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
