Читать книгу Cumin, Camels, and Caravans - Gary Paul Nabhan - Страница 16
ОглавлениеCHAPTER 2
Caravans Leaving Arabia Felix
Following the trail of smoke rising from the tears of frankincense and myrrh, I leave the Arabian Peninsula, cross over to the Horn of Africa, and put my feet back on the lava-strewn earth along the volcanic rim of the Blue Nile Gorge. Near the seven-hundred-year-old monastery of Debre Libanos, I smell a mix of spices being shared on ancient market grounds beneath a gigantic tree within sight of the Abay River, a tributary of the Blue Nile. A clamor of brilliant color and strange sounds welcomes me as I enter the grounds where merchants from near and far have come for the morning spice market.
I continue to follow my nose. It picks up an earthy, mustardy smell. I have a hunch that it is emanating from turmeric (Curcuma longa), a gingerlike rhizome. It is used around the world to reduce inflammation among the tired and the elderly and to stimulate the immune systems of children after they have been sick.
Searching for the source of this pungent fragrance, I wander up and down the crowded aisles of the makeshift bazaar. It seems more like a motley swap meet or picnic than a formal marketplace. I spot a young black woman gesturing toward me and giggling at the out-of-place stranger in the midst of the bazaar.
My eyes focus on her and what she is selling. She is seated on the ground, wearing a blue-and-gray gown decorated with crescent moons and six-pointed stars. Her eyes peek out from beneath a long piece of purple cloth draped over her head. She is beckoning me to pause and taste what looks like a heap of gold dust piled up on a towel before her. I bend down and take a pinch, lick my index finger, and warm to the earthy, peppery, slightly bitter, somehow brilliant flavor that it offers. It is the turmeric that I have been seeking.
Suddenly, I feel connected to traditions of trading that stretch out far beyond my own life span. Spices, incenses, medicinal teas, and other aromatics that have been harvested nearby have also been traded, bartered, bought, and sold in this place for upward of ten thousand years. And yet, their time-tried value in cross-cultural exchanges persists to this day. Some, like ginger and turmeric, originally came from far away, before they found their way into dooryard gardens. Today, the locals consider them theirs, as if these aromatic roots had always been available to their ancestors.
This weekly spice exchange is held among Amharic-speaking Ethiopians who live in clusters of huts nestled in the slopes above the Abay River. The river at the bottom of the barranca is known to the outside world as a major tributary of the Blue Nile. The spice traders congregate on the hard-packed earth in the shade of a giant wild fig that teeters on the edge of the Blue Nile Gorge. The women here live within walking distance of Debre Libanos, the Coptic monastery of the “Lebanese Brothers.” Once a week, they load up their shawls with freshly harvested goods, hike to the tree, and spread out their wares in front of their laps, placing them on handmade cloths or in woven baskets.
I tiptoe among the various vendors, for there is so little room around their piles of chile peppers, turmeric powder, ginger, myrrh, and fenugreek. I can smell the subtly bitter butterscotch aroma of roasting fenugreek seeds nearby. The Ethiopians whom I have met like to roast and grind fenugreek seeds to add to many of their foods. This roasted abesh is destined for their crepelike injera, a flat bread made of fermented teff flour.
As I look around at the mulling of hundreds of people under the branches of the massive fig, I sense that this open-air market has been going on ever since mankind first began to boil potherbs in clay pots and to exchange stories as well as foods around the campfire. The umbrella-like canopy of the old tree that arches above the traders may just be the fabled “tree where man was born.”1
How can something this ancient still be so animated and engaging, not just to me as an accidental participant but to most of the locals as well? Is it something deeply wired in our genes that make us want to taste the exotic, the pungent, the aromatic? Somehow, exchanges such as this, replete with mounds and mountains of spices, incenses, green coffee beans, grains, pulses, poultices, and teas, seem to have always been the primary means of bringing diverse peoples together from neighboring valleys, gorges, and mountain ranges.
Something new began to happen to these localized spice exchanges around thirty-five hundred years ago, although minute changes in many locally isolated economies had been gradually accumulating for some forty-eight hundred years. Perhaps it first occurred on the eastern reaches of Africa, or somewhere along the southern coast of the Arabian Peninsula. I do not presume to know the first place in which it occurred, or among whom it emerged. But when this phenomenon spread, it shifted the trajectory of the world’s economies and ecologies.
While still in southern Oman, I had a chance to visit one of the many earliest spice-trade centers on the peninsula, where this shift presumably occurred during early prehistoric times, irrevocably changing the nature of the marketplace as we know it today. This particular spot was on a gentle rise above the Arabian Sea, with a small estuarine inlet edged by volcanic outcrops. That inlet, which had been selected by people who knew how to choose sites for both their beauty and their utility, formed the most naturally protected harbor I had ever seen.
When I arrived there many millennia after its first settlement, boats were no longer coming into the harbor. Instead, the inlet had become a refuge for herons, egrets, and buzzards that were perhaps attracted to many of the same features that had drawn the earliest human inhabitants. A hyena ran from the edge of the estuary up onto one of the volcanic ridges and disappeared into a cave, nook, or cranny. The harbor offered an abundance of shellfish and finfish, as well as comfortable shelter and easy but protected entry from the sea. Feral dromedaries came near, looking for freshwater in pools near the coast. This remarkable spot once functioned as the harbor of Zhafar, which served the prehistoric port town of al-Balid. The ancient name Zhafar gave rise to that of the province of Dhofar, contemporary Oman’s southernmost trading hub. Just a few miles away I had bought my supply of hojari fusoos.
As sunset cast its lemon-and-rose-colored light over the sea that evening, I wandered through the al-Balid ruins where caravans of camels once met seaworthy dhows, just as the great pilgrim-writer Ibn Battuta had seen during the fourteenth century. The dhows would then sail away with frankincense and other aromatics, taking them beyond their natural ranges, across gulfs and seas to other continents.
FIGURE 2. The ruins of al-Balid, one of the earliest ports for transcontinental trade across the Indian Ocean. (Photo by the author.)
The name al-Balid was an early Arabic term for a permanent town, something altogether different from the seasonal camps that preceded it. It is not surprising that archaeologists have confirmed that this 160-acre site was indeed a major population center four thousand years ago.2 At that time, Oman was called the Land of Magan. It was already known in the wider world for trading copper northward to the prosperous city-state of Dilmun, an ancient trade center in a fertile agricultural valley not far from Qalat al-Bahrain, in the present-day island nation of Bahrain.
Remarkably, the ancient cuneiform texts found at al-Balid have been partially deciphered, and they confirm that long-distance trade of tons of staple foods had begun by 2800 BCE. Sumerian and Akkadian inscriptions from the same period report maritime trade from Mesopotamia to the north, on to the island of Dilmun; southward to Magan, on the Arabian Peninsula; and then eastward across the waters to Melukhkha. This latter place name may have referred to the legendary Spice Islands, now known as the Moluccas.3
Indeed, some of these Sumerian and Akkadian inscriptions may be the earliest written records of long-distance globalized trade. They indicate that the Semitic tribes of Magan were exchanging copper, and perhaps incense medicines or spices as well, for hundreds of tons of barley. Those enormous quantities of cereal grain traveled down the coast of the Persian Gulf southward past the Straits of Hormuz and along the shores of the Arabian Sea as far as Zhafar harbor.4
Minds were traveling as well. Perhaps the traders’ minds leapt to consider the possibility that asafetida from one land might be as valuable as their own fine zedoary, and so a complete alphabet of comparable values for totally dissimilar substances could potentially come into play.
Simply put, Semitic tribes from the driest of lands had learned how to trade the few precious metals, gems, and potent plant products they had—resins, seeds, cinnamon-like bark, colorful stigmas of flowers and their bracts or buds, aromatic herbs, gums—for the surpluses of staple foods produced in better-watered pockets of the world.
Let me speculate for a moment on the significance of the phrase “learned how to trade.” As spice traders gained rudimentary marketing skills, perhaps they came upon psychological strategies to convince a farmer that he needed a copper bell for his wife’s necklace or an anti-inflammatory for the pain in his back as much as he needed enough teff or millet to keep his family from starving during the coming season of hunger. Could it be that people became willing to imagine that someone in another part of the world had something as desirable, potent, and worthwhile as the finest product they could harvest or produce on their own home ground? Perhaps this was the first moment that they sought out staples that they themselves could not easily grow: sorghum, barley, wheat, and teff, as well as fava beans, garbanzo beans, and lentils. They found these grains and beans on islands of irrigated lands in the middle of a desert sea. There, oasis dwellers expressed a desire to acquire spices that might break up the monotony of consuming the same old staples every day and thus brighten an otherwise dull meal.
Dates and goat meat, goat meat and millet, millet and dates. Sorghum and goat meat, mutton and sorghum. Cracked wheat and quail meat, quail eggs and garbanzo bean stew. What might have a certain shadhan, that is, an irrepressible pungency or unforgettable flavor that could provide some pleasurable relief to an otherwise unrelenting sequence of staples? What could break up the dietary monotony and the drudgery of processing, preparing, and eating nearly the same stuff every day?
We can now imagine that there might be a psychological risk to asking such questions on a regular basis. Could it be that such questions made people more apt to be dissatisfied by what lay before them and prone to crave something that was almost out of reach? Semitic peoples, at least some of them, seem to have succumbed to a thirst that could never be quenched—the grass would always be greener on the other side of the desert. It could never be quenched because of one simple fact: they tended to create a psychological desert wherever they went and could therefore reach neither the “grass” nor the happiness.
Thus, like nomadic herders, the traders were motivated to travel far and wide, not only to bring in a larger set of foods to their larders but also to spice them up. As economic historians have recently confirmed, early Semitic traders did indeed find a marvelous way to adapt to the patchy distribution of agricultural and wild resources on the Arabian Peninsula. They became effective traders between or among the peoples living in dissimilar patches, redistributing diversity and wealth in the process.5 To succeed, they appear to have adopted not only a certain kind of mobility but also a mindset that was, until then, rather uncommon elsewhere in the world.
I did not fully fathom the significance of what these early traders had done until I left the Dhofar region to visit the souks of northern Oman, well beyond the range of frankincense itself. At that time, my wife, Laurie, and I were traveling with a brilliant agricultural scientist, Sulaiman Al-Khanjari, who, like many Omanis, had family ties and roots in Zanzibar. Once we had arrived in the coastal metropolis of Muscat, Sulaiman asked if we wouldn’t mind visiting yet another spice souk. “The products you’ll see will be much like those in Salalah, but there is someone who may be working in this souk today whom I particularly want you to meet.” Did I detect a certain twinkle in Sulaiman’s eye as he mentioned this?
Once in the souk, we wander down its narrow aisles, past groups of Arab youths looking to purchase cloth, jewelry, electronics, watches, slippers, shoes, and, of course, spices. Laurie and I try to keep up with Sulaiman, but crowds of Omanis press in on us, wedge in between us, and leave us yards behind our friend and guide. When at last we catch up to him, Sulaiman pulls us into a close huddle to explain the next step. “I want to take a moment to look for an acquaintance, one who has a shop just up at the top of that little stairway. . . . Do you see? There, yes, that one. If he is up there, I will have a word with him, then wave to you to come up to join us.”
I see Sulaiman wave to another man in a white kandora robe, white skull cap, and slipperlike shoes. Dressed identically, the two of them embrace for a moment and then speak quietly for a while. At last, Sulaiman waves for Laurie and me to come up to where they stand.
“Dr. Nabhan of Arizona in America, meet your long lost cousin, Mr. Nebhan, the frankincense trader of Muscat, Oman.” Sulaiman grins. He then translates his words in English back into Gulf Arabic to the middle-aged man standing next to him. This man is shorter than I am, with a full head of black hair and with bags under his eyes that remind me of some of my closest relatives. His skin, like my father’s, is olive colored.
“Al-hamdu lilah! [Praise be to God!]” The smiling spice and incense merchant hugs me, then grabs my hand and holds on to it. He beckons for Laurie to take a picture of us together. Then he offers us some of his frankincense as a gift. We begin to ask questions of each other, with Sulaiman kindly translating and adding his own commentaries to provide some context.
“Are there many of the Banu Nebhani clan here in Oman?” I ask.
The merchant nods. “Well, yes, he supposes so,” Sulaiman explains. The merchant continues nonstop in Arabic while Sulaiman tries to listen, then paraphrases, “Your namesakes have been here a long time . . . maybe fifteen hundred years, maybe two thousand years. So that makes a lot of Banu Nebhani who have lived here . . . in some villages nearby.” Sulaiman then adds some commentary that is clearly his own: “They are like the Smiths or Joneses in your country! They say that the Banu Nebhani came from Yemen with other al-Hadr tribes, I don’t know how long ago.”
My presumed distant cousin, the frankincense vendor, offers more commentary, which Sulaiman tries to translate a bit more literally: “Old tribe . . . clan of what do you call them? Big shots, you know? Many sheikhs.” Our host then asks if there are many Banu Nebhani in my country, and if there are, where they sailed from.
As I answer, Sulaiman translates back into Gulf Arabic: “My grandfather, grandmother, and aunts were born in Lebanon, near the border with Syria. They sailed to America about a century ago, from Beirut to Marseilles and then on to New York. Others went to Mexico or to Brazil.”
After Sulaiman finishes translating my answer, he and Mr. Nebhan banter back and forth for several more minutes. Sulaiman finally turns back toward Laurie and me and grins. “He wants to know what your family trades in your shops in America.”
As I think about how to answer Mr. Nebhan, this Omani merchant, I remember that when the first members of my family came through Ellis Island to New York, some of them worked peddling spices, packaging spices, and retailing spices in corner grocery stores on Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn.
I have paid my dues as well, digging up sassafras roots when I was young, and later harvesting wild chiltepin chiles and wild Mexican oregano with Native American friends in Sonora, Mexico, then serving as a middleman to get them into retail outlets. And now I grow two dozen kinds of peppers, mints, and oreganos on a small farm in the desert highlands of Arizona.
I look up and see that Mr. Nebhan and Dr. Al-Khanjari are still waiting for me to answer. I realize I cannot explain all of that in a manner that makes sense in Arabic, so I respond succinctly: “Well, yes, my family has traded spices in America, but I am a teacher . . . and a farmer.” I ask Sulaiman to explain this to our host. “First, my grandfathers and then my uncles did so. I myself have harvested fulful [peppers] and za’atar [herbs] in America, and have driven truckloads of them from one country to another.”
Mr. Nebhan, a trader of frankincense who has never left his motherland, knowingly smiles, as if he were now sure that I am indeed his distant cousin.
Without access to Arabic genealogies still housed in archives in Yemen, there is no easy way to learn the degree to which we are related, or how many generations ago his ancestors and mine in the Banu Nebhani tribe took up this profession—a predilection, really—of trading spices. All we know is that several thousand years ago some unprecedented developments had begun to affect how Semitic peoples behaved in the places where incense, herbs, musk, dyes, and spices were gathered.
First, traders began to use semidomesticated camels and small sailboats to take these goods far beyond their areas of origin. They moved across continents to cultures that spoke languages they had never previously heard. At first, they retained camels as their sole mode of travel, for they could cover twenty-two miles of roughly level ground a day. But the traders ultimately sought other means to move heavier loads of spices, incense, and herbs longer distances than were possible with their beasts of burden.
They began to build and equip small dhows to sail the open waters of the Arabian Sea and Indian Ocean. Their goal was to travel even farther each day than the strongest camel could, that is, if the winds were in their sails. Of course, by this time, many other cultures around the world had figured out how to navigate the shallow shoals along their open coasts and the backwaters behind nearby barrier islands. They employed boats of buoyant animal bladders and sown-together skins, bundles of reeds, or hollowed-out palms or tree trunks.
And yet, I imagine, the sailors from the southern and eastern reaches of Arabia began to do far more than that. They erected masts with broad, maneuverable sails on them that could be shifted with the direction of the winds. They set out to sail directly across a sea, using the seasonal winds to take their dhows back and forth. Soon, no longer content to navigate along the shores of a bay or shoals of a peninsula, they began to use distant landmarks and stars to maneuver their way over open waters.
Well over a half century ago, historian George Fadlo Hourani, himself the son of a Lebanese shipping merchant, began to wonder why Arabs were among the first people known to venture fully out across the seas. In his beautifully crafted classic, Arab Seafaring in the Indian Ocean in Ancient and Early Medieval Times, Hourani boldly proposed that
FIGURE 3. Dhows such as this one in the seas near Lamu, Kenya, were essential seafaring vessels for early spice traders. (Photo by Karl Ragnar Gjertsen. Courtesy Wikimedia Commons.)
geography favored the development of sailing from Arabian shores. A very long coastline bounds the peninsula on three sides, stretching from the Gulf of Suez round to the head of the Persian Gulf. Near these coasts lie the most fertile parts of Arabia: al-Yaman, Hadramawt, and ‘Umūn; communication between them by sea was no more formidable than the crossing of the deserts and mountains which separated them on land. Commerce with neighboring countries was invited . . . so that across the enclosed waters of the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf the Arabs might be in contact with two of the most ancient centers of wealth and civilization—Egypt and Iran—not to mention Mesopotamia. . . . Most important of all, the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf, supplemented by the Nile, the Euphrates, and the Tigris, are natural channels for through traffic between the Mediterranean basin and Eastern Asia; the Arabs were astride two of the world’s great trade routes.6
It is thus plausible that certain of the Semitic peoples of the southern and eastern reaches of the Arabian Peninsula were no longer satisfied with staying put, for they had come into more frequent contact with many other cultures through long-distance trade. This may be conjecture, but it seems that their belief systems soon departed from those of the many pantheistic and polytheistic place-based cultures of the era.
These restless souls probably became more cosmopolitan, but at the same time, more emotionally and morally displaced, or “placeless.” The pioneering human ecologist Paul Shepard has suggested that the emergence of this peculiar Semitic mindset in the deserts of the Middle East marked a turning point in human history: “On the most ambitious scale in the history of the world, the ancestors of the Old Testament made virtue out of their homelessness. . . . In a Semitic storm god they found a traveling deity who was everyplace and therefore not bound by location.”7
Curiously, perhaps because they chose to bring their God along with them wherever they traveled and even settled in other lands, the various Semitic tribes did not necessarily lose their cultural identity by moving away from home. That is, their identity appears to have become somewhat independent of where they actually lived, although many of them may have kept a nostalgic connection to the mythic place in which their ancestors were presumed to have lived.
Although not as cynical about this placeless tendency as ecologist Shepard was, the great Jewish theologian Abraham Joshua Heschel conceded that at some point, the core Semitic beliefs radically shifted away from those of other Near Eastern cultures. In their minds, Heschel maintains, several Semitic tribes began to reject the very notion “that the deity resides in space, within particular localities like mountains, forests, trees or stones, which are, therefore, singled out as holy places; [that] the deity is bound to a particular land.”
Instead, Heschel himself conjectured that most Semitic religions gradually came to accept that “there is no quality that space [or a presumably sacred place] has in common with the essence of God.”8 If God could be found anywhere in space or time rather than in particular places, so could economic opportunities.
As if to establish that possibility as a fact, the seafaring Semitic tribes of Oman launched sixty- to seventy-day expeditions into lands where other people were eager to purchase their novelties. Journeys of one thousand to two thousand miles suddenly became commonplace. By thirty-two hundred years ago, written records in Mesopotamia were noting that loads of frankincense had been arriving from Oman or Yemen in an ever-increasing frequency and volume.
As a result of the new challenges posed by managing caravans and cargo ships for long-distance transport and cross-cultural exchange, a distinctive multilingual merchant class began to emerge. These business-people forged solutions to the logistical difficulties that were integral to caravanning or seafaring. But they became adept at learning different languages, as well, allowing them to tell others compelling stories about the potency of their products and the adventures that had occurred while in transit. They also began to negotiate for the sales of not just one cargo load but many.
Of course, some people are natural polyglots, and gifted storytellers have emerged in nearly every culture around the world. But Semitic spice merchants somehow prepared their youth to combine these two talents, in order that some stay-at-home 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 years ago, it was the site of the greatest irrigation engineering achievement of its time, watering more than four thousand acres of food and fiber crops.
Historians claim that many of the cultural traditions now associated with irrigated agriculture throughout the world emanated from the Mar’ib, first to Oman and Mesopotamia, then across the Mediterranean to the West and to China in the East, and finally, to the Americas. Even the term acequia, widely used in the Spanish-speaking world for an irrigation ditch, has its root in the ancient Yemeni Arabic term al-sāqiya, a word that can mean any kind of conduit for water.
But when the Minaean culture was flourishing, it did so by forging a symbiotic relationship between the more sedentary al-Hadr tribes, engaged in irrigation agriculture, and the more nomadic Bedu and Jabbali tribes, which herded livestock or traded aromatics. While the oasis-dwelling farmers offered food security to all of the original tribes of Arabia Felix and many in Arabia Deserta, the camel drovers, incense gatherers, and spice traders offered both wealth and worldliness.
The Ma’rib dam was actually built in phases over thousands of years and ultimately irrigated more than ninety-five hundred acres of annual crops, orchards, and date palm groves.11 Its ultimate span across the Wadi Adhanah plugged a six-hundred-yard gap in the Balaq Hills. When its final phase was completed in 715 BCE by Sheikh Sumhu’ Alay Yanuf and his son, the tightly fit stone and masonry blocks of its walls rose fifty feet above the original streambed of Wadi Adhanah. On the sides of the dam, sluice gates sent water down along twenty-five-foot-thick flood retention walls abutting the bedrock of the Balaq Hills. From there, mile-long “mother canals” channeled the stored floodwaters down to secondary and tertiary canals that entered the grain fields and orchard gardens of the Sabaean farmers.12 These farmers then traded their agricultural goods with the Minaeans. In exchange for frankincense, fennel, myrrh, and wild medicinal herbs, the Minaean traders received the grains of a half dozen cereals, four kinds of legumes, a dozen kinds of tree fruits, and vine crops such as melons, watermelons, and cucumbers.
FIGURE 5. The sakieh, an ancient form of water wheel, was a highly prized innovation from al-Hadr Arabs and Persians. Typically driven by oxen, these water wheels were used for irrigation throughout the Middle East and Egypt. (Photography Collection, Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs, New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations.)
Most of these fruits and vegetables were eaten raw while still fresh; the rest were sun dried for later use. The grains and even the legumes were toasted and ground, then made into harira, which often combined wheat, garbanzo beans, and lentils in the same dish. Spices, onions, and wild greens might be added. Unleavened breads were baked on woodfired ovens and used to mop up broths of grains, mutton, or goat meat, serving as precursors to dishes such as tharīd (a broth with bread, typically incorporating meat, but sometimes vegetarian) and maqluba (a boiled grain, meat and vegetable stew). Dates, fresh or pressed into thick pastes, were always available. This was desert peasant food at its most basic, and perhaps at its best.
The Minaeans would be offered cotton and flax for their weaving in exchange for Sabaean-tanned hides of camel, goat, and sheep. The wild desert world and its nomads found a certain synergy with the tamed and tended world of the Ma’rib oasis for upward of twenty-eight hundred years, with regional trade providing prosperity to both.
But then, some thousand years after Sumhu’ Alay Yanuf and his workers had attempted to control desert nature, the Ma’rib dam burst, releasing floodwaters.13 Overnight, the Sabaean Arabs witnessed the draining of the reservoir on which they had depended for more than forty generations. Their role in the world and that of their neighbors—the Minaean spice and incense traders—suddenly and irrevocably changed forever.
Although some Semitic-speaking tribes had long before migrated out of Arabia Felix into other reaches of the Arabian Peninsula, by the third century, refugees from the Ma’rib flood joined them in a diaspora of unprecedented proportions for its era. The great Arab historian Albert Hourani marks the out-migration of proto-Arab Semitic clans from Yemen during this time as one of the pivotal moments of Arab history.14 Many of these clans left their southern motherland for good, fanning out across the peninsula and slowly transforming into the major Arab tribes that have dominated entire regions of the Middle East ever since. Some took the trails northward that had already been pioneered by the first mercantile caravans carrying frankincense to Mesopotamia, Syria, and Egypt. A number of their descendants later entered the spice trade themselves.
And yet, like certain groups of Jews after their departure from their Promised Land, the Arabs who left the well-watered oases of southern Yemen became a restless lot, relatively unattached to any place other than the mythic motherland from which their ancestors had come. Of course, they were intelligent enough and resilient enough to physically and economically make a new home nearly anywhere, but in doing so, they severed the psychic umbilical cord that attached them to their mother country. They were able to build houses, dynasties, and economies in many climes, but they could never go home anymore.
MAP 2. Spice trails of the Sahara
Many became listless drifters. Perhaps that is the inevitable personality profile for a spice trader.
In the sand seas of the Rub‘ al-Khali, they marked their ancient trails out of Yemen by leaving stone triliths as tall as a man. As their name suggests, the obelisklike stone cairns were three to a cluster, and were tall enough to rise above the drifts of sand that accumulated after storms. They marked the pathways that one might need to follow away from Arabia Felix and into the larger world.15
These weather-worn triliths can still be found today, their edges softened by centuries of sandstorms but standing exactly where they were originally erected. They serve as some of the earliest surviving evidence of one of the greatest mass migrations in history—that of Semitic tribes, of Minaean, Arab, Jewish, Phoenician, and Aramaic, away from Arabia Felix. Once the dam broke, they left their peninsular homelands in hot pursuit of the most pungent spices and potent incenses that money could buy anywhere . . . and everywhere.
I will follow them wherever their fragrant trails lead.
• • •
• TURMERIC •
A cousin to ginger and galangal, turmeric is an intriguing source of sharp, earthy aromas and pleasantly bitter flavors. The pale green, pencil-thin rhizomes of young Curcuma domestica (also known as C. longa) dry to a yellow-orange and are even more richly colored beneath their skin. Clearly of South Asian origin, most turmeric used today is grown in India. Early on, its trade beyond the Indian subcontinent utilized overland caravans to reach the Assyrians and Sumerians of Asia Minor.
By the eighth century CE, turmeric was being traded westward across the Indian Ocean and Arabian Sea in dhows, reaching both Yemen and East Africa, including the Mascarene Islands of Mauritius, Réunion, and Rodrigues. It was transported across Sub-Saharan Africa along caravan routes controlled by Berber, Bedouin, and Jewish traders. Dhows had also carried it eastward to China by the seventh century, where both its cultivation and use spread. Marco Polo saw it growing not only in China but on Sumatra and along India’s Malabar Coast, as well.
There appears to be a different route for the diffusion of the names for turmeric, however, one that likely involves Ashkenazi Jews in its journey along more northerly routes. Terms cognate with the Hebrew kurkum appear in Yiddish, Greek, Italian, Bulgarian, Russian, Ukrainian, Korean, Finnish, Norwegian, German, Estonian, Czech, Croatian, Dutch, Breton, Catalan, Spanish, and even Korean. The notion that the English term turmeric comes through French from the Latin terra merita, or “meritorious earth,” because of the visual resemblance of turmeric powder to precious minerals seems to me to be apocryphal. Turmeric and kurkum are likely related etymologically by their reference to the yellow root, as terms for this plant in other languages signify.
Green, Aliza. Field Guide to Herbs and Spices. Philadelphia: Quirk Books, 2006.
Hill, Tony. The Contemporary Encyclopedia of Herbs and Spices. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley and Sons, 2004.
Katzer, Gernot. “Gernot Katzer’s Spice Pages.” http://gernot-katzers-spice-pages.com/engl/index.html. Accessed May 8, 2013.
Sortun, Ana, with Nicole Chaison. Spice: Flavors of the Eastern Mediterranean. New York: Regan Books, 2006.
• CARDAMOM •
After saffron and vanilla, cardamom (Elettaria cardamomum) is the most expensive spice in the world. The essential oils terpinene, cineol, and limonene make it intensely aromatic. The twenty-five jet black seeds in each green-and-white lanternlike pod simultaneously conjure up the flavors of sassafras, eucalyptus, allspice, cloves, camphor, and pepper. It is amazing how their fragrance can be astringent and offer a delicate warmth at the same time.
This distant relative of ginger appears to have originated in the Kerala Hills in the Western Ghats of southern India, and references to it in ancient Sanskrit texts date back five thousand years to the Late Vedic period. It reached Babylon by 7000 BCE and arrived in Greece no later than 50 CE. Today, the cardamom shrub is widely cultivated from India to Guatemala. There is another variety with larger fruit from Sri Lanka as well.
Linguistically, we can trace the cardamom trade overland into Asia Minor, and by sea to the Arabian Peninsula and East Africa. The terms for cardamom in the Middle Eastern and East African languages are all quite similar: habbu al-hayl in Arabic; hel in Hebrew, Farsi, and Amharic; and hil in Azeri and Tigriniya. These cognates are derived from the ancient Sanskrit eli, ela, or ellka, which likely gave rise to the Hindi and Kashmiri elaichi, the Bengali elach, and the Gujarajati elchi or ilaychi, as well. Curiously, European terms, particularly those in the Romance languages, exhibit a total break with the terms from East Africa, the Middle East, and the Indian subcontinent. They all have their root in the ancient Greek kardamomom, which, according to spice scholar Gernot Katzer, is of uncertain and inexplicable origin. Kardamomom was often linked to a presently unidentified spice, amomon, as was cinnamon, or kinnamomon. One possible hypothesis is that amomon referred to Amomum subulatum, the large cardamom of Nepal and of Sikkim in northeast India, which may have dropped out of use in Europe after Roman times.
The use of cardamom by Bedouins on the Arabian Peninsula is ancient, but it has remained strong to this moment. In fact, many contemporary Bedouin nomads carry coffee pots that have a small chamber in their spouts for holding cardamom pods. Although my close Arab relatives in the Middle East are not Bedouins, they are no less attached to cardamom. When I am in any home in the Bekáa Valley of Lebanon, it seems as though cardamom has insinuated itself into every coffee cup, many rice puddings (roz bi haleeb), and even some morning man’oushé pastries. In fact, “regular,” or mazbûta, coffee in Lebanon is typically served with a pinch of ground cardamom and a drop or two of orange blossom water.
Cardamom is a key ingredient in many of the great spice mixtures of the world, including Yemeni zhoug; Syrian, Turkish, and Iraqi baharat; Indian curry powders; blends for chai and khorma; and Malaysian masalas. Cardamom pods are once again finding their way into specialty gins, where they keep juniper berries and cassia bark company.
Gambrelle, Fabienne. The Flavor of Spices. Paris: Flammarion, 2008.
Green, Aliza. Field Guide to Herbs and Spices. Philadelphia: Quirk Books, 2006.
Hill, Tony. The Contemporary Encyclopedia of Herbs and Spices. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley and Sons, 2004.
Karaoglan, Aida. Food for the Vegetarian: Traditional Lebanese Recipes. Beirut: Naufal Press, 1987.
Katzer, Gernot. “Gernot Katzer’s Spice Pages.” http://gernot-katzers-spicepages.com/engl/index.html. Accessed September 1, 2011.
Ravindran, P. N., and K. J. Madhusoodanan. Cardamom: The Genus Elettaria. London: Taylor and Francis, 2002.
• DATES KNEADED WITH LOCUSTS AND SPICES •
Nomads of the Arabian Desert were opportunistic in their foraging for foods, looking for windfalls or unanticipated bumper crops that they could harvest, dry, and store for use over the lean months that would inevitably follow. The food had to be compact and nonperishable, for it would ride in a camel saddlebag for months. It was often traded for staple cereals grown by oasis dwellers such as the Minaeans.
The following recipe combines the locust recipe in the compilation made by Ibn Sayyār al-Warrāq, identified by Lilia Zaouali as the author of one of the oldest surviving Arabic cookbooks, with the ancient practice of kneading locusts into date pulp. I have incorporated spices that have been found on the Arabian Peninsula or obtained through trade with India for millennia, in particular, fennel and asafetida. Chef Ana Sortun finds that the addition of fennel seeds imparts a sweet, warm, almost mintlike flavor to fruits and vegetables. According to Tony Hill of World Spice Merchants, the ground powder of asafetida (a member of the parsley family) emanates an unbelievably strong sulfurous odor until exposed to heat, which transforms it into a curiously complex set of onion and garlic flavors. For this recipe, wild dates are historically preferable, though Medjools or many other widely available domesticated varieties will do. Avoid the more perishable types, such as the Black Sphinx, for this dish. If you cannot find a swarm of locusts (or are wary of capturing it if you do), you can substitute salted roasted grasshoppers, which are available as chapulines in some Mexican American spice shops importing their supplies from Mexico City.
Accompany with hot mint or iced hibiscus tea. Serves 6 to 8.
| 4 | cups live locusts | |
| 4 | cups water | |
| ¼ | cup sea salt | |
| 2 | tablespoons coriander seeds | |
| 2 | tablespoons fennel seeds | |
| 2 | tablespoons ground asafetida | |
| For the Brine Solution | ||
| 5 | quarts plus 1 cup water | |
| 3 | cups rose water | |
| 6 | tablespoons salt | |
| 8 | cups Medjool dates, pitted and chopped |
Find a swarm of locusts resting after a long flight and gather them in a covered basket. Under the shade of a date palm, carefully pick out and discard the dead locusts. Place the live ones in a large bowl, add the water and salt to drown them, then drain off the water and return the locusts to the basket.
In a stone mortar, combine the coriander seeds and fennel seeds and grind together to a fine to medium-fine powder. Stir in the asafetida.
To make the brine solution, combine the water, rose water, and salt in a 6-quart container and stir to dissolve the salt. In a ceramic or other pottery dish, arrange the locusts in a layer ½ inch deep. Ladle 4 cups of the brine solution over the locusts and sprinkle 1 tablespoon of the spice mixture evenly over the top. Top the layers with a heavy plate, pressing down on the plate, and let stand for 10 minutes. Drain off the brine, then repeat the layers of locusts, brine solution, and spice mixture 5 more times, pressing down on the plate and letting the layers stand for 10 minutes each time. Each time you drain off the brine, it should be lighter colored. The final batch should be nearly clear. Transfer the drained locusts to a crock and seal the top so the container is airtight. Let the locusts ferment at room temperature for at least a few days or up to a couple weeks.
Transfer the locusts to a large bowl, add the dates, and knead them together with your hands until fully combined and a soft mixture has formed. Pat the mixture into disklike cakes about 2 inches in diameter and ¼ inch thick. Store in a saddlebag of camel leather.
Hill, Tony. The Contemporary Encyclopedia of Herbs and Spices: Seasonings for the Global Kitchen. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley and Sons, 2004, pp. 42–43.
Sortun, Ana, with Nicole Chaison. Spice: Flavors of the Eastern Mediterranean. New York: Regan Books, 2006, pp. 72–73.
Zaouali, Lilia. Medieval Cuisine of the Islamic World: A Concise History with 174 Recipes. Translated by M. B. DeBevoise. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007, p. 140.
