Spice: The History of a Temptation

by Jack Turner

  Occasionally there are hints that spices themselves were seen as quite literally divine, not merely evoking but in some sense originating from the realm of the supernatural. They were regarded as the earthly or not so earthly analogue of the gods’ nectar and ambrosia. The fourth-century Athenian comic poet Antiphanes compares a particularly sublime perfume to the ‘cassia-breathing wind of heaven’. Intriguingly, by the third century BC nectar is referred to as the name of a wine. The Geoponica, a medieval compilation of ancient manuscripts, gives a recipe for a spiced honey wine: ‘6 scruples of myrrh, 12 scruples of cassia, 2 scruples of costus, 4 scruples of nard, 4 scruples of pepper, 6 pints of Attic honey, 24 pints of wine, and store in the sun at the rise of the dog-star for forty days. Some call this nectar.’ When Agatharchides of Cnidus sailed around Arabia in the second century BC he imagined that the ‘wondrous scent’ of its cinnamon and myrrh were none other than the ambrosia of myth. Nearby, so he believed, were the Happy Isles where the illustrious heroes of Homeric epics enjoyed a blessed afterlife.

  Yet there was more to the logic of spiced sacrifice than the offering of like to like. If spices smelled heavenly, perhaps even originating from some mythic realm, this is also where they went. What strikes moderns as a curious idea was to ancients so obvious as to need no explanation. The gods of the ancients were sky-dwellers, celestial beings of the air and the heavens. Though invisible and remote, they were capable of epiphanies, manifesting themselves in more or less physical form, whether as a mortal, a storm, an animal or a burning bush. And if the air and sky were where the gods were, that was precisely where their burnt offerings ascended.

  The literalness of this belief did not prevent the Greeks and Romans from having fun with the idea. Horace, in an ode to Venus, speaks with typically gentle humour of the goddess inhaling incense. In Aristophanes’ Birds of 414 BC, the birds of the title form a blockade between heaven and earth, preventing the smoke from mankind’s sacrifices from rising and thereby starving the gods into a more accommodating mood. The conceit was a long-running joke. Aristophanes’ contemporary comedian Pherecrates suggested in his Tyrannis that Zeus had created heaven so as to prevent the gods from hanging around the sweet-smelling altars. Heaven itself is described with the word for a primitive chimney, a hole in the roof for the smoke to pass through. In Roman times the boastful cook of Plautus’ Pseudolus claims his food smells so good that the odours fly up to heaven where Jupiter gobbles them up.

  Later, when the pagan gods were facing a final, fatal challenge, the comic writer Lucian played with the idea more cheekily still (his irreverence would, ironically, help ensure his popularity among Christians and thus the survival of his works). In his Icaromenippus or Sky Man, the smoke of the sacrifices functions as a sort of celestial telephone. High on Olympus Zeus receives prayers by lifting lids in the floor of his palace – manholes to the mortals – accepting the fragrant prayers and rejecting the malodorous. Leaning over one hole, he rejects an impious prayer – ‘O ye gods, let my father die soon!’ – and moving on to the second obliges the pleasant-smelling smoke of the sacrifice with rain for drought-struck Scythia, lightning in Libya and snow for Greece. He gives the south wind a day off, dispatches a storm to the Adriatic and sends a thousand bushels of hail to Cappadocia.

  Both the gods and the playfulness were quintessentially Greek, but ultimately these were beliefs that reached back to the far older cultures of the Near East. In ancient Mesopotamia and Egypt alike the notion of the accessibility of heaven and the possibility of direct communication were clearer still. Just as the ziggurats reached up to the skies, so too was smoke another route to the gods – and for that matter a more accessible stairway to heaven. In its simplest terms this same rationale of fragrant sacrifice to curry divine favour was common to all major civilisations of the ancient Mediterranean, finding perhaps its clearest expression in one of the oldest texts, an Assyrian version of the flood myth dating from early in the second millennium BC. Like the more famous Noah, Uta-napishti sits out the deluge in his ark. For six days and seven nights he listens to the rain, until finally ‘the ocean grew calm, that had thrashed like a woman in labour, the tempest grew still, the Deluge ended’. When the floodwaters finally subside the grateful survivor returns to dry land to thank the gods with a sweet-smelling offering. Like so many diners around a summer barbecue, the gods are drawn to the aromas:

  I made a libation on the summit of the mountain

  By sevens I set out the vessels

  Under them I heaped up calamus, cedar-wood and rig-gir,

  The gods smelt the savour; the gods smelt the sweet savour;

  The gods gathered like flies about him that offered the sacrifice.

  On emerging from his ark the Hebrew Noah did the same, so mollifying and appeasing his God: ‘And when the Lord smelled the pleasing odour, the Lord said in his heart, “I will never again curse the ground because of man, for the imagination of man’s heart is evil from his youth; neither will I ever again destroy every living creature as I have done.”’

  In Egypt, where the gods carried different names and dressed themselves in the bodies of animals, the premises of aromatic sacrifice were fundamentally the same. When Herodotus travelled through Egypt early in the fifth century BC, he noted that the Egyptians added spices to their animal sacrifices so as to make them all the more sweeter to their divine recipients. The oldest extant references to aromatics in worship date from the fifth dynasty of ancient Egypt, midway through the third millennium BC, by which time unguents were used to anoint pharaohs, priests and the cultic statues of the gods. In the Pyramid Texts, a collection of religious formulae dating from the middle of the third millennium BC, the sacred incense serves a threefold purpose. On the one hand, the texts make clear that the incense was believed to attract gods, evoking an invisible, numinous presence. Some texts suggest that the incenses were themselves divine, the chosen vessel of the god, or the form in which he or she appeared. The counterpart and in some sense the cosmic corollary was that the incense drove off demons, attracting the good and expelling the evil. In practical terms, the holy unguents were used to anoint the priests and high priest of them all, the pharaoh god-king. An inscription on the base of the Sphinx depicts the pharaoh Thothraes IV around 1425 BC offering aromatic libations to the gods, with which he himself is anointed. The hieroglyph used to designate the sacred aromatics means, literally, ‘that which makes divine’. To be anointed with a fragrant substance was to be god-like.

  To the Egyptians, moreover, incense was not only pleasing to the gods, but also came from the gods. Dating from much the same time is the famous manuscript of the Shipwrecked Sailor, a briny yarn of a castaway lost in the land of incense – Arabia? Somalia? – where he is confronted by a terrifying serpent god who threatens to turn him to ashes. To appease the god’s wrath, the terrified sailor offers him a range of unidentifiable aromatics: ‘I will cause ibi, hekenu, iudeneb, and kbesait to be brought to thee, and incense of the temples, wherewith every god is made content …’, he pleads. But his offer is a case of coals to Newcastle, the god replying with a laugh that it is he who made them. So central were these notions to the Egyptian conception of worship that there was a professional class whose job it was to prepare the sacred oils and unguents. Among the bewildering, animal-headed pantheon of the Egyptians there was even a god of the perfumers, Shezmou.

  Over exactly what perfumes Shezmou was god is, unfortunately, largely guesswork. The effort of extracting modern botanical names from the hieroglyphs and substances such as those offered by the shipwreck is a messy business. The Egyptians were scarcely any clearer than the dazed and terrified castaway about the source of their aromatics, a semi-mythical land they knew as ‘Punt’. Located somewhere on the southern shores of the Red Sea, Punt was supplier to the temples and god-kings of the Nile for well over two thousand years. The earliest recorded expedition took place in the time of the pharaoh Sahure, ruler from 2491 to 2477 BC, although a slave from Punt appears in th
e court of Cheops (c.2589–2566 BC), builder of the great pyramid at Giza. For the sake of its aromatics, Punt was the destination of history’s first recorded merchant fleet, a representation of which is still to be seen jinking an angular course around the walls of the temple of Deir al Bahri, carved there by order of the female pharaoh Hatshepsut around 1495 BC. The reliefs depict a fleet of five ships, complete with sailors climbing aloft, teams of rowers and steersmen fore and aft, navigating through a sea populated by giant squid and enormous fish. Judging by the nature of the products they acquired in Punt and the appearance of their interlocutors (including a grossly fat, apparently Negroid woman; she may represent an early example of a crude racial caricature), modern scholarship generally concurs in situating Punt somewhere in the vicinity of modern Somalia, a voyage of some two thousand miles southward though the treacherous, reef-bound waters of the Red Sea. In the words of the accompanying inscription, these intrepid ancient mariners brought back to the Nile ‘all goodly fragrant woods of God’s-Land, heaps of myrrh resin, with fresh myrrh trees, with ebony, and pure ivory, with green gold of Emu, with cinnamon wood, kheyst wood, with ihmut-incense, sonter-incense, eye-cosmetic, with apes, monkeys, dogs, and with skins of the southern panther, with natives and their children’. The plants were brought back alive, in pots, so an indigenous supply could be grown in the temple gardens. As we shall see, this was far from the last effort to steal the fragrant plants from the lands of their origin.

  It was long thought that Punt was the scene of another more fundamental beginning, the scene where the spice trade first came into being. For lurking among the list of luxuries brought back for Hatshepsut is a hieroglyph that some scholars have translated as cinnamon. Since the first serious scholarly study of the reliefs over a hundred years ago by James Breasted, sometime Professor of Egyptology and Oriental History at the University of Chicago, the relevant hieroglyph has been transliterated so as to yield a word bearing a close resemblance to ancient Chinese and Semitic words for cassia. If this is correct, Hatshepsut’s spices locate the gods and god-kings on the Nile at the end of a trading network that spanned the Indian Ocean.

  Ancient history, alas, is seldom so simple, and Hatshepsut’s ‘cinnamon’ remains at best an intriguing possibility. (A similar debate splutters over medical papyri of the eighteenth dynasty, c.1543–1292 BC, which may likewise contain references to the spice.) The debate hinges on muddy issues of transliteration, with the unsatisfying upshot that the precise identity of Hatshepsut’s aromas remains scarcely less mystifying than Homer’s nectar and ambrosia. Yet in another sense the exact composition of Hatshepsut’s cargo is irrelevant, and cinnamon or no cinnamon, her exotica constitute a beginning of sorts. For if the inscriptions at Deir al Bahri show nothing else, they certainly demonstrate the extraordinary significance the ancients ascribed to aromas, and the lengths they were prepared to go to get them. It was worth sending a fleet nearly two thousand miles south, and worth recording that among the greatest achievements of her reign: look on my luxuries, ye mighty, and despair. (Hatshepsut’s boastfulness seems to have worked rather too well, as her successors felt obliged to deface the monuments to her greatness.) The Egyptians were prepared to go to such lengths for the sake of aromas because the trade served sacred purposes. In the long account of the expedition accompanying the temple reliefs, Amon-Re, lord of the gods, states that he has made Punt, the land of incense, ‘to divert his heart’. If we can discern a motive behind the early trade it was to retain the favour of a fickle heaven.

  In a world of many gods, where pharaohs were themselves divine, this was an imperative with all the gravity of issues of state. Thus if cinnamon was not among the exotica of Punt, the reliefs offer at the very least a clue as to why they were present later, and why spices were so valued as to warrant a trade over such vast distances.* For a culture accustomed to thinking of trade in terms of profit, and spices as mere seasonings, it is a reminder of how easily our assumptions glide into a past where they don’t belong. The first identifiable impulse for maritime contact between Egypt and the world beyond, by any measure one of the defining moments in global history, appears to have come not from gourmets, but the gods.

  Thus when Ovid placed a promise of cinnamon-scented sacrifice in the mouth of Paris his poetic fancies rested on a certain historical truth. And in the case of Helen’s Troy he may have been even closer to the mark than he could have imagined, for it is certain that aromatics were used in the era of the Trojan war, and even earlier. Incense burners, some still with traces of spices, have been unearthed from the same period, and small stirrup vases of the Mycenaeans’ perfumes have been found as far afield as Egypt and Sicily. Various aromatics have been recovered from a Mycenaean ship wrecked off the south-west coast of Turkey, possibly returning from the Levant. At the Mycenaean palace complex of Pylos, built sometime around 1300 BC and destroyed around 1100 BC – the era generally identified with the Trojan war – archaeologists found that no less than 15 per cent of the clay tablets recording the palace inventories dealt with various herbs and aromatics. When the language of the tablets was deciphered and found to be an early form of Greek, the names of numerous aromatics emerged. Coriander was there, easily recognisable as ko-ri-a-da-na. Tablets from the contemporary palace complex at Mycenae, according to legend the home of King Agamemnon, Helen’s brother-in-law, contain cumin (ku-mi-no) and sesame (sa-sa-ma), both words of Semitic origin.

  As the language was transmitted through the centuries, so the belief. Through the long intermission of the Greek Dark Ages, when invaders rampaged down the Greek peninsula and the palaces collapsed into ruins, the Greeks retained a faint memory of the perfumes that had once served their gods. In classical times, the tragedian Aeschylus (525–456 BC) wrote of the sacrificial flames in the palaces, ‘drugged by the simple soft persuasion of sacred unguents, the deep stored oil of the kings’. The Pylos tablets mention four perfumers charged with their manufacture, one of whom, astonishingly, was called Thyestes, a name familiar to students of Greek myth as the unfortunate individual duped by his brother Atreus, Agamemnon’s father, into eating the flesh of his own son. In Mycenaean times the name was simply a professional title, like Smith or Wright, meaning Perfumer. His role was to provide the palace with the perfumes dedicated to the gods Potnia and Poseidon, a supernatural bulwark against divine disfavour.

  Later, as myth would have it, Thyestes’ misfortunes would spawn the curse of the house of Atreus, played out in none other than the palace of Mycenae, the scene where according to legend his brother served his gruesome family meal. And it was the ruins of that palace that yielded perhaps the most striking find of all, if the most ephemeral. Here the archaeologist Fredrik Poulsen found a small stirrup vase dating from the second millennium BC. On removing the stopper ‘there was a sweet fragrance within, a perfume 3,500 years old, which vanished in a moment’.

  Ovid would have been gratified, though probably not surprised: the Mycenaeans and their gods did, indeed, have a refined sense of smell. And so Ovid is vindicated, at least poetically, if not – or not quite – historically. For such, if she ever existed, was the perfume smelled by Helen of Troy.

  Spirit

  God’s Nostrils

  Moreover the Lord spake unto Moses, saying.

  Take thou also unto thee principal spices, of pure myrrh five

  hundred shekels, and of sweet cinnamon half so much, *even

  two hundred and fifty shekels, and of sweet calamus two

  hundred and fifty shekels.

  And of cassia five hundred shekels, after the shekel of the

  sanctuary, and of oil olive an hin:†

  And thou shalt make it an oil of holy ointment, an

  ointment compound after the art of the apothecary: it shall

  be an holy anointing oil.

  Exodus 30: 22–23

  As far as Pliny was concerned it was all a colossal waste. In the good old days, the gods were happy with a simple offering of salt, in the ancient Ro
man fashion; a modest but adequate sacrifice. Why then were his contemporaries intent on sending a small fortune up in aromatic smoke, all in the name of a misguided piety? Worse still, profligate Romans were now taking products once reserved for the immortals and burning them over the remains of dead mortals. This must be why, concluded Pliny, the land where the spices grew was known as ‘Happy’ Arabia: a happiness attributable ‘to the extravagance of mankind even at the time of death, when they burn over the deceased the products which they had originally understood to have been created for the gods’.

  Theologically, Pliny had a point: if the gods were eternal and unchanging, then it followed that the modest offerings of yesteryear were perfectly adequate. But Pliny was more bothered by the economics. When he tried to estimate how much of Arabia’s perfumed goods went up in smoke each year he concluded that a truly vast sum poured into Arabia – and out of Rome. Rome’s other suppliers of spices – India, China and what Pliny knew vaguely as ‘the Arabian sea’ – siphoned off some 100 million sesterces per annum: ‘So much our luxuries and women cost us.’ The beneficiaries were not gods but men.