Cumin, Camels, and Caravans. Gary Paul Nabhan
the border with Syria. They sailed to America about a century ago, from Beirut to Marseilles and then on to New York. Others went to Mexico or to Brazil.”
After Sulaiman finishes translating my answer, he and Mr. Nebhan banter back and forth for several more minutes. Sulaiman finally turns back toward Laurie and me and grins. “He wants to know what your family trades in your shops in America.”
As I think about how to answer Mr. Nebhan, this Omani merchant, I remember that when the first members of my family came through Ellis Island to New York, some of them worked peddling spices, packaging spices, and retailing spices in corner grocery stores on Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn.
I have paid my dues as well, digging up sassafras roots when I was young, and later harvesting wild chiltepin chiles and wild Mexican oregano with Native American friends in Sonora, Mexico, then serving as a middleman to get them into retail outlets. And now I grow two dozen kinds of peppers, mints, and oreganos on a small farm in the desert highlands of Arizona.
I look up and see that Mr. Nebhan and Dr. Al-Khanjari are still waiting for me to answer. I realize I cannot explain all of that in a manner that makes sense in Arabic, so I respond succinctly: “Well, yes, my family has traded spices in America, but I am a teacher . . . and a farmer.” I ask Sulaiman to explain this to our host. “First, my grandfathers and then my uncles did so. I myself have harvested fulful [peppers] and za’atar [herbs] in America, and have driven truckloads of them from one country to another.”
Mr. Nebhan, a trader of frankincense who has never left his motherland, knowingly smiles, as if he were now sure that I am indeed his distant cousin.
Without access to Arabic genealogies still housed in archives in Yemen, there is no easy way to learn the degree to which we are related, or how many generations ago his ancestors and mine in the Banu Nebhani tribe took up this profession—a predilection, really—of trading spices. All we know is that several thousand years ago some unprecedented developments had begun to affect how Semitic peoples behaved in the places where incense, herbs, musk, dyes, and spices were gathered.
First, traders began to use semidomesticated camels and small sailboats to take these goods far beyond their areas of origin. They moved across continents to cultures that spoke languages they had never previously heard. At first, they retained camels as their sole mode of travel, for they could cover twenty-two miles of roughly level ground a day. But the traders ultimately sought other means to move heavier loads of spices, incense, and herbs longer distances than were possible with their beasts of burden.
They began to build and equip small dhows to sail the open waters of the Arabian Sea and Indian Ocean. Their goal was to travel even farther each day than the strongest camel could, that is, if the winds were in their sails. Of course, by this time, many other cultures around the world had figured out how to navigate the shallow shoals along their open coasts and the backwaters behind nearby barrier islands. They employed boats of buoyant animal bladders and sown-together skins, bundles of reeds, or hollowed-out palms or tree trunks.
And yet, I imagine, the sailors from the southern and eastern reaches of Arabia began to do far more than that. They erected masts with broad, maneuverable sails on them that could be shifted with the direction of the winds. They set out to sail directly across a sea, using the seasonal winds to take their dhows back and forth. Soon, no longer content to navigate along the shores of a bay or shoals of a peninsula, they began to use distant landmarks and stars to maneuver their way over open waters.
Well over a half century ago, historian George Fadlo Hourani, himself the son of a Lebanese shipping merchant, began to wonder why Arabs were among the first people known to venture fully out across the seas. In his beautifully crafted classic, Arab Seafaring in the Indian Ocean in Ancient and Early Medieval Times, Hourani boldly proposed that
FIGURE 3. Dhows such as this one in the seas near Lamu, Kenya, were essential seafaring vessels for early spice traders. (Photo by Karl Ragnar Gjertsen. Courtesy Wikimedia Commons.)
geography favored the development of sailing from Arabian shores. A very long coastline bounds the peninsula on three sides, stretching from the Gulf of Suez round to the head of the Persian Gulf. Near these coasts lie the most fertile parts of Arabia: al-Yaman, Hadramawt, and ‘Umūn; communication between them by sea was no more formidable than the crossing of the deserts and mountains which separated them on land. Commerce with neighboring countries was invited . . . so that across the enclosed waters of the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf the Arabs might be in contact with two of the most ancient centers of wealth and civilization—Egypt and Iran—not to mention Mesopotamia. . . . Most important of all, the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf, supplemented by the Nile, the Euphrates, and the Tigris, are natural channels for through traffic between the Mediterranean basin and Eastern Asia; the Arabs were astride two of the world’s great trade routes.6
It is thus plausible that certain of the Semitic peoples of the southern and eastern reaches of the Arabian Peninsula were no longer satisfied with staying put, for they had come into more frequent contact with many other cultures through long-distance trade. This may be conjecture, but it seems that their belief systems soon departed from those of the many pantheistic and polytheistic place-based cultures of the era.
These restless souls probably became more cosmopolitan, but at the same time, more emotionally and morally displaced, or “placeless.” The pioneering human ecologist Paul Shepard has suggested that the emergence of this peculiar Semitic mindset in the deserts of the Middle East marked a turning point in human history: “On the most ambitious scale in the history of the world, the ancestors of the Old Testament made virtue out of their homelessness. . . . In a Semitic storm god they found a traveling deity who was everyplace and therefore not bound by location.”7
Curiously, perhaps because they chose to bring their God along with them wherever they traveled and even settled in other lands, the various Semitic tribes did not necessarily lose their cultural identity by moving away from home. That is, their identity appears to have become somewhat independent of where they actually lived, although many of them may have kept a nostalgic connection to the mythic place in which their ancestors were presumed to have lived.
Although not as cynical about this placeless tendency as ecologist Shepard was, the great Jewish theologian Abraham Joshua Heschel conceded that at some point, the core Semitic beliefs radically shifted away from those of other Near Eastern cultures. In their minds, Heschel maintains, several Semitic tribes began to reject the very notion “that the deity resides in space, within particular localities like mountains, forests, trees or stones, which are, therefore, singled out as holy places; [that] the deity is bound to a particular land.”
Instead, Heschel himself conjectured that most Semitic religions gradually came to accept that “there is no quality that space [or a presumably sacred place] has in common with the essence of God.”8 If God could be found anywhere in space or time rather than in particular places, so could economic opportunities.
As if to establish that possibility as a fact, the seafaring Semitic tribes of Oman launched sixty- to seventy-day expeditions into lands where other people were eager to purchase their novelties. Journeys of one thousand to two thousand miles suddenly became commonplace. By thirty-two hundred years ago, written records in Mesopotamia were noting that loads of frankincense had been arriving from Oman or Yemen in an ever-increasing frequency and volume.
As a result of the new challenges posed by managing caravans and cargo ships for long-distance transport and cross-cultural exchange, a distinctive multilingual merchant class began to emerge. These business-people forged solutions to the logistical difficulties that were integral to caravanning or seafaring. But they became adept at learning different languages, as well, allowing them to tell others compelling stories about the potency of their products and the adventures that had occurred while in transit. They also began to negotiate for the sales of not just one cargo load but many.
Of course, some people are natural polyglots, and gifted storytellers have emerged in nearly every culture around the world. But Semitic spice merchants somehow prepared their youth to combine