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.
