Page:The Periplus of the Erythræan Sea.djvu/123

 forests of acacia, moringa, and euphorbia. From earliest times it has been, together with frankincense, a constitutent of incense, perfumes, and ointments. It was an ingredient of the Hebrew anointing oil (Exod. XXX), and was also one of the numerous components of the celebrated kyphi of the Egyptians, a preparation used in fumigations, medicine, and embalming. It was the object of numerous trading expeditions of the Egyptian kings to the A monement of Sahure, 28th century B. C., records receipts of 80,000 measures of myrrh from Punt. The expedition of Hatshepsut (15th century B. C.) again records myrrh as the most important cargo; its list in the was as follows: All goodly fragrant woods of God’s Land, heaps of myrrh-resin, fresh myrrh trees, ebony, pure ivory, green gold of Emu, cinnamon wood, khesyt wood, ihmut incense, sonter incense, eye cosmetic, apes, monkeys, dogs, skins of southern panther, natives and their children. The inscription adds: (Breasted, Ancient Records of Egypt, II, 109; Flückiger and Hanbury, op. cit., 140–6.)

Pliny (XII, 35) gives a clear account of the gathering of the gum:

Stacte, he says, sold as high as 40 denarrii the pound; cultivated myrrh, at a maximum of 11 denarii; Erythraean at 16, and odoraria at 14. And he concludes: “They give no tithes of myrrh to the god, because it is the produce of other countries as well; but the growers pay the fourth part of it to the king of the Gebanitae. Myrrh is bought up indescriminately by the common people and then packed into bags; but our perfumers separate it without any difficulty, the principal tests of its goodness being its unctuousness and its aromatic smell.

“There are several kinds of myrrh: the first among the wild myrrhs is the Troglodytic; and the next are the Minaean, which includes the aromatic, and that of Ausaritis, in the kingdom of the Gebanitae. A third kind is the Dianitic, and a fourth is the mixed myrrh, or collatitia... a fifth again is the Sambracenian, which is brought from a city in the kingdom of the Sabaei, near the sea; and a