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446

MARCO POLO   BOOK III.

Kundu and Kuzzdzrru, by the Arabs Lubán and Kunc zrr, by the Greeks Libanos, by the Romans Thus, in medieval Latin Olibanum, and in English Frankincense, i.e. I apprehend, " Genuine incense," or " Incense Proper."* It is still produced in this region and exported from it : but the larger part of that which enters the markets of the world is exported from the roadsteads of the opposite Sumálí coast. In ancient times also an important quantity was exported from the latter coast, immediately west of Cape Gardafui (Aromatum Prom.), and in the Periplus this frankincense is distinguished by the title Perztic, " from over the water."

The Illarczsid-al-Ittila', a Geog. Dictionary of the end of the 14th century, in a passage of which we have quoted the commencement in the preceding note, proceeds as follows : " The other Dhafár, which still subsists, is on the shore of the Indian Sea, distant 5 parasangs from Mérbáth in the province of Shehr. Merbath lies below Dhafár, and serves as its port. Olibanum is found nowhere except in the mountains of Dhafár, in the territory of Shehr ; in a tract which extends 3 days in length and the

same in breadth.   The natives make incisions in the trees with a knife, and the
incense flows down. This incense is carefully watched, and can be taken only to Dhafár, where the Sultan keeps the best part for himself ; the rest is made over to the people. But any one who should carry it elsewhere than to Dhafár would be put to death."

The elder Niebuhr seems to have been the first to disparage the Arabian produce of olibanum. He recognises indeed its ancient celebrity, and the fact that it was still to some extent exported from Dhafár and other places on this coast, but he says that the Arabs preferred foreign kinds of incense, especially benzoin ; and also repeatedly speaks of the superiority of that from India (des Indes and de l'Inde), by which it is probable that he meant the same thing—viz., benzoin from the Indian Archipelago. Niebuhr did not himself visit Iadhramaut.

Thus the fame of Arabian olibanum was dying away, and so was our knowledge of that and the opposite African coast, when Colebrooke (1807) published his Essay on Olibanum, in which he showed that a gum-resin, identical as he considered with frankincense, and so named (Kundur), was used in India, and was the produce of an indigenous tree, Boswellia serrata of Roxburgh, but thereafter known as B. thurifera. This discovery, connecting itself, it may be supposed, with Niebuhr's statements about

Indian olibanum (though probably misunderstood), and with the older tradition coming down from Dioscorides of a so-called Indian libanos (supra p. 396), seems to

have induced a hasty and general assumption that the Indian resin was the olibanum of commerce ; insomuch that the very existence of Arabian olibanum came to be treated as a matter of doubt in some respectable books, and that down to a very recent date.

In the Atlas to Bruce's Travéls is figured a plant under the name of A ngoua, which the Abyssinians believed to produce true olibanum, and which Bruce says did really produce a gum resembling it.

In 1837 Lieut. Cruttenden of the Indian Navy saw the frankincense tree of Arabia on a journey inland from Merbát, and during the ensuing year the trees of the

Sumálí country were seen, and partially described by Kempthorne, and Vaughan of the same service, and by Cruttenden himself. Captain Haines also in his report of the Survey of the Hadhramaut coast in 1843-1844,t speaks, apparently as an eyewitness, of the frankincense trees about Dhafár as extremely numerous, and adds

* " Drogue franche :—Qui a les qualités requises sans mélange " (Littré). " Franc . . . . Vrai, véritable " (Raynouard).

The mediaeval Olibanum was probably the Arabic Al-lubein, but was popularly interpreted as Oleum Libani. Dr. Birdwood saw at the Paris Exhibition of 1867 samples of frankincense solemnly labelled as the produce of Mount Lebanon !

" Professor Dümichen, of Strasburg, has discovered at the Temple of Daïr-el-Báhri, in Upper Egypt, paintings illustrating the traffic carried on between Egypt and Arabia, as early as the 17th century B.C. In these paintings there are representations, not only of bags of olibanum, but also of olibanum-trees planted in tubs or boxes, being conveyed by ship from Arabia to Egypt." (Hanbury and Flückiger, Pharmacograpltia, p. 121.)

t Published in J. R. G. S., vol. XV. (for 1845).