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CHAPTER 3

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 from the near-sterile edges of the Dead Sea. The Nabataeans then loaded up camels with as much as they could carry and headed off across the barren desert toward the cities of Egypt, where they hoped to trade this asphalt for foods grown on the fertile floodplain of the Nile.⁴

The Nabataeans of that era forbid their own people to cultivate any crops and were said to abhor being engaged in any practice of agriculture other than herding. And yet, they had to eat, so they traded what they could, whether it was goat hides or wild medicinal plants. By the second century BCE, the Greek geographer Agatharchides reported that the growing Nabataean population had become so depauperate and desperate that they had switched from raiding the few caravans that came across their stretch of desert to preying on another kind of caravan, the fleets out in the sea.⁵ In essence, the Nabataeans left the desert to become pirates who looted sailing ships throughout the Gulf of Aqaba, where they particularly enjoyed pouncing on hapless Egyptian sailors.

Ten thousand nomadic raiders strong, the early Nabataeans played the role of the bad boys of the Red Sea, accosting ships out in the gulf or caravans along its coast rather than practicing any farming or building their own fixed abodes. Some historians suggest that most of the Nabataeans of this time were descendants of the Bani Nabatu, one of the earliest recognized Semitic tribes of Arabia Felix. They were a people who had survived scarcity for centuries if not millennia, and they had become lean and mean in the process.

But as they gained a modicum of wealth, they worked hard to develop unprecedented modes of communication across desert landscapes. Both the Arabic alphabet and the Kufic calligraphy still used today for writing the Qur’an appear to be derived from their lovely ornamented cursive scripts.

Some scholars have suggested that the Nabataeans did not remain a single ethnic entity for very long, but became a heterogeneous community that absorbed other tribes.⁶ Gradually they wove together many influences, including Roman, Greek, Egyptian, and Hebrew, into a larger cultural and economic fabric. Together, they created a distinctive “fusion cuisine” of harira and chorba (hearty stews), murrī (a salty fermented barley paste), and kāmakh rījāl (a somewhat rancid but sharptasting cheese spread made by keeping yogurt in an open vessel for several weeks).⁷

The ancient Nabataean names for these foods spread in Aramaic to nearby Arabic and Hebrew dialects and then became loan words in Persian, Greek, and Roman tongues. Over time, the Nabataean amalgamation harbored an eclectic mix of Aramaic, Hebrew, and Arabic speakers who joined together as bands of outlaws, “redistributing” all of the loot that could be had between Alexandria and Jerusalem. Diodorus, a Greek historian born in Sicily and active from about 30 to 60 BCE, thought them to be mostly Arab herders who turned opportunistically to the sea whenever they could easily retrieve some booty by raiding.

A great number among them bring incense, myrrh and the most precious perfumes which they receive from Arabia Felix, via the ocean. . . . This tribe occupies a large part of the coast and not a little of the country which stretches inland, and it has a people beyond telling and flocks and herds in multitude beyond belief. Now, in ancient times these Arab men observed justice and were content with the food which they received from their flocks, but later, after the kings of Alexandria had made the ways of the sea navigable for their merchants, these Arabs not only attacked the shipwrecked, but fitted out pirate ships and preyed upon the voyagers. . . . After some years, however, they were themselves ambushed on the high seas by some larger ships and then punished for all their bad deeds.⁸

FIGURE 6. Harira stews became vehicles for introducing savory spices to a range of Persian, Arabian, and Berber populations. This lunch was offered by Berbers at Siwa Oasis in Egypt. (Photo by the author.)

Whatever their origins, the Nabataeans gradually shifted from looting others to trading. But they didn’t trade in the way that their neighbors had. They sought to more systematically control the management of most, if not all, of the land and sea trade emanating from the incense kingdoms. By employing long caravans of camels along hard-to-trace routes supplemented by sophisticated ships equipped with oars and sails, they completely eclipsed the Minaeans in dominating the many Frankincense Trails. As observed by Walter Weiss, the Nabatene kingdom “was an unusually peaceful state geared solely to profit from trade, with no real borders, no taxation or social unrest and very few slaves. Its strength was that it consistently managed to keep a distance between the producers and consumers of the goods it transported.”⁹

In essence, the Nabataeans became the first cultural community to be comprised largely of middlemen. They became spice, incense, and perfume brokers who developed, maintained, and controlled transcontinental trade networks. In fact, hardly any of the goods they moved along the Frankincense Trails were from their own lands. Their ecological niche was to serve as obligatory intermediaries in the trade of frankincense, myrrh, Indian spices, and other aromatics across the seas and between the continents.

To do so, most of them opted to live in the “empty space” between the grounds where the aromatics were gathered and the urban markets where they were destined to be used. For them, the desert and the sea had become little more than space to be crossed, for they no longer eked out a living directly from its local resources. What mattered most was their control of the caravansaries and other safe harbors that could serve as way stations on their journeys across such vastness.

Their “strength,” as Weiss calls it, was their insistence that consumers have no direct contact with producers. As long as they kept harvesters clueless about who desired their goods, and never divulged to end users where the goods had actually come from, they controlled the value chain along the Frankincense Trails. This mandate allowed the Nabataeans to profit immensely from the spice trade, for all others in the supply chain had little means of understanding the value embedded in other links in the chain.

Pliny the Elder noted that while incenses, spices, and other products passed through Nabataean hands on their way from Arabia Felix to Gaza, their value accrued to a hundredfold of what it had been when the goods first entered their hands, whether hauled by camel caravan or shipped by coconut-wood dhows with lateen sails.

But the true genius of the Nabataeans may have been their capacity to keep the incenses, spices, salves, and silks destined for Europe, Africa, and Asia Minor imbued with a sense of wonder. They were marketing mystique as much as they were materials. Perhaps they had learned this strategy from the Minaeans who came before them. It was neither the caloric content nor the antiseptic value of the seeds, gums, leaves, and barks that sold cumin, cinnamon, frankincense, labdanum, or myrrh. Instead, sales depended on their compelling marketing of the mythic dimensions of these exotic goods. They essentially did what promoters of amaranth, extra-virgin olive oil, ginseng, and magic mushrooms continue to do today. Beyond the physical properties of the plant or fungus, they brokered the “placebo effect” to their own economic advantage.

For starters, the Nabataeans got the Europeans to believe that frankincense had to be expensive because of the stealth that it took to harvest it from the protected groves of southern Arabia. As the Greek historian Herodotus explained to his fellow Europeans, “When gathering frankincense, they burn storax [a resin of sweet gum trees] . . . and this storax raises a smoke that keeps away the small flying snakes. Great numbers of them keep guard over all the trees that bear the frankincense. Smoking them out with storax is the only way to get rid of them.”¹⁰

Consider for a moment the paradox of those juxtapositions: to enjoy access to divine incense, one must use another smoky fragrance to snatch the sacred substance away from evil serpents that otherwise serve to protect it! Although this legend was possibly told to Herodotus by some Minaean spice trader in the fifth century BCE, the Nabataeans made sure that such stories continued to circulate for several more centuries in the countries remote from the spice kingdoms of Arabia Felix. No doubt the Nabataeans themselves generated equally luminous stories about the places and peoples from which their frankincense was obtained.

By this era, no outsiders were permitted to come near the places of origin of frankincense or myrrh, nor even enter the caravansary where they were temporarily stored. Even the heart of Petra, the temple and trade center that ranked among the greatest in the world by the end of the first century CE, was physically and metaphorically hidden away in the rock.

Petra was the perfect physical manifestation of how the Nabataeans went about their work: its power and beauty were cloaked in mystery until the last moment before arrival, and then they were suddenly revealed in a manner that could only generate awe. Oddly, virtually no archaeological remains of frankincense and other aromatics have been found anywhere near the temples carved into the cliff faces of Petra. Perhaps they were sequestered elsewhere, hidden in nearby slot canyons where foreign soldiers or raiders would be unlikely ever to find them.

For several centuries, Nabataean traders supplied Alexandria, Al ‘Arīsh, Gaza, Jerusalem, Basra, and Damascus with most of their spices, dyes, gums, balms, incenses, and exotic herbs. They had a knack for working with other middlemen to obtain camel loads of silk and ginger from China, true cinnamon and pepper from Ceylon and India, aloe and dragon’s blood from Socotra, and nutmeg from the Spice Islands. Although they did not necessarily visit all of these source areas themselves, they did deal directly with many of their harvesters of aromatics. For six centuries, the Nabataeans moved thousands of tons of goods out of Yemen and Oman, taking them across the Arabian sands and seas to their ports of Luce Come and Aila (later called Elath and then Eilat). From there, the precious cargo went overland to Syria, Canaan, Egypt, and beyond.

I had wanted to follow the Nabataean trade routes northward across the Negev, first to Jerusalem and later to Damascus. But the tense political realities of that moment made it impossible to move easily among these countries. Because I was a Lebanese American who had previously visited relatives in Lebanon and Syria on the same passport I was currently carrying, I was interrogated for three hours at the Israeli port of entry at Eilat. It did not help that I shared a surname with an al-Qaeda operative leader from Somalia. Customs officials told me that I could not enter if I was planning to go on to Syria, even though it was only to have an audience with a cousin who had become mother superior of a convent! I was told that I would have to leave Israel by the same port of entry and then return to Egypt before I could make my way into Jordan (toward Petra). Plus, Syria would not let me enter if my passport carried an Israeli stamp. It all seemed daunting, so Father Dave and I opted for the simplest solution: to focus exclusively on the trail to Jerusalem and reserve Jordan and Syria for other trips.

Once inside Israel, Father Dave and I were disappointed that there was little to see of the old Nabataean and Roman ports of Aila in present-day Eilat. When I later spoke with archaeobotanist Peter Warnock, he confirmed that neither the Nabataean port of Aila nor the hidden trade center of Petra has yet to render much evidence of the trade items that passed through them. This is in part due to poor archaeological preservation of the ground herbs, spices, and dyes recovered there, unlike the relatively rich evidence of grains and beans. Thousands of tons of incense and spices may have been carried through the Negev long ago, but they left not a trace.

Perhaps this is because the aromatics that were funneled into the Nabataean ports and caravansaries were slated to depart soon after their arrival. Spice traders seldom made much money holding on to their merchandise for very long, since the potency of aromatic oils fades with time. Instead, they learned to maximize the rapid turnover of goods. I have seen this where I farm near the largest port of entry for produce coming into the United States, mostly from Mexico. The bulk of the cilantro, cucumbers, peppers, and tomatoes reaching the brokerage houses along the border remains there for less than two hours before being whisked away by semitrucks that haul their cargo northward another five hundred to one thousand miles.

While still in Israel, I continued to puzzle over this paradox: here I was, traveling in the desert between two of the world’s greatest prehistoric spice trade centers, Petra and Aila, and no archaeologist or tourist guide could point to any remains of the aromatics that had made these two sites so famous. The fragrance of their perfumes had dissipated; the incenses had gone up in smoke.

With little to see in Eilat, Father Dave and I boarded a bus and headed for Jerusalem, hoping to catch a glimpse of the ancient desert homeland of the Nabataeans along the way and then to survey the Old City’s souks for the spices and incense that are still traded today. I knew that the Nabataeans had once maintained an archipelago of water holes and way stations in the Negev like so many buoys bobbing in an open sea.

I had imagined spotting them from the highway as we rode along with conservatively dressed Hasidic Jews and Bedouins on the bus from Eilat to Jerusalem. Instead, I could see little from my speeding transport, which was fully packed with sun-tanned teenagers. We were surrounded by young Israeli Jews and by other “liberal” Jews visiting from Europe and America, all of them dressed in the latest beach fashion: designerbranded bikinis, Speedos, T-shirts, tank tops, and flip-flops. And yet it was not their dress that was unsettling; it was their social behavior, or lack of it. Most of them sat on their bus seats, silent, text messaging acquaintances on their mobile devices or listening to music through their headphones.

Like many youths from around the world, they could have been anywhere doing the very same thing, because they were nowhere. In some two hours, I noticed only a single teenager even glancing out of the bus windows, as if the desert itself might be of some interest.

It was an odd way to spend my first few hours in the Negev, the legendary heartland of the Nabataean kingdom, a superficially barren stretch of land that spanned the entire distance from the Red Sea to the Dead Sea. While my fellow passengers listened to their reggae, rock, and hip-hop, I focused on the Negev itself, a desert perhaps as dry and formidable as the nejd in southern Oman.

Except for a few remarkably verdant kibbutzim and date groves nourished by treated sewage effluent, the land was perhaps more barren than when the later eras of Nabataeans had known it.¹¹ To help me visualize this desert prior to the construction of Israel’s resorts, I returned to the journals of Stephens, the first American explorer to reach Petra from the apex of the Gulf of Aqaba:

Standing near the shore of this northern extremity of the Red Sea, I saw before me an immense sandy valley, which, without the aid of geological science, to the eye of common observation and reason, had once been the bottom of a sea or the bed of a river. . . . The valley varied from four to eight miles in breadth, and on each side were high, dark, and barren mountains, bounding it like a wall. On the left were the mountains of Judea, and on the right those of Seir . . . ; and among them, buried from the eyes of strangers, the approach to it known only to the wandering Bedouins, was the ancient capital of this kingdom, the [partially] excavated city of Petra . . . lay before me, in barrenness and desolation; no trees grew in the valley, and no verdure on the mountain tops. All was bare, dreary, and desolate.¹²

What Stephens could not see from the back of an Arabian horse—and what I could not spot from a speeding bus—was that the Negev lands north of Eilat were littered with petroglyph-inscribed boulders and pockmarked with a scatter of hidden cisterns and “chains of wells.” The Nabataeans controlled the Frankincense Trails by virtue of the intimate knowledge of where the scant supplies of water might be found along the routes from southern Yemen to the Levant.

The Nabataeans and their Idumean neighbors were among the finest desert hydrologists and geomorphologists the world has ever known. The hidden waters of the desert seldom eluded them. Even in the seemingly hostile moonscape of Machtesh Ramon, the largest natural crater in the Nabataean kingdom, they found the artesian flows of Ayn Zaharan, the water source now known among the Jews as Ein Saharonim. If the Nabataeans could control access to freshwater, the most precious and scarce substance on the entire Arabian Peninsula, they knew that they would control its spice trade. They would have made good nanotechnologists, for they were fascinated by the little things that could leverage large gains in wealth.

Only through the use of aerial photography have archaeologists been able to realize how richly the Nabataeans had transformed the Negev into a network of signposts marking trade routes and outposts replete with freshwater reserves. The signposts take the form of isolated boulders and cliff faces where Nabataeans scratched their pale messages into the dark desert varnish that had accumulated over the millennia. These messages were mostly left in their Kufic-like script, but it appears that others were left in Safaitic, Thamudic, Aramaic, and even Greek alphabets, for perhaps they were used as “code languages” by Nabataean polyglots. Some of their signs are directional, such as “Go east, over the ridge and into the wadi for water.” Others document a missed rendezvous: Sa’id ma shaf Sud plaintively reports that “Sa’id didn’t get to see his friend Sud” after all the work it took to arrange and attempt an illfated reunion.¹³

FIGURE 7. Wells in extremely arid landscapes such as the Negev were critical to keeping Nabataean traders alive. (Courtesy Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, www.loc.gov/pictures/item/mpc2004005723/PP.)

By 50 CE, these signposts also pointed to another, unprecedented set of developments in the Negev: islandlike vineyards, orchards, and flood-water fields of fodder and staple crops.

Yes, crops. As noted earlier, at first, all Nabataeans adhered to a taboo against cultivating the soil; instead, they traded, raided, herded, or reaped the wild harvests that the desert offered. Although they flourished because of their tenacious control of certain trade routes, it was perhaps inevitable that the Romans and others would try to capture or circumvent those routes. At some point during the first century CE, anticipating that the larger armies and arsenals of the Romans might bear down on their trade centers, the Nabataeans lifted their selfimposed ban on farming. They then used their extensive knowledge of water harvesting to grow crops in some of the driest places that agriculture has ever been practiced. To avoid domination by their Roman competitors, the Nabataeans began to target their agricultural production to provide the foodstuffs in scarcest supply throughout the Roman Empire. As archaeologist Douglas Comer has explained,

Wealth from agriculture became more important as what had been a spectacular source of wealth from trade attenuated. For hundreds of years before the time of Christ, the Nabateans enjoyed a virtual monopoly on the trade of spices, incense and other precious goods from Southeast Asia and Africa, transporting them from the southern tip of the Arabian Peninsula to the Mediterranean, over which they were shipped to Rome. Only the Nabateans knew the routes across the Empty Quarter. But beginning with Pompey’s war on the pirates in 66 BC, sea lanes were gradually made safer, finally breaking the hold that the Nabateans had on the transportation system of the Arabian Peninsula. . . . [And so, they turned to exporting transportable cereals.] Agricultural producers would have found a ready market in the Roman Empire, which suffered a shortage of grain that has been compared to the chronic shortage of oil throughout much of the developed world.¹⁴

The Nabataeans suddenly shifted from trade in wild spices and incense to the production and trade of agricultural commodities. They became some of the world’s first cereal commodity brokers, holding or dumping grains into markets to profit from drought, plagues, famines, or inflation in one part of the empire or another. They not only offered the grains themselves to the Romans, Greeks, and Persians but also introduced certain cereal-based condiments, such as the fermented balls of barley dough that became widely known as bunn.¹⁵

In some ways, Nabataean grain traders played an economic role much like that of Glencore International, a multinational brokerage firm that today controls a quarter of the world’s barley, rape, and sunflower-seed supply and a tenth of its wheat supply. Although Glencore is far from a household word, the transnational firm and its subsidiaries are valued at more than $60 billion and hold assets worth over $79 billion, including half of the world’s available copper supply, a third of the aluminum supply, and a quarter of the thermal coal supply. When its shares went public on the London Stock Exchange in the summer of 2011, its chief executive officer made an estimated $9 billion in a matter of weeks. Without Glencore ever actually holding large stores of these commodities in its own facilities for very long, it is, according to Al Jazeera, “profiteering from hunger and chaos.” As Chris Hinde, a mining industry analyst, told Al Jazeera’s Chris Arsenault, “They are the stockbrokers of the commodities business [that operate] in a fairly secretive world. They are effectively setting the price for some very important commodities.”¹⁶

The Nabataean shift in roles from desert traders, herders, and foragers to irrigation farmers ultimately transformed the desert in which they had lived, but the extent of that transformation was not realized until centuries later. Around 1870, the archaeologist E. H. Palmer began to map the thousands of intentionally shaped mounds of cobbles where grapes once grew—the enigmatic tuleilat el-anab.¹⁷ They were moisture catchers, agrohydrological structures that were engineered to condense, capture, and deliver fog and dew to fuel the growth of the vines, wheat, and fruit trees. Not long after Palmer, others discovered lengthy alignments of cobbles that channeled the infrequent storm runoff from square miles of desert down into fertile terraced grain fields on the floodplains.

Just twenty-five miles north of where my bus sped out of Eilat, archaeologists noticed a series of round features on the ground near Ain Ghadian. They looked at first like bomb craters, and then like prayer beads strung on a necklace.¹⁸ It took considerable effort by a desertsoil scientist who had once worked with hydraulic engineers to identify these features and definitively determine their function.

These later Nabataean innovations were clandestine water catchments linked through well-like shafts connected to a horizontal tunnel that tapped into groundwater and harvested rainwater and stored them both in underground cisterns. The scientist who discovered their efficacy and extent, Berel Aisenstein, referred to these ingenious Nabataean creations as “artificial springs.”¹⁹ These chains of wells were so effective in providing a steady flow of fresh drinking water that Nabataeans were able to survive in areas that received as little as a single inch of rainfall in a drought year! They are called qanats in several Semitic languages, and that term may be at the root of a tree of words now widely used in water management. The related words canal, channel, cane, and alcantarilla are in use around the globe.²⁰