Empire: World History - 214. The Empire of Frankincense & Myrrh

Episode Date: December 24, 2024

“The Nabateans are a silent partner in everything that goes on in the high summer of the Ancient period” - Bettany Hughes By the time of Jesus’ birth, a mysterious empire had built its wealth through trading two of the gifts present at the Nativity: frankincense and myrrh. Aromatic crystals harvested from the sap of gnarled trees, frankincense and myrrh were highly desirable commodities known as the tears or the breath of the gods. Based along the coast of the Red Sea, the nomadic Nabatean people were engineers, mariners and savvy traders, and they cleverly placed themselves as the middlemen in the trade of this incense. The Nabateans gave the world Arabic, and had a kingdom that even Alexander the Great could not siege - so why do so many of us know nothing about them? Listen as Anita and William are joined by Bettany Hughes to discuss how the Christmas gifts of frankincense and myrrh powered a mysterious and innovative kingdom… Twitter: @Empirepoduk Email: [e-mail] Goalhangerpodcasts.com Assistant Producers: Anouska Lewis & Evan Green Producer: Callum Hill Exec Producer: Neil Fearn Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

If you want access to bonus episodes reading lists for every series of Empire, a chat community. Discounts for all the books mentioned in the week's podcast, add free listening and a weekly newsletter, sign up to Empire Club at www.mpowerpoduk.com. Coming to the house, they saw the child with his mother Mary, and they bowed down and worshipped him. Then they opened their treasures and presented him with gifts of gold and of incense and of my. Hello, welcome to Empire with me, Anita Arden. And me, David Atterborough.

Yeah, well, exactly. What are you doing, auditioning for some kind of narration thing? I'd rather like that, yeah. Voice-overs by William Darlhamper. He can do drama, he can do pathos, he can do comedy. Could be a whole new career. Good Lord. Anyway, look, hello, it is Empire and we are so excited because we've brought you an early Christmas

present in the perfectly formed shape of Bettany Hughes, our favourite historian. How are you, lovely woman? I'm just delighted and overjoyed to be with you from thousands of miles away. We're very definitely not in the same time zone or country or continents. Or indeed in Kansas anymore. I mean, look, you are sort of dusty because you have come out. of the trenches, digging into the very, very history that we are talking about. So the last episode that we did here on Empire was about the Magi. And we promised that we would get deep into the heart

of those gifts that were brought to the infant baby Jesus. So appropriate Christmas Eve today. And we were talking about Frankencents and Mer and you are following that trail right now, right here and right now, aren't you? I am. So I'm very wicked because I shouldn't be talking to you at all because people said, you must tell anybody you're here following the trail of Frankenstein. So I thought, oh, what will I do? I'll get on a podcast with Anita and William, my old friends, and tell the world about it. We won't tell anyone. Don't tell a soul, please. You can be absolutely certain. Just us and our 880,000 downloaders. Gorgeous, gorgeous. Well, I'm dusty. I'm not going to tell you exactly where I am because I've

been handling beautiful, beautiful pots from the age of Jesus, in fact, from that world that gave him gold and frankincense and meur this morning. And as soon as we finish speaking, I'm going to Oman to have a look at where incense actually came from. So it's perfect. You're catching me mid-flow, mid-archaeology stream, as it were. You are literally always the perfect guess. You could not be more perfect now. Can I just say before we go any further with this story, there's a little story, there's a little Benton Hues story I want to share with you. Because your seven wonders of the ancient world, Bettany Hughes, just keeps rising to the top. It does. Number one. Amazing. It's such a fabulous book and it is no surprise to me like Zebedy. Just keeps leaping on up there, right to the

heady heights of those charts. What lovely, lovely people, lovely friends you are to mention that. I know, it's fantastic. I haven't really been home since August of 16th. I've been on the road and I keep on getting these very sweet messages from my husband saying, well, well done. Number one, when are you coming home? Please come home. So, no, I'm thrilled. I'm thrilled. It's great, isn't it? Because, you know, these are these things that existed. All the stuff that we talk about was a long time ago. These are really a long time ago. But it's fabulous that people still care about them. Well, let's start. Because Franken sense, we touched on with our brilliant, brilliant guest. We love Lloyd. He's just wonderful man. We might just have to do another whole Persian series just to get Lloyd back on. Oh, he's just so fabulous. But we talked about frankincense. And I think we ought to really sort of explain what this stuff is. So if you look at it, it looks like crystallised sugar, which can lead to some real problems

in my household because my mother, once somebody gave me some frankincense, and she popped a whole handful in her mouth and tried to eat it. And we have, she threw it all out. So we now can't have frankincense in this house ever again because, you know, my mother. But what does it look like? And just tell us, with frankincense and ma'er, they have a similar origin story of how we come to get it and harvest it. Totally right. So they're both saps, but from very different trees. So frankincense comes from the Boswellia, Sacra tree. It's a tree. It's very difficult to grow.

That Boswellia, as in Johnson and Boswell. But indeed, indeed. And sacra, as in sacred, obviously. And I've seen incense being harvested. And it's the most extraordinary. thing. Well, everyone can say that. No, it's true. That they've seen insects been harvested. It's something like the April Fool about spaghetti harvest. But there you have. No, no. I've spent a long time watching incense being harvested. And you know what's incredible. So it's still done by Bedouin communities in places like Oman and Yemen. It's a very, very particular skill because they basically gently, gently, gently, gently chip away at the trunk of the tree. And you have to be absolutely millimetre precise because if you wound the tree too much, you get infections in

and the tree dies. And as they chip, chip, chip, chips, this lovely sound as they as they chip the trunk. The incense oozes out of the Boswellia Sacra like milk. It's white. Sticky. Yeah, sticky white glue. And often in the region it's called words relating to white or milk. So laba, labna, lebna, it was called that sometimes in the ancient world too, because it just looks like the tree is weeping milk, but then the magic happens when it dries, because it becomes this beautiful, translucent, almost kind of golden amber-like colour. And this is both mure and frankincense, or just frankincense? Actually, I've failed you, because I've not seen myr being. I know mure. I know ma'am. I have, well, I'm not personally, but I've seen videos,

and it is a very similar situation where the bark of this. And then, and the, and both of these trees that yield this golden kind of harvest, they're small and gnarly and they don't look very beautiful at all. They're low to the ground. They're very, very scrubby looking. And likewise, with myr, again, the sap is white and sticky. But when it's exposed to the air, it goes redder. So, you know, your frankincense is golden and amber, as you quite rightly say, and the myr is a much sort of rustier red colour. Because these trees, much like the human body, they try to protect themselves from wounds and infections. So what they do is if they sense that they've been cut, they release this kind of sap, which in nature will just go to this glassy texture and seal up

the wound. But the chemicals that are released, they are very volatile in these sort of bumps and bruises. And it's that volatile chemical that gives you the smell, both in frankincense and in mure. And very different they are too. They're both kind of woody, but mure when you burn it's much were spicy and frankincense is a bit more lemony tinge. So that is why, and they have antibiotic qualities, which will come to with myr, because that's very important, why they're used for embalming and for anointing queens and things like that. And do we know how early on man realized that this milk could be used for anything? So you get frankincense balls in Tutankarmoon's tomb, for instance. Really? The first recorded evidence is a thousand years before that. Because as you say, Ani,

It's such a funny thing, isn't it? If we use the word incense or frankincense, I think almost automatically we think of a sort of lovely, wafty, nice to have thing that makes rooms and churches and temples smells nice and is overused in drama recons and kind of Roman films and there's always like clouds of incense. But it's so functional. It's so practical.

Exactly as you say, it's got antibacterial and antibiotic properties. They even now think that incense is actually a very natural mood, lifner, which is something that's talked about in the ancient sources. And women used to burn frankincense wood a lot, and then they would use the kind of charcoal's ends to make coal because it works as an insect repellent. So it's got massive, massive uses. So as we all know, the ancients are very good. Basically, if there's something handy around them, they are very good at discovering that early on. because for them this is a difference between life and death and survival. And how early on did it get associated with gods and divinity and temples?

Right from the very start. So it's either described as the tears or the sweat or the breath of gods. And there was this notion that by burning frankincense, you physically lifted messages up to the skies. It would be on those kind of clouds that these very particular prayers would be carried, which is the reason it got burnt in. in temples and then eventually in churches. So it's always had this sacred tinge to it.

And actually, in fact, ladies and jones, where I'm heading in Oman, this very remote island, it was described as an island inhabited by holy men. And they were holy because they dealt in frankincense. I mean, it's sort of two things here. I mean, I was reading some science journals as to, you know, why this might be sort of related to sort of heavenly things. People write about this stuff. It's fantastic.

The whole world is the library for you. But it's because sort of richer people would be able to afford this stuff and they had better hygiene and they got sick less. And so suddenly these two things got conflated that, you know, sort of better health or being, you know, a curse of sickness being lifted from you. It is associated with the smell that wafts around wealthier people or people who clean up or people who, you know, have temples and things which are free from the refuse of ancient times, which were just rich with cholera and typhoid and all of those things. The other thing, I just thought this was fascinating, but the book of Exodus mentions a particular blend of frankincense. And it's such an interesting reference because it says, you know, look, this must be, and it's a special recipe of frankincense. And it says you have to burn it before the Ark of the Covenant. And if anyone tries to take any of this stuff to burn it for themselves, they must be, and I quote, cut off from their people.

So it was specifically a scent or a smoke of the gods that had magical powers. How quickly does it turn into an export item? How quickly is it being shipped off from this region of Arabia in the wider sense to Europe and beyond? Well, again, almost immediately. So it goes through the desert route. So you have desert incense trails and then these maritime incense trails. And we know that the records that we have from, you know, what we would call the Western world, Alexander the Great, for instance, gets into massive trouble because he orders too much, too much incense. Basically, if you've got this grand idea of yourself, that you'll do this amount, as you're saying, Anita, because of it being a status symbol, you're going to come to a sticky end. So that's when we start to hear it written about, you know, in really great detail. But it's basically as soon as we have records. Because how could you not? As we said, it is this, it's kind of quasi-magical thing. And actually in a posh Greek and Roman homes, it was burnt as well as being burnt in the temples. And there was a whole, etiquette around it, that you had particular brands of frankincense, incense, and mire that were burnt at different times of day. So there was a kind of competitive incense burning, I think, amongst the kind of urban, urban elite, you know. And frankincense, because people say, what's difference between incense and frankincense? Frank is basically a later French word that means really

posh or kind of really high, high quality. So frankincense is the very poshest incense. Yeah. Oh, that is very, very interesting. We are here to talk about largely the people who cornered the market, as it were, and built an entire civilisation off the back of these magical, aromatic wafts of smoke. And they are a people that you know everything about because you have been digging away into their history, but most people will not even have heard of the Nabatians. Now, can you just first of all give us a thumbnail sketch of who the Nabatians were?

I can indeed. I should also just warn you, I am obsessed with the Nabatians. And more than a little bit in love with them. So how long are we got? We've got a long as you like, Ben-Neus. So absolutely. So the Nabatians, one of the most influential societies and cultures in the story of civilization. And yet, and it drives me mad, they often end up in the footnotes of history or ignored

or actually kind of actively censored from the record books because they're not Greek, They're not Roman. They're not Egyptian. They're not Persian. And yet they interact with all of these worlds. So basically they're initially a desert dwelling tribe. I mean, are they basically Arabs? Are we right to call them Arabs? They are largely early Arabs. Yeah, absolutely. Because their script becomes Arab. Becomes Arab. Exactly. So this is just one of the many things that they give the world. And they're, you know, we should all know that as a fact. And yet they don't get the credit where credit is due. they sort of come really into the spotlight in the 5th and 4th centuries BCE, but they're described earlier than that by Assyrian sources.

And Assyrian sources took about these men that live in the desert in very, very harsh climate, and yet they say somehow they make the desert flourish. They make a success of this world. And they're talking both about their extraordinary water engineering. They're really pioneers in water tech. This is something we'll come back to because it's very important. It's very important. So they're great water engineers and they are also very, very good at trading.

They trade not just frankincense but also pearls and beautiful textiles and indeed gold over 4,000 miles. And they start off as camel herders, is that right? They do. I mean, yeah, they do kind of camel herders, goat herders. They are basically desert people but as far back as we have records, they're also trading. So I was slightly leaped to their defence. Yes, you are. I do.

I won't hear a word said against them. You're among friends here. We're also a big Nabatian. I'm so pleased. I'm so pleased. Because they're just very smart. I was actually talking to an archaeologist yesterday in our dusty trench. And I said, you know, if you had to sell the Nabatians to the world, because quite rightly, as you said, so few people have heard of them, they've heard of this place that they've built Petra, but they don't know the name of the Nabatians.

Patra, we will do a lot about it a bit. Perfect. So I said, how would you describe them? And he said, well, one of the things about the Nabatians is they don't really care about much other than making money, which makes them sound shallow. But then if you think about it, we're talking about the ancient world. So in order to make money, you have to really get on with people. You have to be multilingual.

You have to earn the trust of those that you're trading with. You have to be able to travel extraordinary distances. You have to have extraordinary know-how. So they're basically, in comparison again with the other civilizations at the time, they're very peaceful. They just want to get on with their job of being the Uber traders, the kind of Amazon service of the ancient world. That's a beautiful way of putting it. And like Amazon, they don't actually make it themselves. They're buying the incense from other people.

Yeah. So Oman and Yemen are two of the few places on earth where the Boswellia sacriacry. trees can grow. So they're importing and exporting this incredible crop. And they're helping, you know, they're helping build the forts where this very precious commodity is stored. But they are exactly that. They're basically the kind of middlemen and really crucially middle women. And this is another reason that I adore the Nabatians. Women have incredible status and standing in the Nabatian world. And again, why aren't we all taught this at school? So I always feel it's a tiny bit like the kind of situation during World War I and after,

because a lot of the actual camel caravans themselves are run by men. So it's the men physically out on the camels, physically doing those long sea journeys. Women are left behind in the cities and the settlements to run things. So Nabatian women, we know, had ownership rights. They had inheritance rights. They build extraordinary tombs in places like Alula, in what's now Saudi Arabia. The priestesses can collect tithes and taxes. So they're really, really, really kind of keeping the Nabatian world going. And we see from the coins, Nabatian coins, you often have

the queens featured alongside the Nabatian kings. That's not untypical of nomadic peoples, though, is it? You find a lot of nomadic peoples that the women have got much, much bigger roles and are much more at the centre of things. We were talking about it with the Mongols and Genghis Khan, I mean, you're where women had so much more agency and were trained in fighting and things like that. Is it just a function of nomadic life? Because I know that some of the early historians, people like sort of diodorus, who wrote about them, very early on, said, these are people who value their freedom above everything else.

I mean, I know your guy said they love money. One of the things that often early, ancient historians said, these are a free people who know the desert better than anybody else and they value freedom above everything. Exactly. Well, they do. They value liberty, but you can still be wealthy and have liberty. You know, they value liberty with a very nice lifestyle attached. Thank you very much. It's kind of the vibe that I get from them. So again, and it's really crucial that they are obsessed with having the liberty to travel where they want and when they want. And at one point when they rub up against the Romans, they say, listen, what we just can't understand is let us live as we want to live. That's all that we ask to do. do. And we know that we help you. So why on earth are you trying to overrun us and enslave us? Let us live as we want to live. Well, I mean, let's not jump ahead to the Romans. Let's talk a little bit because we're going to come to that because it is sort of the almost the end of a fabulous story. But I want to sort of dwell in the beginning because it's so gorgeous. One of the reasons the Naveteers are so successful is, number one, they know the desert better than anyone else because

they are a free people and they have travelled it. I mean, it's sort of a little bit of a dune vibe. going on here, you know, where you've got the Fremen, if you are into that kind of thing, who know the deserts, they travel through areas that nobody else can, and they are able to wander freely with their blue, blue eyes and the dark, dark sand. But, I mean, having that knowledge of the desert means early on when these peace-loving people are sort of, you know, with all this knowledge, they see caravans who are travelling and they become guides. That's the first thing that they do to sort of get even into this world of trade and money, honey, start leading caravans and saying, look, we'll protect these caravans. It doesn't take long,

because as you say, they are brilliantly canny to say, why are we protecting these guys? Why don't we just do it ourselves? And they sort of corner the trade routes of particularly Spices, frankincense and myrrh. I love the fact that it's very similar to June, because obviously spice was this precious commodity that was traded in June, in the film, Dune, that also had these kind of magical medicinal properties. And incense, as we now know, is exactly the the same. So yeah, they were protecting caravans and then they take over with their unique understanding of the desert. They were also great mariners. And again, it's something I think that we forget about the Nebitians, if we ever knew about them in the first place. But now we know

about these people must remember not to forget that they were also great masters of the sea. Because they understand the Red Sea and the coral bomes. They're very good at negotiating around those. There's a slightly less savoury moment in their history. where they seem to act as kind of pirates and, you know, lure ships onto the coral reefs so that they'll break. Reckers. Exactly. Exactly, wreckers. And they hire themselves out as mercenaries. So at the time of the Battle of Actium and, you know, all that conflict between Cleopatra and Rome, there are Nabatian sailors involved in that as well. So they're sailors as well as in charge of those roots in the desert. And we should say that this is a period when the Red Sea is a very busy sea. You've got, particularly, particularly in the kind of first century BC, you've got lots of long-distance stuff

going first to the Horn of Africa, to Axum and the Ethiopian kingdoms, and then beyond following the monsoon winds to India, which is, I write about this in my golden road, and you have this, it just takes two months on the monsoon winds to leave the Red Sea and travel all the way down to Kerala. And the map of the world, I mean, I think this is just so important

to sort of look back and see what places. Gaza was one of the most wealthy, thriving ports where, you know, this stuff came in and stuff went out. So you would have these sort of incense trails, you know, coming through the port of Gaza, which was wealthy beyond imaginings for people who lived around there. And you still have fragments of that amid all the mess in Gaza, those Byzantine churches sitting there where we had the Palestinian Christians being attacked earlier in the war there. But those churches go back to this period, to the period when the incents is coming through Gaza

and going on to Roman Byzantine. I'm really interested, though, why we are so ignorant about this, because it's not as if we didn't know about this here in the West. There was this one chap, I'm sure you know all about him, and I love him because he just sounds so eccentric and bonkers. Johann Ludwig. Yes. He sort of went and was the first European, they say, in 1812,

to see Petra. And we should talk about Petra, because it's so intrinsic. linked with the Naveteers. Rose Red City is old as time. But he saw it. You know, you know, he's this fantastic guy who sort of grows up in Switzerland and he trains and goes and learns things in Cambridge. In fact, he's tasked with going to find Timbuktu and mapping the Sahara Desert. And so he learns Arabic at university, decides to dress as an Arab because he wants to pretend to be an Arab. So he's wandering around Cambridge in terrible inclement weather in a dishdash and a turban. Everyone thinks he's mad. But he is a Arab. But he is a Arab.

this person who writes this account of travelling through these narrow passes near Wadi Musa, the valley of Moses, and suddenly coming out into this wide open space and seeing Petra. Wadamusa, by the way, so interesting because that's in the Bible as well. That's where Moses supposedly struck a rock and this spring came up through the rocks for those people fleeing Pharaoh. Now, tell us about Petra, where is it? what, you know, describe what he saw because he was so overawed by. He was also worried he was going to get his throat slit at any moment, so didn't hang around too long.

Originally called the rock, isn't that right? Yeah, Rakmoo. Rackmoo. That's what the Navitians called it, which was their word for rock. And then it becomes Petra rock in Greek. So it's sort of, it is the rock. It's a very rocky place. You know, you've got this famous Sikh made even more famous by the fact that Indiana Jones, Harrison Ford rides down it.

And then, you know, that kind of is inside the treasury. So Petra's most beautiful, beautiful, beautiful, not just city, but whole region. There's much more of it than people realise, isn't there? A lot of outlying monuments and extraordinary things around that whole area. Absolutely. There's little Petra. There are areas of tombs. I mean, this is a huge archaeological park that you can go and visit. And can I just say, please, people go and visit it because Jordan has, you know, it's really suffered because of what's happening in the Middle East and tourists aren't going.

But Jordan is really, really safe. So please go now. So Petra, yes, this incredible city, the kind of northern capital of the Nabatian kingdom. And again, as you say, Anita, if you go there, it's one of those places you think, this cards have been forgotten until 1812. It's one of the most extraordinary places on earth. It's not an official wonder of the world, but it is a wonder of the world. But I think there's a very particular reason for that, and it's a very pernicious one,

because, as I said, the Nabatians aren't big on written histories. They do write, and there's this early form of Arabic. They cover their tombs with. So it's not true that they don't write, and they do make a record of themselves. But they're much less show-offy and shouty than the Greeks and the Romans. They're kind of more, again, just sort of getting on with it and measuring themselves up. I always feel measuring themselves up against the extraordinary nature and landscape and geology that they inhabit. A lovely way of putting it.

And it's quite a stable regime, isn't it? they don't have coups, they don't, you know, brothers don't kill each other. We've just been doing the moguls. And every generation, there's a kind of massive upheaval when one guy goes down and all the children's busy blinding and sort of capturing each other. That doesn't happen in Petra. Yes, there's certainly less of that. I mean, yes, you know, there's a lot less of that. As I said, they're focused on the bottom line because that would just make, you know, that would make the kind of interrupts the cash flow. So yes, they do seem stable. And again, they have this sort of inbuilt checks and balance. So there's almost a day.

in Petra, which is like the Feast of Fools that we would think of as a medieval thing, where basically the king has to sit surrounded by all the people of Petra and answer his faults. So they do a kind of roasting of the king. Oh, wow. That's amazing. Which is incredible, isn't it? We don't get to do that. No, exactly. But how again, how forward thinking is that for them to say, we know we're not perfect, we know we can do better? There's probably simmering resentments, get it all out in one go. Could you just sort of give us a date for when those enormous sort of cliff face carvings of a beautiful temple and city is sort of created, the Petra, that if someone's going to Google

it right now, and I really do urge you to Google it, because if you haven't seen it, it is breathtaking. But this was when, and was it all built off the back of, you know, frankincense and meur, basically, and the incense trail? I mean, definitely, yeah. I mean, it's a wealthy, wealthy city. So kind of fundamentally, you know, give and take a hundred years either side, it's pretty much dead on 2,000 years ago. So at the time of Jesus, so Herod the Great's mother, by the way, was Nabatian.

Again, like, how come we don't know that? And then Herod himself fights with the people of Petra, doesn't he? There's a kind of argy-bargy going on over that border just for a change. There is. They get involved exactly in Judea, and one of the Nabatian kings is very disapproving of the fact that Herod Antipas takes a new wife. the famous dance of the Seven Veils that never actually happened with Salome, but they're involved in that story as well.

So they're kind of deeply, basically, what we think of as the kind of high summer of the classical world. The Nabatians are there, almost like this kind of silent partner in everything that's going on. We've been largely describing them with relation to their Western neighbours,

but they're also big friends, aren't they, with the Parthians. And like the Parthians, there's some evidence that they expose their bodies once they're dead, that they leave them for sky burial like Zoroastrians, which takes us back to the Magi, where we're coming from. So this is all connected with the story of the Magi. It's all connected, and they absolutely look both East and West. That's completely crucial to

their success and their sense of themselves and the world. Well, let's take a break, and after the break, let's sort of develop a little bit more than Navetian story that you have never heard before, and you're hearing it from the greatest source that we could possibly bring you. Are Christmas present to you because we spoil you? Join us after the break. Welcome back. So just before the break, we were talking about Petra and, you know, what you'll see is this redstone, dry, arid place. But we touched on this, Bessonene, I want you to talk about it a bit more. They understood water, the importance of water, how to store it and how to move it better than anybody else in that great expanse of desert. Tell me how they did it because they

Green to Petre. It had palm trees and pools. Yeah, absolutely. It had meadows. It had vineyards. And as you say, they are masters at hydroengineering. As many societies that depend on the desert are deep in the desert, they used to establish systems. And there was this whole sort of secret coded messages that they would leave on the surface of the land so that if you were a friend of the Nabatians, you would know where to go down to find the water. But in Petra, they just take this to an extraordinary level. So they there are wells, there are pipe systems that you can still see if you go to visit Petra itself running down the Sikh where they would gather rainwater in these kinds of mountaintop systems and send it down through the city. And yeah, I mean it's just, it's a kind of astonishing what

they did, even in Alula, which is another of their cities in the south, this place that's called Hegra. I think at the latest counts, they've discovered 132 different wells there. So in one city. You know, that's an awful lot of wells. So it's incredibly sophisticated and rather beautifully, there are Jordanian academics studying this at the moment with this luminescence system where they're basically measuring ancient sunlight and working out when ancient sunlight last hits these particular channels and engineering so they can work at exactly what year they were created and whether they were kind of master craftsmen who were working on one or the other. So you know, it's both functional and very romantic. And so when you would arrive at Petra in antiquity,

like today, you'd go down this very narrow cleft in the rock that's almost one or two people wide. That's why it's so wonderfully defensible. But then at the end of it, you'd come not to the wonderful sort of deserty-looking, exotic, dry series of tomb facades and so on that you see today. You'd actually enter this spectacular oasis, green and gorgeous and hung with fruit and treat. and incense-bearing plants. Yeah, and rich with the smells and people talk about the number of bees that there were there and the lavender that grew and mangoes. Mangoes in petrol.

Just mad, isn't it? If you look at the desert, they're growing mangoes in the desert. Now, if you build something this good and if your money, honey, is based on frankincense and something that's portable, I'm guessing there are people who want it very, very much. And who are the first people who think, you know what, we'll have a bit of that. No, we'll have all of it. It's the Greeks. How do they sort of get involved?

Well, Alexander the Great, as we know, not a man to kind of look down a... Oh, back. Yeah, back off from a challenge. So the Greeks attack Petra and they try to take it over. Actually, interestingly, what they want is both the incense trade and something else, which the Nabatians trade in, which is the petrochemical of the day, bitumen. Asphalt. Yeah, which in some versions becomes asphalt, exactly.

So bitumen is a naturally occurring petrochemical. It bubbles up out of places like the Dead Sea. And in their early history, the Dead Sea is within Nabatian territory. And bitumen is also extraordinarily useful. So you can use bitumen in building material. You can use it as a fuel. You can use it to waterproof boats and those famous water systems that the Nabatians as such stars at.

So basically people want a bit of all of that. They want the incense and they want the bitumen. And so they attack the Nabatians again and again. But like in June, the film, it's a really bad idea to attack. Don't pick on them. Don't pick on the Fremen. Yeah, exactly. You're not going to win.

You're not going to win. Don't pick on a desert people in the desert. It was that lovely story when the first bunch of Greeks, a one-eyed Greek general, Antigonus, comes. and he does it when all the men are away. Yes. And he enslaves the women and carries them off. And then there's this wonderful dune moment.

But like a Dufus, he's brought horses because he's Greek. What does he know? He hasn't brought camels. He's brought horses. So sort of dragging all the slaves and the incense that's weighing down his poor horses, they are knackered. They get about, what, 30 kilometres, Bethany, away from Petro? Not far, and they've got silver as well.

They've got huge amounts of silver. And so the men, the furious, heroic nebatee, in men, as I said, who can do no wrong in my eyes. It's a June moment, isn't it? It is. It is. They recede back into the desert and then attack. They also attack successfully by sea. When there's another Greek intervention, they attack on rafts with arrows. So, yeah, so even Alexander the Great, who, as we know, was not unsuccessful in his campaign of conquest. Even he can't quite take over an Abatean territory. Can we just do this heroic moment, which has to be when we make the film of it better, and we have to have this moment.

in that first raid when they've taken all the women from Petra and enslaved them and led them into the desert. The people of Petra, they've sent trackers ahead. And some of the Petra captives have escaped and they meet in the desert at night. And the Petrons work out exactly where the Romans are camped. And under the cover of darkness, in the night, 8,000 camel-mounted warriors come out of the desert. And the Greeks are all fast asleep or just getting up. and the Nabatians fight with javelins, and they kill the Greeks where they lay, lancing those who clumbered awake to defend themselves.

And there's only 50 Greek cavalrymen that escape into the desert. It's a fabulous Christmas story. It's a lovely. Timothy Chamolet is there somewhere. To add to this lovely Christmas story, have either of you ever seen a camel's inflatable mouth sack? No, I want to now. It's the only thing I want to see.

What is that? For the man who has everything. Listen, guys, see it. You will never want to see it again, I promise you. It's one of the most. Oh, when they blow those big balloons? Yes, no, I have seen that. No, what is it?

Wait a minute. I haven't. What is it? Please don't Google it now because you might not survive the rest of the podcast. Do Google it because you'd enjoy it. It's shocking, astonishing, petrifying. And it's basically what male camels do when they're excited, either by anger, fear, rage or sexual arousal.

I've brought this on on a couple of camels, actually. Oh, I'd for another time, William. I'm sure it's not anger, William. Sure, it's not anger. But carry on. So they bear down on you. So this is when I think of that story. I don't just think of the javelins.

I think of these mouth sacks, which just like burst out, like the most disgusting innards with sort of dripping with camel saliva vibrating when they're crossed. They make quite a racket while they do. Can I just say, this is the most seasonal podcast you're going to listen to? You're not going to get this anywhere else. This is the only place you're going to get this.

Camel Mouthsax coming to you from Empire Pod. Could we talk very briefly about the Romans? Because where the Greeks fail, arguably the Romans who've also got their eye on the dizzying, which again, I mean, just biblical references, they mention how rich these tribes of the desert are. And they're thinking, are talking about the Nabatians when they say how much tribute is given to King David. You know, that it was just mountains and mountains of gold that come from the desert people. So tell me, when do the Romans suddenly think we will succeed where the Greeks have been massacred? Well, they keep on trying the Romans and partly because you said they want all of their wealth,

also because they are obsessed with incense, the Romans. The Romans have a real fetish for incense. They just can't get enough of it. Augustus in particular is determined to take over that incense trade. I mean, we're talking about industrial quantities of incense coming into Rome itself, the city of Rome. And I've read an essay by that wonderful one of us got a Bowersock, who's got the best, which sounds like he's got an inflatable cable thing going on himself.

And Bauersock writes how he thinks Augustus wants, particularly wants the incense because of its link to divinity and kingship. And so the same reason that St. Matthew is bringing incense into the gospel story is the thing that's propelling Augustus at the same sort of time to go and find the source of the incense. I mean, it's absolutely right. And so the Nabatians, in that clever merchant way, are sort of sometimes allies of the Romans,

sometimes their arch enemies. But they do the most brilliant bits of kind of tactical, commercially minded, industrial one-upmanship in a sense, because they say that they're going to take the Romans to find the source of incense. And it's this hideous journey that takes months and Romans fall by the wayside and they get dysentery and disease and it's like, scurvy.

It's the desert at its harshest. And on the way back, that journey takes a fraction of the time because the Nabatian guides are going, actually, we could have done it like this the first time round. We didn't want to. Because we wanted to prove to you that you can't operate without us. You know, it's so smart. It's so, canny. I love the other thing about the Navetians, and I'm pretty sure they are responsible because

it's too clever and too wonderful for anyone else to have done it. But in antiquity, they certainly had all this mythology around the trees that yielded frankincense and meur saying, you know, that they were guarded by these winged serpents or monsters that would come and get you. Now, I am absolutely convinced, don't know about you, Bethany that that is clever Nabatians putting it about. You know what? Only we can get past the winged serpents, my friends, to get to this stuff. Of course. Of course it is. Of course it is. No doubt. I mean, they are. They're super smart. And they, you know, their relationship with the Romans is, as I said, it's also much more sophisticated than is described actually in a lot of textbooks. Because probably now, if you will go and Google Nabatians, it will tell you that the Romans took over in the second century, AD,

that kind of there's a Trajan conquest and annexation, and then that's it for the Nabatians. And it's really, really, that is not the case. We know, again, from the archaeology, dare I say it, from some of the archaeology I was standing in earlier today, that Nabatians carry on. There are Nabatian-style villas that continue right the way through the Christian period. And it's almost more that they just do what they're always very good at. They're Byzantine churches there, aren't there? They're lovely basilicas in Petra.

Beautiful Byzantine churches. Quite sometimes these Nabatians convert to Christianity in its earliest form. So they don't go away. That's what's really interesting. They don't become an enslaved nation or population. They keep going. They keep being the guides and the merchants. They just allow to do it under this kind of Roman gloss.

So the Romans might think they've won, but they haven't really. The Nabatians are playing them at their own game. Can I ask one question, which I'm itching to ask before we finish it. We talked with Lloyd last time about how Mur is sometimes associated with death and embalming. What is it with the Nabatians and death? Because all those lovely buildings that you see pictures of when you talk about Petra are not actually houses, are they? Or even temples, they're tombs. Yeah, exactly.

The treasury, the famous treasury that, again, is in the kind of Indiana Jones Harrison Ford films and that appears on every postcard of Petra. It's not a treasury. It's a tomb, probably for Aritas IV, the kind of premier king. And all of their cities are surrounded by tombs, kind of inward facing, also orientated to the sun, the moon and the stars. And we have sort of far more tombs for them than we do anything that they're actually living in. It's like the Egyptians in that they love life so much. They want it to carry on after death. So it's not an obsession with death.

It's an obsession with life. The way that they talk about, the cycle of life, is much more Bedouin, in that, again, it just carries on. They know that at a cosmic level, we're all connected, and that just our matter continues in the matrix, and will continue to be part of the sun, the moon, the stars and the planets. And that's their worldview. Well, can I just say there has never been a podcast that's mentioned so many films.

Matrix, June. I mean, everything is here. And it is our Christmas present to you. And you have been a fabulous Christmas present to us. Thank you so very much, Bettany Hughes. Bettanyi are you? I'm flying in three minutes to Oman. And we're researching.

And I don't know if this is, you know, fear not lovely, dear people. We won't tell anyone. only one, but this will all become a, is this Park Girl also going to be part of a beautiful series that will come to you next year? You heard it here first. Well, we will plug the absolute living daylights out of that. Bettany, thank you so much. Happy Christmas for all of us. It's been an absolutely wonderful mini-series and we've been so happy to do it. Next time on Empire, we're going to return to the moguls with the extraordinary, and let me tell you, it is an extraordinary story of Jahangir. Till the next time we meet, it is goodbye from me, Anita

Arnan. For me, William Duremberg.