in a tightly capped glass container for up to 2 weeks and use as a rub for lamb or other meat or to flavor a braise or stew.
Al Taie, Lamees Abdullah. Al-Azaf: The Omani Cookbook. Muscat: Oman Bookshop, 1995, p. 49.
CHAPTER 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
