The Incense Route

From roughly the third century BC to the second century AD, a network of overland and maritime routes carried frankincense and myrrh from southern Arabia and the Horn of Africa to the temples and marketplaces of the Mediterranean world. The routes ran north from the incense-producing regions of Dhofar and Hadramaut, through waystations in the Arabian interior, to hubs such as Petra and Gaza, before the resin reached Rome, Alexandria and beyond.

The Nabataeans, based at Petra, controlled a pivotal stretch of the route — the point where paths from the Gulf of Aqaba and the Dead Sea converged — and grew wealthy taxing the caravans that passed through. Other trading cities, among them Gerrha on the Persian Gulf and the ports of Khor Rori and Qana on the Arabian Sea, linked the overland route to seaborne trade reaching as far as India.

Frankincense itself is harvested from Boswellia sacra, a low, resinous tree that grows in the arid hills of Oman, Yemen and Somalia. The tree is cut in careful incisions; the wound seeps a milky resin that hardens into the fragrant “tears” burned as incense across the ancient world. In Hellenistic and Roman times, its value was said to exceed that of gold.

The route’s importance faded as Rome established direct maritime trade with India and, later, after the seventh-century Arab conquest of Egypt redrew the region’s trading map. But something of it survives in Incense of Music each time a resin is placed on the coal: a small return to a trade that once moved along caravan tracks for a thousand miles, tree to temple, temple to city, city to memory.