The Incense Road

Around 750 BCE, a provincial governor on the Euphrates recorded a complaint in stone: a caravan had crossed his land without paying. It is the oldest surviving record of a caravan out of the interior of Arabia, and the first thing history tells us about the trade is that a man with soldiers took his share of it.

The cargo was aromatic resin, frankincense and myrrh, grown in a narrow band of country at the southern rim of the peninsula and burned in the temples of the whole ancient world. This is the history of the road that carried it, across thirteen centuries. The cargo changed, the ports changed, the kingdoms and the gods changed. The road remained, and it remained taxed.