Road to Ubar Pa - Nicholas Clapp [86]
At nearby sites, such as Flintknapper's Village, the People of 'Ad would have enjoyed a good life, as good as the late Stone Age allowed. Goats had been domesticated, and their long hair was loomed to create spacious, comfortable tents. Domesticated cattle provided skins, milk, and meat. Though game wasn't as plentiful as it had been when they first settled here, the People of 'Ad sharpened their hunting skills by crafting finer, more effective arrowheads.
At first the 'Adites worked just one side of their large flint arrowheads, but then, influenced by samples imported from the north, they worked both sides and added a barb. Finally, in an advance that was their own invention, the arrowheads of 'Ad were streamlined and deftly serrated, with a ridge running down the middle. They were contoured "trihedral rods" (as classified by archaeologists).
Evolution of arrowhead technology
This shape could be achieved only with skilled, twisting blows of stone on stone. Found throughout Dhofar, these trihedral rods defined, at an early stage in their existence, the range of the People of 'Ad. Remarkably, it was a territory that would be theirs for the next 5,000 years (circa 4500 B.C. to 500 A.D.).
The life of the early 'Adites centered on their campfires. It was there that they crafted their arrowheads and stone tools, and it was there, quite by accident, that they may have discovered the fragrance and uses of frankincense. Imagine an extended family camped at the same place for several months. With the supply of deadfall firewood exhausted, a couple of children might have been given a hand axe and asked to cut an armload of branches from a nearby scraggly tree, no taller than they. As the fire was kindled, an unusually white smoke curled up, and instead of watery eyes and coughs, it prompted appreciative sniffs and sighs. The smoke of the frankincense was sweet and clean. If in their early belief system the People of 'Ad had notions of Paradise, its scent was that of frankincense.
The 'Adites doubtless found many uses for frankincense. What better offering for their animistic and celestial deities? It had practical applications as well. It took the edge off the smell of well-worn garments; it sweetened drinking water; it hastened the healing of wounds. After dark an 'Adite could shape a blade by the intense, almost supernatural light of burning frankincense. Quite naturally, word of this wonderful substance spread, and samples were traded to nearby tribes and eventually to the civilizations of distant lands.
As early as 5000 B.C., there is indirect evidence that the northern Mesopotamian city of Ubaid imported pearls, precious stones, and incense from Arabia. The Ubaid culture was in time supplanted by the civilization of the Sumerians, and at their great city of Uruk several bas-reliefs illustrate offerings of incense to the sun god and his consort. Researching Sumerian cuneiform tablets, Juris Zarins found that their deities were in the earliest years purified with the burning of cedar brought from Lebanon. But then, according to a text dated to 2350 B.C., these deities were offered incense:
(SHIM = incense)
More specifically, the gods were offered what was probably frankincense:
(SHIM.GIG = frankincense)
The displacement of cedar by frankincense as a temple offering would have been expedited by the domestication of a sure-footed, tough beast of burden—the donkey. The first long-range caravans were donkey caravans, and with them a "merchant of aromatics" could have made yearly forays into the heart of Arabia.
(GARASH.SHIM = merchant of aromatics)
The ritual burning of frankincense became a call to the gods who, as it is recounted in the epic of Gilgamesh, "smelled the sweet savor. The gods gathered like flies over the sacrificer." Though the Sumerians didn't have a very high opinion ("like flies") of their gods, smoke curling heavenward conveyed pleas, expressed gratitude, offered atonement. Indeed, the German incense historian Walter Müller believes that