214. The Empire of Frankincense & Myrrh

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0:29On coming to the house, they saw the child with his mother, Mary. and they bowed down and worshipped him. Then they opened their treasures and presented him with gifts of gold and of incense and of myrrh. Hello, welcome to Empire with me, Anita Arden. And me, David Attenborough. Yeah, well, exactly. What are you doing? Auditioning for some kind of narration thing? I'd rather like that, yeah. Voiceovers by William Dalrymple. He can do drama, he can do pathos, he can do comedy. Could be a whole new career. Good Lord. Anyway, look, hello, it is Empire. And we are so excited because we've brought you an early Christmas present in the perfectly formed shape of Bethany Hughes, our favourite historian.

1:20How are you, lovely woman? Thank you. I'm just delighted and overjoyed to be with you from thousands of miles away. We're very definitely not in the same time zone or country or continents. Or indeed in Kansas anymore. I mean, look, you are sort of dusty because you have come out of the trenches digging into the very, very history that we are talking about. So the last episode that we did here on Empire was about the Magi and we promised that we would get deep into the heart of those gifts that were brought to the infant baby Jesus. So appropriate Christmas Eve today. And we were talking about frankincense and myrrh and you are following that trail right now, right here and right now aren't you?

2:02I am. So I'm very wicked because I shouldn't be talking to you at all because people said you mustn't tell anybody you're here following the trail of Frankenstein so I thought oh what will I do? I'll get on a podcast with Anita and William my old friends and tell the world about it. We won't tell anyone. Don't tell a soul please. You can be absolutely certain. Just between us. Just us and our 880 ,000 downloaders. Gorgeous, gorgeous. Well I'm dusty I'm not going to tell you exactly where I am because I've been handling having beautiful, beautiful pots from the age of Jesus, in fact, from that world that gave him gold and frankincense and myrrh this morning.

2:39And as soon as we finish speaking, I'm going to Oman to have a look at where incense actually came from. So it's perfect. You're catching me mid-flow. That is very exciting. Mid-archaeology stream, as it were. You are literally always the perfect guest. You could not be more perfect. Now, can I just say, before we go any further with this story, there's a little story. There's a little bit story I want to share with you because your seven wonders of the ancient world, Bettany Hughes, just keeps rising to the top. It does. Number one. Amazing. It's such a fabulous book and it is no surprise to me like Zebedee just keeps leaping on up there, right to the heady heights of those charts.

3:18What lovely, lovely people, lovely friends you are to mention that. I know it's fantastic. I haven't really been home since August the 16th. I've been on the road and I keep on getting these very sweet messages from my husband saying, well done. Number one, when are you coming home? Please come home. So no, I'm thrilled. I'm thrilled. It's great, isn't it? Because you know, these are these things that existed. All the stuff that we talk about was a long time ago. These are really a long time ago, but it's fabulous that people still care about them. Well, let's start because frankincense, we touched on with our brilliant, brilliant guest.

3:56We love Lloyd. He's just a wonderful man. Might just have to do another whole Persian series just to get Lloyd back on. Oh, he's just so fabulous. But we talked about frankincense and I think we ought to really sort of explain what this stuff is. So if you look at it, it looks like crystallized sugar, which can lead to some real problems in my household because my mother, once somebody gave me some frankincense and she popped a whole handful in her mouth and tried to eat it. and she threw it all out. So we now can't have frankincense in this house ever again because, you know, my mother. But what does it look like?

4:30And Tess, tell us, with frankincense and myrrh, they have a similar origin story of how we come to get it and harvest it. Totally right. So they're both saps but from very different trees. So frankincense comes from the Boswellia sacra tree. It's a tree that's very difficult to grow. Is that Boswellia as in Johnson and Boswell? Indeed, indeed. And Sacra as in sacred, obviously. And I've seen incense being harvested and it's the most extraordinary thing. Not everyone can say that. No, it's true. That they've seen incense being harvested. It sounds like the April Fool about spaghetti harvest. But there you have.

5:08No, no, no. I've spent a long time watching incense being harvested. And you know what's incredible? So it's still done by Bedouin communities in places like Oman and Yemen, it's a very, very particular skill because they basically gently, gently, gently, gently chip away at the trunk of the tree. And you have to be absolutely millimeter precise because if you wound the tree too much, you get infections in and the tree dies. And as they chip, chip, chip, it's this lovely sound as they chip the trunk. The incense oozes out of the Boswellia sacra like milk. It's white. Sticky. Yeah, sticky white glue.

5:47And often in the region, it's called words relating to white or milk. So laba, labne, lebna. It was called that sometimes in the ancient world too, because it just looks like the tree is weeping milk. But then the magic happens when it dries, because it becomes this beautiful, translucent, almost kind of golden amber like colour. And this is both myrrh and frankincense or just frankincense? frankincense actually i failed you because i've not seen myrrh being i know my i know i have well i'm not not personally but i've seen videos and it is a very similar um situation where the the bark of this and then both of these trees that yield this this golden kind of harvest they're small and gnarly and they don't look very beautiful at all they're low to the ground they're very very scrubby looking.

6:37And likewise with myrrh, again, the sap is white and sticky, but when it's exposed to the air, it goes redder. So, you know, your frankincense is golden and amber, as you quite rightly say, and the myrrh is a much sort of rustier red colour. Because these trees, much like the human body, they try to protect themselves from wounds and infections. So, what they do is if they sense that they've been cut, they release this kind of sap, which in nature will just go to this glassy texture and seal up the wound. But the chemicals that are released, they are very volatile in these sort of bumps and bruises.

7:12And it's that volatile chemical that gives you the smell, both in frankincense and in myrrh. And very different they are too. They're both kind of woody, but myrrh, when you burn it, it's much more spicy and frankincense is a bit more lemony tinged. So that is why, and they have antibiotic qualities, which we'll come to with myrrh, because that's very important, why they're used for embalming and for anointing queens and things like that. And do we know how early on man realised that this milk could be used for anything? So you get frankincense balls in Tutankhamun's tomb, for instance. Really?

7:47The first recorded evidence is a thousand years before that. Because as you say, Anita, it's such a funny thing isn't it if we use the word incense or frankincense I think almost automatically we think of a sort of lovely wafty nice to have thing that makes rooms and churches and temples smells nice and is you know overused in drama recons and kind of roman films and glad there's always like clouds of incense but it's so functional it's so practical exactly as you say it's got antibacterial and antibiotic properties they even now think that incense is actually a very natural mood lifner which is something that's talked about in the in the ancient sources and women used to burn frankincense wood a lot and then they would use the kind of charcoals ends to make cold because it works as an insect repellent so it's got massive massive uses so as we all know, the ancients are very good.

8:45Basically, if there's something handy around them, they are very good at discovering that early on, because for them, this is a difference between life and death and survival. And how early on did it get associated with gods and divinity and temples? Right from the very start. So it's either described as the tears or the sweat or the breath of gods. And there was this notion that by burning frankincense, you physically lifted messages up to the sky so it would be on those kind of clouds that these these very particular prayers would be carried which is the reason it got burnt in in temples and then eventually in in churches so it's always had this sacred tinge to it and actually in fact ladies and gents where I'm heading in Oman this very remote island it was described as an island inhabited by holy men and they were holy because they dealt in in frankincense.

9:39I mean it's sort of two things here. I was reading some science journals as to why this might be related to heavenly things. People write about this stuff. It's fantastic. The whole world is the library for you. But it's because richer people would be able to afford this stuff and they had better hygiene and they got sick less. And so suddenly these two things got conflated that better health or a curse of sickness being lifted from you is associated with the smell that wafts around wealthier people or people who clean up or people who have temples and things which are free from the refuse of ancient times, which were just rich with cholera and typhoid and all of those things.

10:18The other thing, I thought this was fascinating, but the book of Exodus mentions a particular blend of frankincense. It's such an interesting reference because it says, look, this must be, it's a special recipe of frankincense. It says you have to burn it before the Ark of the Covenant. If anyone tries to take any of this stuff to burn it for themselves, they must be, and I quote, cut off from their people. So it was specifically a scent or a smoke of the gods that had magical powers. How quickly does it turn into an export item? How quickly is it being shipped off from this region of Arabia in the wider sense to Europe and beyond?

10:56Well, again, almost immediately. So it goes through the desert route. So you have desert incense trails and then these maritime incense trails and we know that the records that we have from you know what we would call the western world alexander the great for instance gets into massive trouble because he orders too much too much incense basically you've got this grand idea of yourself that you you're due this amount as you're saying anita because of it being a status symbol you're going to come to us to a sticky end so that's when we start to hear it written about you know in really great detail but as basically as soon as we have records because how could you not as we said it is this it's kind of quasi magical thing and and actually in in posh greek and roman homes it was burnt as well as being burnt in the temples and there was a whole etiquette around it that you had particular brands of frankincense incense and myrrh that were burnt at different times of of day so there was a kind of competitive incense burning, I think, amongst the kind of urban elite.

12:01And frankincense, because people say what's the difference between incense and frankincense. Frank is basically a later French word that means really posh or kind of really high quality. So frankincense is the very poshest incense you can get. Oh, that is very, very interesting. We are here to talk about largely the people who cornered the market, as it were, and built an entire civilization off the back of these magical aromatic wafts of smoke. And they are a people that you know everything about because you have been digging away into their history, but most people will not even have heard of the Nabataeans.

12:39Now, can you just first of all, give us a thumbnail sketch of who the Nabataeans were? I can indeed. I should also just warn you, I am obsessed with the Nabataeans. and more than a little bit in love with them. So how long have we got? We've got a log as you like, Ben News. So absolutely. So the Nabataeans, one of the most influential societies and cultures in the story of civilization. And yet, and it drives me mad, they often end up in the footnotes of history or ignored or actually kind of actively censored from the record books because they're not Greek, they're not Roman, they're not Egyptian, They're not Persian, and yet they interact with all of these worlds.

13:21So basically, they're initially a desert-dwelling tribe. I mean, are they basically Arabs? Are we right to call them Arabs? They are largely early Arabs. Yeah, absolutely. Because their script becomes Arab. Becomes Arab, doesn't it? Exactly. So this is just one of the many things that they give the world. And we should all know that as a fact, and yet they don't get the credit where credit is due. They sort of come really into the spotlight in the 5th and 4th centuries BCE, but they're described earlier than that by Assyrian sources. And Assyrian sources took about these men that live in the desert in very, very harsh climate.

13:59And yet, they say, somehow they make the desert flourish. They make a success of this world. And they're talking both about their extraordinary water engineering. They're really pioneers in water tech. This is something we'll come back to because it's very important. It's very important. So they're great water engineers and they are also very, very good at trading. They trade not just frankincense, but also pearls and beautiful textiles and indeed golds over 4 ,000 miles. And they start off as camel herders, is that right? They do. I mean, yeah, they do kind of camel herders, goat herders. They are basically desert people, but as far back as we have records, they're also trading.

14:40So I was slightly leaped to their defence. Yes, you are. I do. I won't hear a word said against them. You're among friends here. We're also big Nabataeans. I'm so pleased. I'm so pleased because they're just very smart. I was actually talking to an archaeologist yesterday in our dusty, dusty trench. And I said, you know, if you had to sell the Nabataeans to the world, because quite rightly, as you said, so few people have heard of them. They've heard of this place that they built, Petra, but they don't know the name of the Nabataeans. Petra, we will do a lot about it. Perfect. So I said, how would you describe them?

15:16And he said, well, one of the things about the Nabataeans is they don't really care about much other than making money, which makes them sound shallow. But then if you think about it, we're talking about the ancient world. So in order to make money, you have to really get on with people. You have to be multilingual. you have to earn the trust of those that you're trading with you have to be able to travel extraordinary distances you have to have extraordinary know-how so they're basically in comparison again with the other civilizations of the time they're very peaceful they just want to get on with their job of being the uber traders the kind of amazon service that's a beautiful way of putting it and like amazon they don't actually make this make it themselves they're buying the incense from other people yeah so so oman and yemen are two of the few places on earth where the boswellia sacra trees can grow so they're importing and exporting this this incredible crop and they're helping you know they're helping build the forts where this this very precious commodity is stored but they are exactly that they're basically the kind of middle men and really crucially middle women and this is another reason that i adore i adore the Nabataeans, women have incredible status and standing in the Nabataean world.

16:35And again, why aren't we all taught this at school? So I always feel it's a tiny bit like the kind of situation during World War One and after, because a lot of the actual camel caravans themselves are run by men. So it's the men physically out on the camels, physically doing those long sea journeys. Women are left behind in the cities and the settlements to run things. So Nabatean women we know had ownership rights. They had inheritance rights. They build extraordinary tombs in places like Al-Ula in what's now Saudi Arabia. The priestesses can collect tithes and taxes. So they're really, really, really kind of keeping the Nabatean world going.

17:17And we see from the coins, Nabataean coins, you often have the queens featured alongside the Nabataean kings. That's not untypical of nomadic peoples, though, is it? You find a lot of nomad peoples that the women have got much, much bigger roles and are much more at the centre of things. We were talking about it with the Mongols and Genghis Khan, I mean, where women had so much more agency and were trained in fighting and things like that. Is it just a function of nomadic life? Because I know that some of the early historians, people like Diodorus, who wrote about them very early on, said these are people who value their freedom above everything else.

17:53I mean, I know your guys said they love money. One of the things that often early ancient historians said, these are a free people who know the desert better than anybody else and they value freedom above everything else. Exactly. Well, they do. They value liberty. But you can still be wealthy and have liberty. You know, they value liberty with a very nice lifestyle attached. Thank you very much. Like it's kind of the vibe that I get from them. So again, and it's really crucial that, that they are obsessed with having the liberty to travel where they want and when they want. And at one point when they rub up against the Romans, they say, listen, what we just can't understand is let us live as we want to live.

18:35That's all that we ask to do. And we know that we help you. So why on earth are you trying to overrun us and enslave us? Let us live as we want to live. Well, I mean, let's not jump ahead to the Romans. Let's talk a little bit because we're going to come to that because it is sort of almost the end of a fabulous story. But I want to sort of dwell in the beginning because it's so gorgeous. One of the reasons the Nabataeans are so successful is, number one, they know the desert better than anyone else because they are a free people and they have traveled it. I mean, it's sort of a little bit of a dune vibe going on here, you know, where you've got the Fremen, if you are into that kind of thing, who know the deserts, they travel through areas that nobody else can, and they are able to wander freely with their blue, blue eyes and the dark, dark sand.

19:19But I mean, having that knowledge of the desert means early on, when these peace loving people are sort of, you know, with all this knowledge, they see caravans who are traveling, and they become guides. That's the first thing that they do to sort of get even into this world of trade and money, honey, they start leading caravans and saying, look, we'll protect these caravans. It doesn't take long because as you say, they are brilliantly canny to say, why are we protecting these guys? Why don't we just do it ourselves? And they sort of corner the trade routes of particularly spices, frankincense and myrrh.

19:54I love the fact that it's very similar to June because obviously spice was this precious commodity that was that was traded in dune in the film dune that also had these kind of magical medicinal properties and incense as we now know is exactly the same so yeah they were protecting caravans and then they they take over with their unique understanding of the desert they were also great mariners and and again it's something i think that we forget about the nebatians if we ever knew about them in the first place but now we know about people must remember not to forget that they were also great masters masters of the sea because they understand the Red Sea and the coral bowmates, they're very good at negotiating around those.

20:32There's a slightly less savoury moment in their history where they seem to act as kind of pirates and lure ships onto the coral reefs so that they'll break records. And they hire themselves out as mercenaries. So at the time of the Battle of Actium and all that conflict between Cleopatra and Rome, There are Nabataean sailors involved in that as well. So they're sailors as well as in charge of those routes in the desert. And we should say that this is a period when the Red Sea is a very busy sea. You've got, particularly in the kind of first century BC, you've got lots of long distance stuff going first to the Horn of Africa, to Aksum and the Ethiopian kingdoms, and then beyond, following the monsoon winds, to India, which is, I write about this in my Golden Road.

21:22And it just takes two months on the monsoon winds to leave the Red Sea and travel all the way down to Kerala. And the map of the world. I mean, I think this is just so important to sort of look back and see what places. Gaza was one of the most wealthy, thriving ports where, you know, this stuff came in and stuff went out. So you would have these sort of incense trails, you know, coming through the port of Gaza, which was wealthy beyond imaginings for people who lived around there. And you still have fragments of that amid all the mess in Gaza, those Byzantine churches sitting there where we had the Palestinian Christians being attacked earlier in the war there.

22:02But those churches go back to this period, to the period when the incense is coming through Gaza and going on to Roman Byzantine. I'm really interested, though, why we are so ignorant about this, because it's not as if we didn't know about this here in the West. There was this one chap, I'm sure you know all about him, and I love him because he just sounds so eccentric and bonkers, Johann Ludwig. Yes. Mark Hart, yes. He sort of went and was the first European, they say, in 1812, to see Petra. And we should talk about Petra because it's so intrinsically linked with the Navitians. Rose Red City as old as time.

22:38But he saw it. He's this fantastic guy who sort of grows up in Switzerland and he trains and goes and learns things in Cambridge. In fact, he's tasked with going to find Timbuktu and mapping the Sahara Desert. And so he learns Arabic at university, decides to dress as an Arab because he wants to pretend to be an Arab. So he's wandering around Cambridge in terrible inclement weather in a dish dash and a turban. Everyone thinks he's mad. But he is this person who writes this account of traveling through these narrow passes near of Wadi Musa, the Valley of Moses, and suddenly coming out into this wide open space and seeing Petra.

23:20Wadi Musa, by the way, is so interesting because that's in the Bible as well. That's where Moses supposedly struck a rock and this spring came up through the rocks for those people fleeing Pharaoh. Now, tell us about Petra. Where is it? Describe what he saw because he was so overawed by it. He was also worried he was going to get his throat slit at any moment, so it didn't hang around too long. Originally called The Rock, isn't that right? Yeah, Rakmu, Rakmu. That's what the Nabataeans called it, which was their word for rock. And then it becomes Petra Rock in Greek. So it's sort of, it is The Rock.

23:52It's a very rocky place. You know, you've got this famous Sikh made even more famous by the fact that Indiana Jones, Harrison Ford rides down it. And then, you know, the kind of is inside the treasury. So Petra's most beautiful, beautiful, beautiful, not just city, but whole region. There's much more of it than people a lot of outlying monuments and extraordinary things that around that whole area absolutely there's little Petra there are areas of tombs I mean this is a huge archaeological park that you can go and visit and can I just say please people go and visit it because Jordan is has you know it's really suffered because of what's happening in the Middle East and tourists aren't going but Jordan is really really safe so please go now fabulous place so Petra yes this incredible city, the kind of northern capital of the Nabataean kingdom.

24:39And again, as you say, Anita, if you go there, it's one of those places you think, this can't have been forgotten until 1812. It's one of the most extraordinary places on earth. It's not an official wonder of the world, but it is a wonder of the world. But I think there's a very particular reason for that. And it's very pernicious one. Because as I said, the Nabataeans aren't big on written histories. They do write, and there's this early form of Arabic they cover their tombs with. So it's not true that they don't write and they do make a record of themselves, but they're much less show-offy and shouty than the Greeks and the Romans.

25:15They're kind of more, again, just sort of getting on with it and measuring themselves up. I always feel measuring themselves up against the extraordinary nature and landscape and geology that they inhabit. A lovely way of putting it. And it's quite a stable regime, isn't it? They don't have coups. Brothers don't kill each other. We've just been doing the moguls of every generation. There's a kind of massive upheaval when one guy goes down and all the children are busy blinding and sort of capturing each other. That doesn't happen in Petra. Yes, there's certainly less of that. I mean, yes, you know, there's a lot less of that.

25:48As I said, they're focused on the bottom line, because that would just make, you know, that would make the kind of interrupts the cash flow. So yes, they do seem stable. And again, they have this sort of inbuilt checks and balance. So there's almost a day in Petra, which is like the Feast of Fools that we would think of as a medieval thing, where basically, the king has to sit surrounded by all the people of Petra, and answer his faults. So they do a kind of roasting of the king. Oh, wow. That's amazing. Which is incredible, isn't it? We don't get to do that now. No, exactly. But again, how forward thinking is that for them to say, we know we're not perfect.

26:25We know we can do better. There's probably simmering resentments. Get it all out in one go. Could you just sort of give us a date for when those enormous sort of cliff face carvings of a beautiful temple and city are sort of created, the Petra, that if someone's going to Google it right now, and I really do urge you to Google it, because if you haven't seen it, it is breathtaking. But this was when, and was it all built off the back of, you know, frankincense and myrrh, basically, and the incense trail? I mean, definitely. Yeah. I mean, it's a wealthy, wealthy city. So kind of fundamentally, you know, give and take a hundred years either side, it's pretty much dead on 2000 years ago.

27:04So that's, So at the time of Jesus, so Herod the Great's mother, by the way, was Nabataean. Again, like, how come we don't know that? And then Herod himself fights with the people of Petra, doesn't he? There's a kind of argy-bargy going on over that border just for a change. There is. They get involved exactly in Judea. And one of the Nabataean kings is very disapproving of the fact that Herod Antipas takes a new wife, the famous dance of the seven veils that never actually happened with Salome. But they're involved in that story as well. So they're kind of deeply, basically what we think of as the kind of high summer of the classical world.