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Highlights
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The Frankincense Trail describes a seaborne and caravan trade route for frankincense and myrrh, linking the places were frankincense was produced in present-day Oman, Yemen, and northern Somalia with markets in the Nile valley, the Fertile Crescent, ancient Mesopotamia, Egypt, Greece, Rome, and India.
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Cultivated from a desert tree that grows in wadis, frankincense is an aromatic gum used in making incense, medicines and as base for amouage perfumes. It was valued by the Egyptians, Greeks and Romans to make incense and fragrances used in burials, sacrifices and important rituals.
✏️ pure frankincense comes in pale, yellow, translucent gummy blobs. It produces musky, lemony smoke when burned on top of coals in censures.
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trading it from 1000 B.C. to A.D. 700
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The best frankincense grows on a desert plateau that borders the green Qara mountains of the Dhofar region of southern Oman. This area has the right combination of high humidity, white limestones soils, higher winter temperatures, steady tropical sun, and heavy dew from the monsoons. The mountains and escarpments along the coast block the monsoon rains and produce a microclimate where frankincense trees grow
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Babylonians, Sumerians, Assyrians and Persians offered frankincense and other aromatics to their gods. Known as the “perfume of the gods,” frankincense was used in ancient Egyptian rites and as a base for perfumes and an ingredient in mummy preservation oils
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The first known reference to frankincense is an inscription on the 15th-century B.C. tomb of Queen Hatshepsut. It describes expeditions sent to Punt (probably Somalia) to fetch it.
✏️ Potentially first reference to frankincense use.
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One of the main purposes of frankincense was to hide awful smells. The Romans used it as a deodorant and for perfumed cremation rites. Nero reportedly used a year’s supply at the funeral for his consort Poppaea. In Roman times, frankincense was widely used to consecrate temples, mask the odor of cremations, make cosmetics and treat illness such as gout and a “broken head” and “malignant ulcers about the seat.”
✏️ Usage by romans and greeks
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The frankincense trade was its peak in the A.D. 2nd century, when South Arabia shipped more than 3,000 tons annually to Greece and Rome. The whole trade was controlled by a cartel not unlike OPEC of today. Pliny identified the tribes that produced frankincense and myrrh as “tent dwellers” called the Scenitae. “They are the richest races in the world
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On the location of the frankincense trail Pliny wrote: “The export of frankincense is along one narrow track” in ” octo mansionibus distant ” that lay along eight oases, each a day apart to the east and south of Shabawa.” He also wrote that Alexandria was major processing center for frankincense and that a rigid security system was set up to protect it. “Good heavens! No vigilance is sufficient to guard the factories…before [the workers] are allowed to leave the premises they have to take off all their clothes…Frankincense…is conveyed to Sabota on camels…The kings have made it a capital offense for camels so laden to turn aside from the high road.”
✏️ Path and security
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Between 2000 B.C. and 1000 B.C., complex trade network evolved to transport frankincense and other items overland that traversed long distances over the desert, where water was scarce. Many archeologists believe these routes were developed after the domestication of the camel, which could travel further on much less water than donkeys. Some scientists believe the trade began before the domestication of the camel, before the region changed from savannah to desert.
✏️ This goes really far back in time. Perhaps on donkey caravans for a while until domestication of the camel
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The Frankincense Trail caravan routes passed through a series of kingdoms---Main, Hadramawr, Sheba, and Qataban---in what is now Yemen, and then paralleled the Red Sea coast, about 70 miles inland, and passed through Mecca and Medina in present-day Saudi Arabia before reaching it destination, Petra in the kingdom of Nabataea in what is now Jordan.
✏️ End points varied all over.. Asia Minor, Palmyra, Damascus, and the Parthian Empire, Also egypt? roman empire, greece, etc.
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Legends of the frankincense trades became associated with the a city called Ubar (Iram). Ubar (60 miles from Salahar) is ancient fortress city mentioned in the Koran as “Iram of the columns” and described by early European explorers as “the Atlantis of the Sands.” It reached its peak as the source of much of the frankincense for the Frankincense Trail trade route and was said to be “rich in treasure, with date gardens and a fort of red silver.” The ruins of Ubar were discovered under the sand in 1992 using satellite imagery and clues gleaned from ancient historians and European explorers. Between 1992 and 1994, a fortress, administrative center and protected water supply were uncovered under the sand. Remain from neolithic times, the frankincense era, and the early Islamic era have all been found
✏️ Iram is not conclusively Ubar. I’m not seeing a clear consensus on this. So I’m not sure which place is related to frankincense trail. Nor to which place are all the paragraphs here referencing.
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In the late 1990s, archeologists discovered 65 separate archeological sites on the frankincense trail west of Ubar in Oman and Yemen. The finds included a pair of ancient fortresses like the one at Ubar, 30 “triliths” (stone markers), Stonehedge-like standing stones and boulders with inscriptions of Yemeni-style daggers. Many of the sites were found using satellite imagery and following the most logical route that caravaneers at that time would have used. Locals along the route actually pointed out the sites. One site contained 2000-year-old porcelain from China and stoneware from Vietnam.
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Present-day Yemen was once part of the ancient kingdom of Saba (Biblical Sheba), the most well-known and strongest of the kingdoms that appeared along the Frankincense Trail trade routes. It first appeared around 1000 B.C. and endured to the A.D. 4th century. The Koran describes Saba as a land with “two gardens on the right hand and the left…A fair land and indulgent Lord!” Because the people rejected Allah they were cursed with “gardens bearing bitter fruit, the tamarisk and here and there a lote-tree.” Marib (100 miles east of San’a) was the capital of Saba (Biblical Sheba) and the largest of the caravan cities on the Frankincense Trail. Located at an important passage from the Qana frankincense production areas through the Hadramawt Valley, it grew from rich trade and supported a large population with agriculture nourished by water from a massive earthen dam that was built in the 8th century B.C. in a wadi between two mountains and stood for more a thousand years.
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Modern Baraqish (20 miles off the San’a-Marib Road) is the home of Main, another ancient kingdom on the Frankincense Trail. The city was founded around 400 B.C. and was still occupied in the mid-1700s. The 14-meter-high wall and 57 time bastions largely intact. There are also a domed ruins of a small mosque; a small masonry temple with images of sacrificial ibex and gazelles; dancing girls, offerings of wine; and rows of bird-like men with lyres and war clubs.
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Beginning around the A.D. 1st century, trade picked up between India and Rome and the Greek kingdom in Egypt on what became the maritime Silk Road. Ships traveled on the monsoons between India and the Middle East and navigated the Red Sea to points, where short caravans could take goods to Alexandria on the Mediterranean Sea. A number of ports in the Gulf of Aden and the Red Sea---including Aden and Al-Munza (north of the Bab al Mandab strait, an entrance to the Red Sea)---grew rich from the trade at the expense of the land routes.
✏️ Between this, rise of christianity and islam that both got rid of rituals involving incense, and burials vs cremations.