The Roman Empire has been imagined – mostly by modern scholars – to have surrounded itself by ‘walls’ of various nature: from armies and fortifications; through natural barriers encompassing rivers, mountain-ranges, and deserts; to cultural boundaries, separating between the Hellenized and the barbarian, the sedentary and the nomadic; the lands beyond the Ecumene and the civilized world. This frozen paradigm has been challenged over the last few decades by grand-strategy doubters, who emphasized the spontaneity and opportunism of even the most long-lived of empires. In yet another all-too-frozen paradigm – this one also based on ancient historians such as Tacitus – the Roman empire has been considered to have served as a developing force, bringing progress to its primitive dominions. This concept too has been challenged by post-colonial perspectives which undermined the single-directionality of cultural influence and Romanization.
In these discussions of the Roman frontiers, significant energies have been dedicated to aspects of cultural differences, defensive measures, and imperial ideologies. The economy of the periphery, on the other hand, has won less attention, particularly insofar as regards its interphase with the center. While major production and redistribution centers at the heart of the empire have remained in the focus of economically-based discussions, the role of production on the frontiers and beyond them has been mostly assumed vaguely, and the crucial role in the process of trade routes and stations within it.
Questions of economic nature, we believe, contain the potential to complement the complex picture of an imperium sine fine – in Roman cosmology: an empire with no limits – and to explain much of the practical motivation behind it. It thus merits further investigation, starting with the one economic engine which has always challenged the existence of wall-like barriers, namely the global trade route. We know much about the geographic location of trade routes, but we know significantly less about their temporal dynamics and what were the factors that defined the resilience of these systems in the critical times of proto-globalization. Precious little is also known about the inside point of view of the route’s traders themselves, underrepresented as they are in written history. The BIG questions remain unheeded and unanswered for now, including how ancient global trade was organized; how global routes were segmented into different sections or among different groups of traders; Wand what was the part of imperial control in it overtime?
Discussing the constant, omnipresent impact of Mediterranean connectivity, Horden and Purcell (2000) recognized that “trade does not always follow the flag”. To the extent that we consider connected spheres beyond the Mediterranean basin, the phenomenon should be appraised also globally. The rigidity of walls and barriers, or, on the flipside, their permeability, should be tested against the economic power of the vibrant trade route, which would have been a presence far steadier than the odd hostile enemy invasion, and which would have served also as a vehicle for the transportation of ideas and technologies.
The area of the Negev-Arava in the Southern Levant, located between the Red Sea and the Mediterranean, served as a crossroad of trade-routes linking three continents. Commerce peaked with the consolidation of the Incense Road by the Nabatean system (3rd cent BCE – 3rd cent CE), a network of independent merchants that altered the costs and patterns of global trade. They were the first to bottom up develop into an unprecedented web of material and commodity flows. During the 1st-2nd cent CE the desert transportation corridor, resource zone and road’s infrastructures further expanded and long-distance trade networks stretched between large-scale political players. The commercial skills and economic prosperity further expanded during the Byzantine period (4th–early 7th cent CE), when important stopping grounds transformed to innovative dryland agricultural centers: viticulture and wine production in the Negev Highlands, date honey and myrrh incense in the Arava. Another pronounced globalizing moment in the Negev history occurred in the Islamic period (mid-7th–11th cent CE), when the Incense Road merged with the Silk Road and a package of new crops, livestock breeds and irrigation techniques spread from East and South Asia into Mediterranean lands. It is also then that textile, including silk and cotton fabrics, had reached the Negev.
Our case-study is thus the Nabatean Incense Road (3rd BCE – 3rd CE) with its complex commerce networks, which traversed the deserts of Arabia and connected between diverse political entities and economic hubs. Throughout the first millennium BCE, the production of aromatics and their distribution expanded steadily, to encompass, eventually, vast areas, from Southern Arabia to the Western Mediterranean. One of the key segments in the journey of these highly valuable commodities was located in the arid stretch of land connecting the Red Sea with the Mediterranean, with the route crossing the Southern Levant from Aila via Petra to Gaza (as opposed to alternative routes crossing through Egypt) gaining primacy from an early stage, thanks to the agency of the residents of the area, broadly described by western sources as Nabataeans. It is currently accepted that the Incense Road, as it came to be known, remained highly active from the Hellenistic period well into Roman times, thus allowing us to follow its function next to well-documented socio-political developments and alterations, particularly the emergence of the Roman limes, and the demographic boom of the Negev.
Sites associated with the Incense Road, especially forts and caravanserais, supply currently a picture whereby the route became less active during the 3rd century CE, after the establishment of Roman presence in the area and the provincialization of Nabatea in the 2nd century, and before the urbanization and economic rise of the Negev in the 4th century. The economic significance ascribed by modern research to the Incense Road has led to the hypothesis that the entire international trade in the Negev collapsed when the road became inactive. Yet the archaeology of forts offers only a partial picture, which does not take into account, for example, changing aspects in security. Another issue which must be taken into consideration is the demand for the goods supplied by means of this road, which did not necessarily subside. To be sure, international trade thrived once again in the Negev of the 4th century onward, next to primary production.
In this paper, therefore, we review the historical, archaeological, and ethnographic data of the intercontinental Incense Road and its camel trains, and discuss the economy of logistics within the system, aspects of adaptation to political challenges, and how those influenced the scope of the road, its economic capacity, and the size and nature of caravans. Our main aims would be 1) to produce an evaluation of the road’s infrastructure and complexity; 2) to assess how it came to accommodate intense traffic at its peak; 3) and to provide new tools for defining the trans-regional connectivity of the Nabateans in the face of the barriers presented to them by empire on the one hand, and by the desert on the other.