The Incense Route and Arabian Trade

The Incense Route ran roughly 2,400 kilometers from the kingdoms of southern Arabia — principally Saba (biblical Sheba), Qataban, Hadramawt, and Ma'in, in what is now Yemen and Oman — northward through the Arabian interior to Gaza and the Mediterranean, and its commercial rationale rested on two aromatic tree resins found in commercial quantity almost nowhere else in the ancient world: frankincense (Boswellia sacra) and myrrh (Commiphora myrrha), both native to the Dhofar region of Oman and the Hadramawt coast. These resins were burned in temple ritual across the ancient Mediterranean and Near East, used in Egyptian embalming, and valued medicinally, making them, gram for gram, among the most valuable commodities moved by land in antiquity; the route's operation depended entirely on the prior domestication of the dromedary camel for caravan use, achieved in Arabia by around the early first millennium BCE, since camels alone could cross the arid interior stretches between watering points that pack animals used elsewhere in the ancient world could not survive.