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
