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| 0506 |
The Book of Ser Marco Polo : vol.2 |
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Kundu and Kundurnu, by the Arabs Lubdn and Kundur, 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 Sumali 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 Peratia, “from over the water.”
The Mardjid-al-Ittid, 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 Dhafar, which still subsists, is on the shore of the Indian Sea, distant 5 parasangs from Mérbâth in the province of Shehr. Merbath lies below Dhafar, and serves as its port. Olibanum is found nowhere except in the mountains of Dhafar, 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 Dhafar, 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 Dhafar 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 Dhafar 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 Hadhramaut.
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 Travels is figured a plant under the name of Angona, 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 Merbât, and during the ensuing year the trees of the Sumali country were seen, and partially described by Kemptorne, 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,† speaks, apparently as an eye-witness, of the frankincense trees about Dhafar as extremely numerous, and adds
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