Page:The Periplus of the Erythræan Sea.djvu/140

 the kingdoms of the Arabian peninsula. It is separate from Hadramaut and Oman. There is no cultivation, neither are there palm-trees in the country. The wealth of the inhabitants consists of camels and goats. Their food is flesh, preparations of milk and small fish, with which they also feed their beasts. The country is also known as that of Mahra, and the camels called Mahriyah camels are reared in it. Ash-Shihr is sometimes conjoined with Oman, but it is contiguous to Hadramaut, and it has been described as constituting the shores of that country. It produces frankincense, and on the seashore the Shihrite ambergris is found. The Indian Ocean extends along the south and on the north Hadramaut, as if Shihr were the sea-shore of the latter. Both are under one king."

Hommel (in Hilprecht, op. cit. 700–1) argues for a derivation of this name from some word allied to the old Hebrew term for frankincense, shekheleth; which does not seem to have been in use on the south coast, while the evidence of the Arab writers is against him. (See also Glaser, Skizze, 178–9.) The Periplus in §32 is against him, by using the adjective Sachalitic as qualifying "frankincense," which would be quite redundant.

Vaughn (Pharm. Journ. XII, 1853) speaks of the Shaharree luban from Arabia, as yielding higher prices than that produced in Africa; a term exactly corresponding to the "Sachalitic frankincense" of the Periplus.

29. Always fatal.—The reports of the unhealthy character of this coast, spread by the earliest traders, have been assumed to be their device to discourage competition. The fate of Niebuhr's party in Yemen, and the more recent tragic outcome of Bent's explorations, sufficiently confirm the dangers from malaria, dysentery and the scorching sun.

But aside from the question of physical health, the tapping of the frankincense tree was believed to be attended by special dangers, expressed in the faith of the people, and arising from the supposed divinity of the tree itself.

W. Robertson Smith (Religion of the Semites, p.427) recounts this belief as follows:

"The religious value of incense was originally independent of animal sacrifice, for frankincense was the gum of a very holy species of tree, which was collected with religious precautions. Whether, therefore, the sacred odor was used in unguents or burned like an altar sacrifice, it appears to have owed its virtue, like the gum of the samora (acacia) tree, to the idea that it was the blood of an animate and divine plant."