310 JOhN K. DAVIES
One final aspect can only be touched on, since its ramifications extend far
beyond the remit of this volume. Egyptian outreach into Sinai for primary
materials such as copper and turquoise had already led to mining exploitation
in southern Sinai and was later, in the thirteenth through twelfth centuries
BCE, to yield further activity in the Timna’ valley, some 25 km north of Elat.^80
In itself this activity had nothing to do directly with aromatics, but it was one
of many commodity traffics, driven especially by demand in Egypt, which
came to use the same transit routes over Sinai and beyond. In consequence,
by the Late Bronze Age (if not long before) a set of divergent, overlapping,
and ever-changing networks of communication had emerged within a sin-
gle region. Very broadly, in the east-west dimension it runs from the eastern
marches of Egypt across the Negev and into the Saudi desert beyond Jordan,
and in the north-south dimension runs from the latitude of the Dead Sea
within present-day Israel and Jordan southwards into the Hejaz: in essence,
Transjordan and the Negev. At least from the early first millennium BCE, if
not from much earlier, complex geopolitical influences seem to have turned
this region, in the very literal sense, into a crossroads, with major cultural con-
sequences. They cannot be set out in detail here,^81 for anyone who explores
the course of scholarship in the last forty years about the history of the region
in the Late Bronze and especially the Early Iron Age becomes aware of an
intense debate over land use, settlement patterns, oscillations and tensions
between settled and nomad life-styles, economic activities, population densi-
ties, state formations and dissolutions, ethnic identities, and external influences.
The intricacy of that debate is compounded by the never-ending arguments
over the historicity of Solomon, for whatever historical core may underlie the
Biblical narrative of Solomon’s personal and ‘trading’ relationships with Hiram
of Tyre to the north and with a queen from ‘Sheba’ to the south^82 has to imply
for the mid-tenth century BCE a securely usable north-south line of com-
munication by land from Tyre to the Gulf of Aqaba. Moreover, even without
the Biblical references (of very early dramatic date) to ‘the King’s highway’,^83
the distribution maps of ‘Midianite’ pottery from Qurayya in the late Bronze
Age,^84 and several centuries later that of Edomite pottery from Buseirah,^85
are sufficient in themselves both to attest the existence of a communication
network and to show it capable of transporting heavy and bulky materials.
Aromatics used it, but did not generate it.
Moreover, that network was one among countless such in the Old World,
which current scholarship is still far from having fully identified and mapped.
The fuller that map becomes, the clearer the sense that we shall have of the
ways in which separate and largely isolated cultures gradually came to inter-
act and to form that loosely linked oikoumene which, to his eternal honour,
Hecataeus was the first to describe systematically. We owe it to him to take the
task forward.