Saba, Timna, and Shabwa. Leather goods and metals were also transported down various paths, not just one Frankincense Trail.9 Most of the Minaeans lived deeper in the hinterlands, on the ecological boundary between Arabia Felix and Arabia Deserta.
For much of their history, the Minaeans controlled the last small, stone-walled oases where sedentary Arabs dwelled: Yathrib (later called Madinat Rasul Allah, or Medina) and Qarnaw. That was before their own caravans began to venture out to where nomads roamed the sand seas of the Rub‘ al-Khali or gathered gums in the groves of frankincense or myrrh on the edge of the nejd.
The Minaeans soon became the regular go-betweens that linked two very different worlds: that of the nomadic tribes who wildcrafted fragrant herbs, aromatic incenses, and potent medicines from the desert itself, and that of the sedentary tribes who cultivated millet, dates, sesame seeds, and flax and used saffron and indigo to brighten their lives.
Minaean storytellers developed countless ways to heighten the mystique of the nomadic cultures to the sedentary farmers, who seldom had time to explore beyond their irrigation ditches. Likewise, Minaean bards found ways to make the nomads envious of all of the wealth that the farmers accumulated in their permanent homesteads and villages. The Minaeans lived in both of these worlds, and they learned to play one against the other with relative ease.
It was this group of intermediaries who gradually but firmly took control of the early spice trade in the southern reaches of the peninsula from 1200 to 650 BCE. Although they never achieved the full expansion of their domain to the entire peninsula, they set the stage for lasting interregional trade. Historian Caroline Singer notes their pivotal presence even in the crossroad communities of the Hadhramis (at the Shabwa oasis) and the Sabaeans (at the Ma’rib oasis) and in Qana, the primary port for the maritime shipping of aromatics:
The merchants themselves would probably not have been natives of Shabwa; there is no evidence for either Hadramites [Hadhramis] or Sabaeans acting as incense dealers. It appears instead that there was a very specific group of South Arabians who acted as long-distance traders, and who came from the kingdom of Ma’in. According to Pliny, the Minaeans [became] the best-known South Arabians in the Roman world. They took consignments of incense to Syria, Egypt and Assyria, as well as to the Greek and Roman world, and they established a dynamic network of traders, each under the supervision of a magistrate, in various key points along the route. There was a settlement of Minaean traders in the Qatabanian capital of Timna’, in the Hadramite capitol Shabwa; in the [outlying] oasis of Dedan, and in various cities of Egypt, including Alexandria.10
Curiously, throughout the Arabian Peninsula, incense and spice traders like the Minaeans tended to keep their most valuable stores of incense away from port towns. Good ports were valuable, but they were also vulnerable, for they could be more easily raided by rakes and ramblers from the outside. Like the famous hidden city of Petra later populated by the elusive Nabataeans, the oases frequented by most spice merchants lay inland, where marauders would have had to cross difficult stretches of featureless desert to find the fortresses where the most precious caches were guarded. This held true for incense repositories located in what is now Oman, just as it was for such repositories in Yemen.
While still in Oman, Laurie and I were taken to Bahla Fort, one of the most representative and intact fortresses historically used by spice traders, including my own Banu Nebhani clan. This mythic fortified city was situated a considerable distance inland from the several ports where my clansmen once controlled the trade. We traveled back across barren coastal plains, then down dry gravel riverbeds and up and over low limestone ridges before we glimpsed the still-stunning site of Bahla. It edged a steep-rising limestone plateau, Jabal al-Akhdar, where many of my kinsmen took refuge once their hegemony over the fertile valleys ultimately declined. I first caught sight of a dense patch of towering date palms, and then saw other soaring profiles rising above the horizon, like a mirage in the blistering hot sun. Protected with ten linear miles of high stone walls, the castlelike fortress rose above the fields and groves.
Here was where the spices, incenses, dates, and precious metals were kept before they were taken to the coast by camel caravan during the cooler hours of the night. And here is also where the cinnamon and cardamom, the black and white peppercorns, the saffron and sandalwood—goods that had been purchased from sailors who had ventured as far as Socotra, the Malabar Coast of India, Sri Lanka, or Indonesia—were hoarded.
We spent much of the day wandering along the irrigation ditches that watered the plots of fava beans and hedges of roses, the groves of dates and the orchards of citrons, pomegranates, and figs. They had been nurtured by a falaj, an irrigation system of hydraulic structures that harvested and stored rainwater from the barren limestone slopes above the walled oasis. We visited stone-lined pools for prayers, pools for baths, and canals that meandered through a shady and verdant world that bore no resemblance to the sunbaked desert beyond the walls.
Later, when we arrive at the souk in nearby Nizwa and enter the marketplace where vegetables and fruits are sold, we are joined by Ali Masoud al-Subhi, a local resident. Ali tells me that he may have something special to show me. He marches us right up to a produce vendor’s booth where an old man is dozing—his face is partially hidden by a white jalabiyah—as if he has been unable to stay attentive to his customers during the midday heat. Before him on a white countertop is a two-foot-long palm raceme harboring a cluster of freshly harvested dates. “Try one,” Ali whispers to me, “and don’t worry about stealing. I will leave some coins for the old man to find when he awakens.”
FIGURE 4. Bahla Fort served as an inland hub for trade out to the Strait of Hormuz, Gulf of Oman, and Indian Ocean. It is now a World Heritage Site. (Photo by the author.)
I pinch a few ripe dates off of the palm inflorescence and give one to Sulaiman, another to Laurie, and then take a third one for myself. My teeth cut through its dark chocolate skin and rich, sugary caramel-colored flesh. It is overwhelmingly sweet but delicious.
I look up. Ali has left a few coins on the counter and is now pinching another date off of the cluster. He holds it up between his index finger and thumb, as if it is a scientific specimen of some sort. “This, my friends, is called the Nebhani seedling date, and I believe it grows only here. Perhaps it exists in no other oasis. Perhaps it was named long ago for your family.”
Of all of the irrigated date palm oases on the Arabian Peninsula, including Nizwa and Bahla, perhaps the one at Ma’rib on Wadi Adhanah, in north-central Yemen, has the greatest primal significance to the history of Arab peoples. Indeed, it is often considered to be the earliest exemplar of hydraulic civilizations, for when it was first built some four thousand