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
