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
Merbath 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
Angoua, 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 Merbat, and during the ensuing year the
trees of the Sumali 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[2] speaks, apparently as an eyewitness, of the frankincense
trees about Dhafar as extremely numerous, and adds that from 3000 to
10,000 maunds were annually exported "from Merbat and Dhafar." "3 to 10"
is vague enough; but as the kind of maund is not specified it is vaguer
still.
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