known by their most conspicuous product–a caravan track that ran north
paralleling the Red Sea. Such a road was made possible by the domestication
of the camel in the late second millenniumBCEand the rise of caravan cities
along the route such as Iathrib (Medina). The Incense Road was exploited by
anyone who could muster enough power to threaten it or who controlled
vital supplies such as food and well water along the way. Pliny provides a
look at how this impacted on the frankincense trade, one of the road’s major
products. Frankincense was produced east of Saba but had to be conveyed to
the Sabaean capital on pain of death to be taxed by the local temple. From
there it went north to the country of the Gebbanites, where it was taxed by
their king, after which it passed through 65 additional staging posts, each of
which levied taxes, fees, and other costs infixed portions“so that expenses
mount up to 688 denarii per camel before the Mediterranean coast is
reached; and then again payment is made to the customs officers of our
empire.” The total trip normally took 70 days. The transporters of these
goods may have been a people separate from the Sabaeans and other Arabs
whom one scholar, Alessandro de Maigret, has labeled the“Turret-Grave
people”from the unique form of burial they practiced. They were thought to
be an ancient, autochthonous people who organized and developed the trade
system around the Arabian peninsula as early as 3000BCE.
The area between the northeastern corner of the Red Sea and the
Mediterranean came to be controlled by the Nabataeans, sheep herders from
the mountains of Jordan turned plunderers turned merchants. The Nabataeans
discovered they could accrue more wealth by protecting caravans and pro-
viding them with services than by attacking them, so they offered caravaneers
food, water, and cool rest areas in the caves of their mountains. When the
number of caves proved insufficient, the Nabataeans began carving out their
own. In the end they built a caravan city, Petra (“The Rock”), one of the
world’s truly unique places, a mountain refuge that became a mountain
metropolis with facades of colonnaded porticoes sculpted out of the red,
pink, and orange sandstone, fronting on rooms that were essentially man-
made caverns. A population of 30,000 was supplied by a system of cisterns
fed by channels chiseled into the rock, bringing enough spring water to
irrigate fruit gardens and wheatfields.
As it turned out, the Nabataeans also had a knack for commerce that made
their city one of the richest in the world between the second centuryBCEand
the second centuryCE. Petra became a hub for routes running in different
directions from the Incense Road to Egypt, Mesopotamia, the Levantine
ports, and Damascus, beyond which the Incense Road connected to the Silk
Road. Strabo notes that Petra was“exceedingly well-governed”and calls the
Nabataeans“a sensible people.”They had, he observed, two very admirable
traits. First, whereas foreign merchants frequently engaged in lawsuits with
each other and with the locals,“none of the natives prosecuted one another
and in every way kept peace with one another.” Profit-making was
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