This spot is the perfect launching pad for a spice odyssey, one that will take us to the ancient port of Zayton on the China Sea, to the Turpan Depression that edges the Gobi Desert below the Tian Shan range on the border between China and Kazakhstan, to the Panj River that separates the Hindu Kush of Pakistan from the Pamirs of Tajikistan, to the coastal ports of Oman, Egypt, Turkey, and Mexico, to the slot canyons of Petra in Jordan, and to the sprawling souks, çarşısı, bazaars, and mercados of Syria, Ethiopia, Egypt, Turkey, Morocco, Portugal, Spain, and Mexico. We will wander down the Incense Trails of the Middle East, the Silk Roads of Asia, the Spice Trails of Africa, and the Camino Real of Central and North America. It will take us back in time, and possibly, it may launch us into considering our future.
But first we must pay homage to the spindly frankincense tree here in its primordial nejd habitat, for it was once the most expensive and widely traveled cargo in the world, its antiseptic, culinary, medicinal, and magico-religious uses well regarded by dozens of cultures.
How odd it is that the unforgettable fragrance of frankincense comes not from its flowers or fruits but from its wounds, as if it were one more saint like Francis of Assisi or Jesus of Nazareth with stigmata that drip with blood, sweat, and tears. Whether wounded by the whipping of branches during seasonal windstorms, bruised by the browsing of camels, or cut open by the crude mingaf knives of Omani, Yemeni, and Somali harvesters, this injured bush offers up a few grams of gum as its only useful product. If it is too badly injured or too frequently milked by greedy tappers, the bush will succumb to a premature death. These stunted perennials already struggle to survive on sun-scorched scree where rainfall is scant; it does not take very much additional stress to hasten their demise.
For that reason, and because there are few other lucrative products that can be derived from the nejd barrens in the Dhofar highlands, frankincense stands have been traditionally owned, carefully protected, and diligently managed for millennia. In his great Naturalis Historiae, Pliny the Elder wrote descriptively of the frankincense groves that he called “the forests of Arabia Felix”: “The forest is divided up into definite portions, and owing to the mutual honesty of the owners, is free from trespassing, and though nobody keeps guard over the trees after an incision has been made, nobody steals from his neighbor.”8
Outside of Dhofar, I listen to an Omani forest steward explain to me that his job is much like that of a game warden. His task, he says, is to “keep watch over what is precious.”
His name is Ali Salem Bait Said. He comes from a family and Jabbali tribe that functioned as traditional owners of a particular frankincense gathering ground until the late 1960s. All such historically controlled lands were divided into parcels called menzelas. When the paternal bloodline inheritance of the right to manage and harvest a grove, or menzela, of frankincense finally broke down, it terminated a centuries-old land tenure tradition. But Ali Salem Bait Said still remembers his family’s stories of how to care for a productive stand of frankincense properly: “In the past, [my] people thought of themselves as friends of the tree. They don’t scratch down to the bone. They go and cut closer to the bark—not deep—so that they will not hurt the tree. Now [with the suspension of traditional ownership] there is no one to take care of the trees. And so there are people who come here that think of them as wild [not managed] and milk them for all they can give, until the trees dry up. [Those migrant harvesters] may not even know the traditional songs for lubān, the ones which we sang in celebration of God.”
Ali points out trees that have had branches broken by feral camels and others that he believes have been milked too frequently. He suggests that at least in his tribe such occurrences would have been uncommon when the centuries-old practices of menzela management were still intact.
Later, I have the opportunity to learn about more ancient frankincense gathering and management traditions from a remarkable field scientist and observer of frankincense culture, Mohamud Haji Farah, who received his doctorate in desert studies from the same University of Arizona program where I obtained mine. Although Somali by birth, Dr. Farah has spent several years near Dhofar documenting how indigenous Omani tribal herders and migrant Somali harvesters work with frankincense. Ironically, he focused on Jabal Samhan, the same area that I was fortunate enough to visit. Of slight build and quiet voice, Farah speaks and writes with discerning authority on the indigenous traditions that have evolved around this much-revered spiritual and economic resource. Among his observations is that “frankincense trees are presumed to possess or house supernatural powers associated with both good and evil spirits. . . . [And so, it was] a sacred commodity, and its harvesters worked under ritualistic constraints.”9
FIGURE 1. An Omani forester approaches a frankincense tree near Sohar, a port of departure for the Arabic spice trade. (Photo by the author.)
I had heard that harvesters were not allowed to sleep with their wives or eat certain foods during the harvest season. Farah neither confirms nor denies this for me. Instead, he notes how the chanting of prayers and the burning of incense are still enacted at the beginning of the tapping season. Some harvesters believe that frankincense trees could not survive, thrive, and yield incense in such harsh and desolate arid environments if they did not have sacred powers.10
The rituals, Farah surmises, are means of showing respect to the trees and perhaps even pacifying them. He has found that such beliefs were widespread among Arab harvesters, not only in Oman but in Yemen and Saudi Arabia as well. Farah and other scientists who have surveyed the persistence of these traditions guess that such beliefs and rituals promote self-constraint among harvesters. It seems that they discourage would-be trespassers from entering someone else’s menzela patch in order to milk their trees clandestinely.
In listening to both Ali Salem Bait Said and Mohamud Farah, I am struck by just how vulnerable frankincense is on its home ground, and yet how long the harvesting of its incense has persisted—perhaps four thousand years—without widespread decimation of its populations. I wonder whether the ritual constraints and the prayerful gathering of its precious resins have somehow kept frankincense populations from being overexploited, even though the incense has been in transcontinental trade for thousands of years.
Or perhaps the harvesters in Yemen, Oman, and Saudi Arabia recognize that if they eliminate their most valuable resource, they would have few other desert plants, animals, or minerals to trade for food. Especially during times of drought or political disruption, the trading of frankincense has been one of the few hands they could play. Yet another reason for the longevity of frankincense was suggested to me by a second Omani forester, who explained, “It would not be right to fail to protect this plant, for it is the source of our history.”
I begin to think about other desert dwellers I have known, especially herders and hunter-gatherers who have not had the food crops produced in irrigated oases to fall back on during the worst of times. Having a mythical medicine, spice, or incense to trade was perhaps all that kept them from starvation during the harshest periods.
The nomadic Seri Indians with whom I have lived and worked in Mexico’s deserts offer such an example.11 As soon as European missionaries arrived on the edge of their traditional territory, the Indians opportunistically engaged these Jesuit priests in unwittingly supporting two of their economic strategies. First, the Seri obtained food by trading incense such as copal, medicines such as jojoba, and spices such as oregano to the priests to send back to Europe. Then, once they knew what the outsiders had in store, they would clandestinely raid their trading partner’s pantries for additional food and drink.
As I leave the highlands of Jabal Samhan for the port town of Salalah, I take a handful of frankincense beads along with me to burn ritually that night. They are modest in size and sit lightly in my palm. And yet I have heard that they command respectable prices in the souks and tourist shops along