The Incense Route was the network of camel caravan roads and Red Sea shipping lanes that carried frankincense and myrrh from southern Arabia (today's Oman and Yemen) and the Horn of Africa north through Shabwa, Timna, Najran and Petra to Gaza on the Mediterranean, and onward to Egypt, Babylon and Rome. The overland trade flourished from roughly the 3rd century BC to the 2nd century AD, according to UNESCO, though incense had reached Egypt for many centuries before that. Along with the two resins it carried Indian pepper and cinnamon, pearls, textiles, gold and enslaved Africans, and the tolls and profits built the South Arabian kingdoms of Ma'in, Saba, Qataban and Hadhramaut and the Nabataean kingdom of Petra. This guide looks at what moved along it and who moved it.
Frankincense and Myrrh from Dhofar, Hadhramaut and the Horn of Africa
Frankincense is the dried resin of Boswellia trees, chiefly Boswellia sacra, which grows in southern Arabia and Somalia. Harvesters cut the bark and let the sap harden into "tears"; trees begin producing at about eight to ten years old and are tapped two or three times a year, with the last taps of the season giving the most aromatic resin. The English name comes from the Old French franc encens, "high-quality incense", and the Greek word libanos is cognate with the name of Lebanon. Myrrh comes from the thorny Commiphora trees, especially Commiphora myrrha, native to Somalia, Oman, Yemen, Eritrea and eastern Ethiopia.
The best Arabian frankincense grew in Dhofar, in what is now southern Oman. From the natural harbour of Khor Rori, where the Kingdom of Hadhramaut founded the fortified port of Sumhuram in the 3rd century BC, resin was shipped west along the coast to Qana (modern Bir Ali in Yemen). The Periplus of the Erythraean Sea, a 1st-century AD Greek merchant's handbook, says that all the frankincense of the country was carried by camel to the royal city of Sabbatha (Shabwa) to be stored, and to Qana on rafts buoyed by inflated skins. Sumhuram was abandoned in the 5th century, most likely because a sandbar closed the estuary. In 2000 UNESCO listed the frankincense trees of Wadi Dawkah, the caravan oasis of Shisr/Wubar and the ports of Khor Rori and Al-Balid together as the Land of Frankincense.
Demand came from temples, physicians and embalmers. Egypt used myrrh in embalming the dead, and in the Greek and Roman world frankincense was burned in worship and used in medicine and cosmetics, and it was valued more highly than gold. Demand rose sharply from the beginning of the 5th century BC, and the trade in the two resins gave the route its name.
The resin trade outlived the caravans. Today about 90 percent of the world's frankincense comes from the Horn of Africa, mainly from communities along the Somalia–Ethiopia border, rather than from Arabia. The trees are under pressure: heavily tapped Boswellia produce seeds that germinate at only about 16 percent, against more than 80 percent for untapped trees, and burning, grazing, longhorn beetles and land clearance for farming are thinning the woodlands further.
Pepper, Cinnamon, Gold and Enslaved People: The Other Cargoes
The caravans carried far more than incense. Indian spices, precious stones, pearls, ebony, silk and fine cloth reached Arabian ports by sea and joined the overland route, while the Horn of Africa supplied rare woods, feathers, animal skins, gold and its own Somali frankincense. The Periplus lists, port by port along the Somali coast, what a merchant could buy. At Malao, near modern Berbera, the exports were myrrh, a little frankincense, the harder cinnamon, Indian copal and, though only rarely, slaves; at Opone, now identified with Hafun, it was the greatest quantity of cinnamon on the coast and a great deal of tortoiseshell, better than any found elsewhere. People were therefore a commodity on these routes, not only the ones who moved the goods.
The trade also reached back much further than the classical caravan era. The Egyptian king Sahure of the 5th Dynasty sent the earliest recorded expedition to the Land of Punt, which most scholars place in the Horn of Africa, bringing back myrrh, frankincense, electrum and live animals. In the 15th century BC Queen Hatshepsut sent five ships to Punt from Mersa/Wadi Gawasis, the Egyptian Red Sea port that lay some 1,200 km north of it. Reliefs at her mortuary temple at Deir el-Bahari show the expedition led by the chancellor Nehsi and a cargo that included thirty-one small incense trees carried aboard in tubs.
Minaean, Sabaean and Gerrhaean Caravan Merchants
The overland trade ran on the dromedary, probably first domesticated in the Arabian Peninsula about 4,000 years ago, and on the kingdoms that taxed its watering places. In the second half of the first millennium BC the South Arabian states of Ma'in, Qataban, Hadhramaut, Saba and later Himyar controlled the caravan trade north from Yemen. Each took its cut, and the tolls charged by owners of wells and other facilities pushed up the final price.
The Minaeans of Ma'in, based in the Jawf valley of northern Yemen, were the great caravan merchants of the 5th century BC onwards. They are the only South Arabian people whose surviving inscriptions describe their trade, and Greek and Roman writers spoke of "Minaean frankincense". About seventy Minaean inscriptions have been found outside their kingdom, roughly fifty of them at the oasis of al-Ula in north-western Arabia, where Minaean traders lived as a resident community. Others turn up at Qaryat al-Faw in central Arabia, in Egypt and on the Greek island of Delos, where Minaean merchants set up an altar to their national god Wadd.
Further south, Qataban's capital Timna lay on the caravan road; Pliny the Elder, who called the city Thomna, said it had 65 temples. Shabwa, the Hadhramaut capital, was the collection point for Dhofar's frankincense. A separate branch ran from the Persian Gulf, where the port of Gerrha controlled the aromatics trade to Babylon in the 1st century BC. The Seleucid king Antiochus III sailed there in 205 BC, probably to pressure Gerrha into sending more of its trade through his territory. Inland, Dhofar’s frankincense was carried from Shabwa north to Najran and on towards the Levant.
Nabataean Middlemen at Petra and Avdat
At the northern end, the Nabataeans controlled the last and most profitable stretch. Petra stood where the incense road from Arabia to Damascus crossed the route west to Gaza, and the Nabataeans also ran the caravan road across the Negev to the Mediterranean. They first appear in history in 312/311 BC, when an officer of Antigonus I, one of Alexander's successors, failed to take their stronghold. Diodorus Siculus, writing around 50 BC from earlier sources, describes them as a tribe of some 10,000 warriors, pre-eminent among the nomads of Arabia, who shunned farming, fixed houses and wine and dug bottle-shaped rainwater cisterns in the rock, carefully hidden from invaders. They also traded bitumen from the Dead Sea to Egypt.
Across the Negev, the Nabataeans built caravan stations that became towns. Avdat (Oboda) began as a seasonal campsite on the Petra–Gaza road in the 3rd to late 2nd century BC and grew into the most important town on the route after Petra. In 2005 UNESCO listed Avdat, Haluza, Mamshit and Shivta, with their fortresses and irrigated farmland, as Incense Route – Desert Cities in the Negev. Nabataean independence ended in 106 AD, when the emperor Trajan annexed the kingdom as the Roman province of Arabia Petraea.
Soldiers and Sailors: Aelius Gallus, Eudoxus and the Sea Bypass
Armies followed the money. Assyrian records show Tiglath-Pileser III marching through Phoenicia to Gaza in the 8th century BC, apparently to control the incense trade at its outlet. Rome tried a direct strike. In 26 BC the prefect of Egypt, Aelius Gallus, sailed for Arabia Felix with 10,000 infantry, including 500 Jewish and 1,000 Nabataean troops, guided by the Nabataean official Syllaeus, who led the army astray. They landed at Leuke Kome, marched through the desert to Najran and advanced as far as a city the sources call Marsiaba, which some historians identify with the Sabaean capital Marib. Disease and bad water destroyed much of the army, and Strabo, Gallus's friend, recorded the campaign as a complete failure.
Sailors did what soldiers could not. In the late 2nd century BC Eudoxus of Cyzicus, sailing for Ptolemaic Egypt, opened a direct sea route to India using the monsoon winds, and Greek sources also credit a navigator named Hippalus. After Rome annexed Egypt the sea trade boomed, and ships could load incense and Indian goods without paying the Arabian caravan tolls.
The overland route did not vanish at once, but the 3rd-century crisis of the Roman Empire brought much of it to a standstill. When trade recovered, goods from India and Arabia were reaching the Gulf of Aqaba port of Aila and the Wadi Sirhan instead of the old caravan towns. The Rashidun Arab conquest of Egypt, which began in late 639 or early 640, then ended the era in which Alexandria served as the Greco-Roman world’s gateway to the India trade. Yemen returned to long-distance commerce only centuries later, when coffee shipped from the Red Sea port of al-Mocha became the new luxury export. In February 1895 the British explorer Theodore Bent identified Moscha Limen, the old frankincense harbour of Dhofar named in Greek sources, where resin had once been collected for shipment to Qana. For more on the animals that made the land route possible, see our history of camel caravan routes, and for the rock-cut city at its northern hub, our guide to Petra in Jordan.