Hadhramaut in 218 B.C.

Hadhramaut — Spring 218 BC · The Land Where Incense Grows.

The easternmost of the great South Arabian caravan kingdoms, ruling the sun-baked wadis and incense coasts of eastern Yemen. Where its neighbours Saba, Qataban and Ma’in grow rich forwarding the aromatics, Hadhramaut grows them: from its harsh coastlands and the Dhofar region beyond comes the world’s finest frankincense, gathered and funnelled inland to the walled royal city of Shabwa. To hold the source of antiquity’s most coveted luxury, and the eastern roads that carry it, is to command a power out of all proportion to so dry a land.

While Carthage and Rome gather for war at the western edge of the world, the kingdom of Hadhramaut sits at its far eastern margin, prospering quietly on the one thing every shrine and palace of antiquity must have: frankincense. Its kings rule from Shabwa, on the desert’s edge, where — by long custom — every load of incense gathered in the eastern valleys and the Dhofar coast must be brought, tithed to the god, and only then released to the caravans. In 218 BC Hadhramaut stands independent among the South Arabian incense-powers, its wealth flowing north along the overland spice roads and out across the Indian Ocean from its port of Cana — a kingdom rich, remote, and almost untouched by the wars of the Mediterranean.