302 JOhN K. DAVIES
Classical periods and on Greek-language sources, and will not attempt to trace
in detail traffics in aromatics which followed other routes than that towards
Greece, let alone traffics in other commodities. It will however attempt to knit
the various clusters of information together within a descriptive-interpretative
framework, and to do so in such a way that systematic comparisons can be
made with other traffics.II
In itself the word ‘aromatics’ is a vague term that encompasses a wide range
of primary materials, the commoditisation^14 of many of which goes far back
into the Bronze Age. No even approximately complete list will be offered
here,^15 since while many of them were available regionally, or at least within
the broader Egypt-Anatolia-Mesopotamia triangle, the long-distance traf-
fic which is the subject of this paper was generated by certain species of
Boswellia and Commiphora which were indigenous to, and confined to, cer-
tain regions of South Arabia and the Horn of Africa.^16 The former area in
particular (present-day Yemen) was called Eudaimon or Felix in antiquity for
good reason. Its climate and geology had allowed not just Bronze Age agri-
cultural development but also, well before ca. 2000 BCE, the creation of an
irrigation economy, the construction near Mārib of what has been called ‘the
greatest technological structure of antiquity’,^17 and the adoption by the eighth
century BCE if not earlier of a version of an alphabetic script for the four
closely-related languages (Sabaic, Minaic, Qatabanic, and Hadramitic) used in
the region.^18 Whatever economic effect the traffic in aromatics had on the area
was therefore an add-on to a long-established agrarian economy.
That traffic is best viewed initially from the vantage point of the late fourth
century BCE, since by good fortune a convergence of information from var-
ious Greek literary texts provides three clear pointers, each from a different
stage of the route, to the structure of the traffic as it then functioned. We
begin in Yemen itself, since unnamed informants,^19 perhaps of the immediate
post-Alexander years, provided Theophrastus with material enough to compile
two major sections of his Enquiry into Plants, 9.4 on frankincense and myrrh
and 9.5 on cinnamon and cassia. That he describes in close detail the trees and
the processes of extrusion of the gum, and cites the regions of production as
Saba, Hadramyta, Kitibaina, and Mamali (9.4.2 and 5) inspires confidence, so
that there should be some substance in his further report that:the whole mountain range, they said, belongs to the portion of the
Sabaioi, for they are the proprietors and are honest in their dealings with
each other, so that no-one keeps guard. Hence they said that they took
away quantities of the frankincense and myrrh, put them in their ships,