Uncovering Hidden Outposts in the Desert
The desert shimmered before me, chimerical by its very nature. After days of visiting the spice souks of Alexandria and Cairo, Father Dave Denny and I were making our way across the Sinai with two Cairene van drivers in an old Volkswagen bus. It was the time of year when the Sinai is hot, dry, and desolate, with barely a cloud or a caravan in sight. For hours, we gazed out the window and saw sandy swales on the edges of hamadas, regs, and limestone ridges where it seemed as if every cobble was covered with a shiny black desert varnish. The sun’s heat reradiated off of the sheen. The road ahead was drenched with mirages of water that suddenly pooled up before our eyes. As we approached one of the pools, we realized that it was not filled with recently fallen rain, but with inky black asphalt from the ancient beds of bitumen excavated near Gaza.
As the van bounced along its bumpy surface, I tried to read a coverless, out-of-print British guidebook to my old friend Dave. It noted how archaeologists had been deciphering inscriptions about the spice trade on a twenty-three-hundred-year-old sarcophagus found in Egypt. The inscriptions detailed a Minaean trader’s account of following a route similar to the one on which we were traveling, but in the opposite direction. The trader was carrying perfumes and spices from the southern stretches of the Arabian Peninsula that were to be used in a prominent Egyptian temple.
Later, Callixenus of Rhodes recorded seeing one such caravan as it sought to go beyond the peninsula in search of better prices for its goods: “There marched three hundred Arab sheep and camels, some of which carried three hundred pounds of frankincense, three hundred pounds of myrrh, and two hundred of saffron, cassia, orris [an aromatic iris root], and all other spices.”1
I glanced up from the book in time to see a few Bedu on camelback, heading toward the coast of the Red Sea. Soon, I was looking out over the beaches and coral reefs along the shoreline and across the waters of the Gulf of Aqaba to the northwestern edge of the Arabian Peninsula, where low coastal ranges seemed to waver and wriggle with the heat. The highway ran roughly parallel to the coast, sometimes nearer to the water, sometimes farther, for another hour. If this route seemed tiresome to me as I sat in a van that lacked air-conditioning, I wondered what the journey must have been like on the back of a camel, barely buffered from the desert sun?
And yet, for several centuries in the first millennium BCE, Minaean caravans had carried frankincense, myrrh, and spices along this route, northward from Hadhramaut in Arabia Felix, across the Arabia Deserta to the Gulf of Aqaba, and then up to Petra and Gaza, or across the entire Sinai to the Nile. Some of the caravans were lucky enough to avoid the raids known as ghazw, in which poor nomads captured food and other resources from richer tribes, thereby redistributing wealth. If a Minaean expedition was successful, its goods might reach Damascus and Jerusalem. Or they might find their way to Alexandria and Giza (near present-day Cairo) on the other side of the Nile. But whenever droughts or plagues affected the local nomads’ capacity to raise livestock or forage for wild foods, they reverted to stalking the spice traders. To avoid losing all of the goods they carried in their caravan, the Minaeans often resorted to paying bribes or protection fees so that they might pass safely through the territories of poorer nomadic tribes.
I had become impressed by the tenacity and perspicacity of those prehistoric traders, but I was also getting road weary just thinking about the tediousness of their journeys across the open desert. The attitude that one must maintain to endure such a journey was well captured by explorer John Lloyd Stephens more than a century ago. After traveling in the company of Bedouins from the Red Sea toward Petra, he wrote, “We got through the day remarkably well, the scene always being precisely the same: before us, the long desolate, sandy valley, and on each side the still more desolate and dreary mountains. Towards evening we encamped; and after sitting for some time around a fire with my companions, I entered my tent [to sleep].”2
A flat tire and a half-hour pit stop on the barren side of the Sinai highway provided me with sufficient time to consider the wide ripple of influences that emanated from the doggedly determined Minaean traders who had preceded Stephens by two to three millennia. During the years that their trading culture flourished, their envoys had reached as far as the Greek island of Delos, the port of Alexandria, the oasis of Palmyra and settlements of Chaldea, and even to the ancient harbor of Keralaputra on the coast of present-day India. They had maintained a string of oasis outposts across the Arabian sands, including Najran and Timna. But after centuries of dominating trade in aromatics, the Minaeans began to falter in their efforts to control all spices, incenses, dye, and minerals flowing in and out of Arabia Felix. One possible reason for this waning was that the costs of bribes and protection fees simply became too great.
But a second possibility for their demise seems equally plausible: their competitors had learned to sail all the way to the southern port of Aden, both from the Red Sea on the west and the Arabian Sea on the east, thereby avoiding desert raiders.3 Ultimately, the Minaeans lost their competitive edge and economic niche. By 100 CE, their peculiar Semitic language, the now-extinct Madhabic tongue, was no longer the lingua franca of globalized trade.
I was jogged out of my reverie on Minaean history by the driver revving up the engine of our Volkswagen bus. Now outfitted with a nearly bald but inflated tire, our aged vehicle limped into the Red Sea resort town of Taba, the easternmost settlement in all of Egypt. When it came to a stop, I paid the two Egyptian drivers in pounds, and they immediately began their return trip west. Without even purchasing a new tire or some food, they had chosen to hasten toward Cairo and the comforts of the Nile.
Father Dave and I checked into two rooms in a modest hotel built just above the shoreline, and I took time out to soak my bones in the hypersaline waters of the Gulf of Aqaba. When the heat began to dissipate an hour before sunset, we left the crowded beach and hiked back from the highway into the shadows of a side canyon, where we found an encampment of forty to fifty Tarabin Bedouins who had moved up from neighboring Nuweiba.
These Bedu had improvised shade shelters and storage sheds next to their tents and corrals. The structures were elaborated from the debris they had looted, retrieved, or rescued from construction sites along Taba’s boulevard of resort hotels. I was greeted by a couple of Bedu boys and one girl who had been herding Nubian goats and fat-tailed sheep into the corrals for the night.
As soon as the sheep and goats were safe, the children walked me back to where their parents were camped. A middle-aged couple and an old man warmly welcomed me, then rolled out a carpet on the stony ground, sat me down, and not far from the carpet made a small wood fire on which to heat water. They prepared some shai nana’a (spearmint tea), offered us each a cup, and then poured cups for themselves. As we sipped our tea, the children came around to entertain us. When we got up to leave the campsite, the old man offered me a sandstone carving of a striped hyena consuming the head of a luckless tourist. I took it without question, giving him a few pounds and a couple of paisley bandanas in exchange.
Returning to our lodging just before dark, I realized that I could see the lights of Eilat, Israel, across the bay. Immediately to the right of them were the lights of Aqaba, Jordan. Long before these present-day resort towns illuminated the northern horizon from Taba, historic port towns had existed along the coast, where goods that had come from as far away as India were transferred to camel caravans for their trip into the desert.
The coastal ranges of Saudi Arabia across the gulf were also visible. From my vantage point, I could see how the northern reaches of the Red Sea are divided into four countries today. Twenty centuries ago, they were all part of one legendary nation of spice traders, a desert country with amorphous boundaries that the Jewish historian Josephus called the Nabatene kingdom, and whose itinerant traders were known from Ma’rib to Rome as the Nabatu. We call them the Nabataeans.
There was something about the Sinai’s scrappy Tarabin Bedouins that echoed the little that I knew about the ancient Nabataeans. Although a Nabataean presence is first evident in the archaeological record at the start of the fourth century BCE, their small nomadic clans are hardly mentioned in written documents for another several hundred years. In 312 BCE, Hieronymus of Cardia offered one of the first recorded observations of them. He worked with them in the gritty business of mining bitumen