A History of the World in 100 Objects - Dr Neil MacGregor [116]
The chief productions of Arabia are frankincense and myrrh … they are the richest nations in the world, seeing that such vast wealth flows in upon them from both the Roman and the Parthian empires; for they sell the produce of the sea or of their forests, while they purchase nothing whatever in return.
The ‘Incense Road’ was in its way as important for the exchange of goods and ideas as the Silk Road. Frankincense was used by the Romans in vast quantities and was the principal form of incense in the ancient world. The altar of every god in the Roman Empire, from Syria to Cirencester, burned with Yemeni incense. Myrrh had various uses: as an antiseptic for dressing wounds; for embalming – it was essential for Egyptian mummification; and in perfume. Although it’s not a strong fragrance, it has the longest life of any scent known. Indeed it was myrrh that lay behind ‘all the perfumes of Arabia’ that could not sweeten Lady Macbeth’s bloodstained hand, although they would certainly have washed and sweetened Wahab Ta’lab’s. Both frankincense and myrrh were very expensive. A pound of frankincense cost the equivalent of a Roman labourer’s salary for a month, and a pound of myrrh twice as much. So when the Magi bring frankincense and myrrh to the infant Jesus, they are bringing gifts not only fit for a god – they are also as valuable as their other gift, gold.
We have no other contemporary written sources from the Yemen apart from terse and opaque inscriptions like this one, but this hand, together with other pieces of bronze sculpture of similar quality and the ancient industrial slag recently discovered in south Arabia, show that Yemen was then a major centre of bronze production. Wahab Ta’lab’s hand is clearly the product of skilled metalworkers. If you look at it carefully you can see that it has been cast using the lost-wax technique (see Chapter 18) and is very beautifully finished at the wrist. So our bronze hand is definitely a complete object, not a fragment broken off from a larger sculpture.
Offering replica body parts to the gods was by no means peculiar to Arabia – you find them in Greek temples, in medieval pilgrim shrines and in many modern Roman Catholic churches, used to ask a god or a saint for bodily healing or as a thank you for recovery. Wahab Ta’lab’s hand speaks to us from a religious world that was dominated by local gods who looked after particular places and peoples. But it was a world that was not going to last; Arabian aromatics had powered the religious life of the pagan Roman Empire, but when that empire converted to Christianity and no longer needed frankincense for worship, the incense trade was dealt a massive blow, contributing to a collapse in the Yemen economy. Local gods like Ta’lab disappeared, perhaps because they were no longer delivering the promised prosperity. Suddenly, in the 370s, offerings to traditional gods just stopped and their place was taken by other gods with a wider, universal reach. These are the religions of today. Within the next couple of centuries the rulers of Yemen shifted from Judaism to Christianity to Zoroastrianism and finally, in 628, to Islam, which has remained the dominant religion of Yemen ever since. Local gods like Ta’lab no longer stood a chance in the face of great supra-national faiths.
But some elements of Ta’lab’s world did live on. We know, for example, that like many Arabian gods he was venerated through pilgrimages to his shrine. The religious historian Professor Philip Jenkins, of Pennsylvania State University, is fascinated by elusive survivals like this:
There are aspects of the old pagan Arabian religion which do live on into Islam and into Muslim times, especially in the practice of the pilgrimage, the Hajj, to Mecca. Muslims would absolutely reject any pagan context, obviously. They frame it in terms of Abraham