A GENERAL MODEL Of LONG-DISTANCE TRADE 305
north along the King’s Highway toward Damascus or west toward Memphis,
is not determinable.
That picture, clear but limited, provides a vantage point from which theenquiry can move outward in a number of directions. Direction (A) looks for-
ward in time and westward in space, toward the changed balance of demand
that the increasing wealth of central Italy generated from the late third cen-
tury BCE onward. That permits a focus on the Nabataeans and toward their
achievement in cornering the traffic and protecting it against competition for
several hundred years, until Roman investment in Red Sea infrastructure (on
a foundation laid by the Ptolemies)^35 allowed Egypt-based traders to by-pass
the overland caravan route and to obtain direct access by sea not just to the
Hadramawt but well beyond, to India, Sri Lanka, and the African coast. This
track is already well-researched and will not be pursued here.
Direction (B), which will also not be pursued here, looks northward andeastward, toward the evidence for effective demand for the aromatics of Yemen
from Mesopotamia and India and from even further east.^36 Direction (C) does
the same for the various civilisations of the Mediterranean, a task which is
wholly impracticable here: section III will review mainly that evidence which
concerns Greece and precedes the epoch of the triptych reported above for
the late fourth century BCE. Direction (D), presented in section IV, will use
the evidence to construct a model that might be applicable to the transits of
other commodities.
III
The first approximately datable evidence for the use of south Arabian aromat-
ics in Greece dates from the turn of the seventh and sixth centuries BCE, a
date by which their use had already had a very long past elsewhere. It went
back at least to the third millennium BCE in Egypt, access being gained by
both Nile and Red Sea. That traffic, which presents major problems of its own
that will not be broached here,^37 lost its hitherto exclusive access to such aro-
matics when the so-called Incense Road overland from Yemen towards Jordan
became a viable route. The period of its development,^38 and also that of its
northbound continuation, the ‘King’s Highway’ from the Gulf of Aqaba to
Damascus,^39 have been much debated. For present purposes it is sufficient to
identify as a terminus ante quem non the fundamental technological advance
represented by the use of the camel as a draught animal. That innovation, to be
explicitly distinguished both from initial domestication^40 and from use in war-
fare,^41 was what made long cross-desert transits possible and is likely to have
been long-drawn-out and highly variable by region. The thirteenth or twelfth
centuries BCE are now being commonly seen as the earliest likely period of
draught use,^42 but specific evidence is not available until ca. 750 BCE, when a