A lost city in the Sultanate called Ubar, in the south region of Oman, once full of prosperity dating back to 5000 BC, was rediscovered in the early 1990s and is still under archaeological excavation. The city, in Dhofar in southern Oman, is believed to have been built by King Shadad and the people of Ad, and is at the center of the frankincense trade, as camel caravans once traveled on routes carrying precious cargo of this rare commodity through the Arabian Peninsula all the way to Jerusalem.

Frankincense was used traditionally during religious ceremonies and is still used so today. It was also used as perfume and medicine during ancient times. Historical documents reveal that the Queen of Sheba offered this sacred aromatic gum to King Solomon.

Even in Greek and Roman times, incense was much sought after for various reasons. It was burnt on altars and used for embalming. Globules of frankincense were found in the Egyptian Pharaoh Tutankhamun�fs tomb. In the first century AD, the Roman Emperor Nero burned more incense at the funeral of his wife than Arabia produced in a year, which Nero called the wealthiest area in the world.

The popular frankincense tree called the Boswellia Sacra now grows only in the Dhofar region and in northern Somalia. The best of it comes from trees on the inland side of the mountains, but some frankincense also grows on the plain south of Salalah.

Visually, the tree itself is not so attractive; it is a very low twisted bush-like tree and lacks a central trunk. The tree has many prickly branches extended every which way carrying small, crankily leaves. When the silvery bark is pared off, drops of white resin ooze from it like a scar. These drops, known as �gLuban�h are left on the tree for two weeks to dry into transparent globules that are then collected for export. Marco Polo described the process 700 years ago stating: �gThe trees are like small fir trees; they are notched with a knife in several places and from these notches the incense is exuded. Sometimes also it flows from a tree without any notch; that is by reason of the great heat of the sun there.�h

The globules were worth their weight in gold in Roman times but the incense market collapsed in the fourth century AD as Christianity spread throughout the Mediterranean, which at first did not use incense. Currently, a moderate amount is collected for the use of home incense, for perfumes and as a chewing gum. Samples of the �eLuban�f frankincense can be found at most Middle Eastern stores.

that was excellent samaki...
Boswellia Sacra is also a good chewing gum...

Yes Fahad, you are right, i am living abroad now, and i brought many of frakincense for three porpuse:
1. as chewing gum
2. as good smell for my apartment and my dresses
3. to let its smoke evaporate in the water bottle and fill it with water so water will have frakecense smell, the water is delicious.

My family has such tradition since long time back, and my father used to tell me that frakincense is important for the brain and it gives me good enveronment to study without complicity.

would you tell me if it has any other other healthy benifits?

well samaki,
i only know about its smell and its use as chewing gum...

regarding health benefit, it might be mentioned in one of teh herbal books... but i don't believe those books unless they provide evidence of what is mentioned there...

well said samaki.........

about the medicine it is used as a herbal medicine ......... annd most of old ppl use this till now as medicine .......... they use this for black magics to open them and as they said envy and so on ......... i dont really know much about herbal medicines ........... thses days we dont use herbal medicins so we dont know much about them ......... i dont belive much on them .............:p

It is used to make cosmetics, to mask unpleasant odors such as from cremations and to cure nearly all known illnesses, it was chiefly in use for religious ceremonies. The Arab historian Al Tabari said, “incense smoke reaches the heavens like no other”.

Incense is the resin of the dwarf tree belonging to the genus Boswellia and is one of several aromatic substances which releases a strong, acrid and agreeable odor on burning.

It is agreeable, but difficult to understand why this aroma was so esteemed by Mediterranean and Near East civilizations that they considered it essential for their religious ceremonies. The belief was that burned slowly, incense placated the gods.

According to ancient documents, the annual consumption of incense in the temple of Baal in Babylon was two and a half tons. In Rome, Pliny the Elder wrote how the Emperor Nero burned the whole of Arabia’s annual production of incense at the funeral of his wife Popea.

Incense was also used to embalm corpses. Small pieces of incense were used in the tomb of Pharaoh Tutankhamun. It was likewise used as a medicine.

One of the main centres for elaborating incense was Alexandria. Nothing changes in this world. Pliny remarked on the security measures surrounding the production of the incense that, “Heavens, there is nothing one can do to protect the workshops. The workers are stripped before being allowed to leave the premises”.

The trees were so highly prized that they were protected by serpents. Alexander the Great, attracted by the prospect of such enormous treasure, planned to invade Arabia in order to control the trade in incense from its point of origin. Only his death prevented him from fulfilling this ambition. The captain of Alexander’s reconnaissance vessel noted that: “The incense tree is not tall. It is only two and half metres high, with many branches and pear shaped leaves”.

The elaboration of the incense was surrounded with rituals. It was considered a hereditary right of a small caste which regarded itself as sacred. “Men are not allowed to he impure by being with women or in funeral processions when at work on tapping the trees”.

The best and most fragrant incense has always originated from the Dhofar, which is today in southern Oman. This is “silver incense”, as Pliny termed the purest incense, which is, “brilliant white and gathered at dawn in drops or tears in the shape of pearls”.

Once collected, the incense was carried on a long and incredibly arduous journey of 5,000 or 6,000 kilometers through some of the most hostile and dangerous regions of the world.

From Dhofar and the ancient trading port of Sumhuram, just north of what is now Salalah, it was carried in rafts made of skin to the port of Qana, in what is today Yemen; and from there by caravan of camels across the Yemeni mountains and the Arabian desert and the lava fields of the Hijaz, to Petra, Gaza and Alexandria.

Incense is still used locally in many ways. Under baskets in the shape of bee hives, where the washing is hung out to dry, a container is placed in which the incense is then burned in order to perfume the clothes. The country women slip one of these containers underneath their clothes to let the aroma permeate them. They also use it for medicinal purposes.

The history of incense does not end here. What little of the trade survives is in the hands of the Bedouins of Bait Kathir and to a lesser extent of the Al Mahra tribes near Salalah. For many generations, these tribes have had the rights to collect the incense in their own region. Nowadays, as it has become uneconomical for them to do it themselves, they have increasingly subcontracted the task to Somalis.

The gathering of the incense, which begins in the winter, reaches its decisive point in the spring and ends with the summer monsoons. It begins with the shaving of the bark and the branches of the Boswellia Sacra, using a short knife known as a mingaf. The Bedouins accompany their work with a strange guttural and monotone chant. From the cuts in he bark oozes the resin, or luban, which is given time to crystallize and is collected one or two weeks later in baskets of plaited palm leaves.

There are at the moment new prospects for the trade in incense. The resin of the silver frankincense is used as a key ingredient in the perfume called AMOUAGE, which is a revival of the old traditions of making perfume in Arabia, which for many centuries out_classed even those of France in their quality and subtlety.

v. good samaki .......... v.good points indeed .........:D