Of all the trade routes of the ancient world, this was the oldest and almost certainly the richest. For 10 centuries, the frankinscense road—really a series of cities, oases, and for tresses—carried a precious cargo from the mountainous interior of Yemen to the coasts.   Much of the trade was controlled from the capitals.

When Roman scientists, in the first century after Christ, were compiling all the world’s knowledge into a single volume, to be known as an encyclopedia, the authors devoted several pages to that miracle of the East, frankincense: it was harvested, wrote Pliny the Elder, by a tiny class of elite Yemenis: “not over three thousand families have a right to that privilege by hereditary succession. For this reason, these persons are called sacred, and not allowed, while pruning the trees, or gathering the harvest, to receive any pollution, either by intercourse with women or contact with the dead; by these religious observances it is that the price of the commodity is so enhanced.”



Expensive it was. Enriching it was. All the funerary rites of the ancient world, from Aleppo to Cordoba, from Alexandria to Agadir were solemnized by this ethereal perfume—the  sap of the frankincense tree. Not to mention wedding rites and every other rite of passage. In consequence, in its early youth, Yemen, or parts of what is now Yemen, lived through an era of staggering, incalculable wealth. The merchants of the globe stood on bended knee before the kingdoms of the ancient Arabian world: the Minean, Sabaean, Katabanian, Hadrami and finally, perhaps a hundred years before Christ, the Himyaritic. It wasn’t until AD 45 that Hippalus, a Greek mariner, discovered a strangely consistent series of winds sweeping the bottom of the Arabian peninsula—the Trade Winds--that the Frankincense road gave way to ocean going vessels. Before that hour, everything that came from the East or from

Eastern African was likely to pass through a string of ancient capitals on the edge of the Arabian desert –Marib, Shabwa, Barakish--which had become, essentially, stations on the world’s most lucrative trade route. What else traveled on this road? Cinnabar from the famous Dragon’s Blood tree (used by Roman soldiers to staunch bleeding), myrrh, slaves (from Africa) ivory, diamonds, cinnamon (from India), lapis lazuli, pearls, pepper, salt, and every other exotic jewel and spice that capitals in the West were learning to love.  Now the route is travelled by tourists and the occasional beduin.  The ancient cities are still in place: Barakish, Marib, Shabwah, Sirwah.  Traveling from one to the next is like sailing across a dead sea.  Great expanses of sand lap at the gates of these long vanished cities,  and from the citadels one peers out over the wastes as at an endless, rolling sea.



The Yemeni desert: it can be an isolating, lonely place. When Freya Stark ventured into the Hadramaut valley for the first time in 1934, she wrote in her diary: “I thought of the Arabian coasts stretching on either hand: three hundred miles to Aden; how many to Muscat in the other direction? The Indian Ocean in front of me, the inland deserts behind: within these titanic barriers, I was the only European...A dim little feeling came curling up through my sleepy senses; I wondered for a second what it might be before I recognized it; it was Happiness, pure and immaterial, independent of affections and emotions, the ethereal essence of happiness, a delight so rare and impersonal that it seems scarcely terrestrial when it comes.“