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believe that the myrrh, frankincense, cinnamon and spices pouring into the kingdom of Aethiopia and upper Egypt all came from the same place. Possibly traders in Aethiopia obtained a better price for their myrrh and cinnamon if they stated the difficulties and dangers they experienced collecting it in the countries of the savage Gallas or their antecedents in the Horn of Africa.
“There can be no doubt that the natives of these regions have always been greatly feared by their less warlike neighbors. The Somalis and their antecedents have always been keen traders, and there can be little doubt that if cinnamon ever existed in these regions, the practice of collecting it would not have been dropped unless the species here collected was of a very inferior quality and gradually lost its marketable value.”
T hrough the courtesy of the same gentleman in gathering speci- mens of the various aromatic gums of Somaliland, a more positive statement may be made than was possible under § 32, pp. 141-2, concerning the Egyptian frankincense trade, in determining the character of the trees depicted on the Punt reliefs at Deir el Bahri, a photograph of which was reproduced on page 120.
Professor Breasted in his Ancient Records of Egypt (II, 263-5), calls this tree myrrh, and translates it as myrrh wherever the records refer to it. In the publications of the Egypt Exploration Fund (The Temple of Deir-el-Bahri, III, 12), it is called frankincense , but is located in Somaliland in the neighborhood of Mosyllum, because of the sup- posed African appearance of the Punt people who appear elsewhere in the reliefs.
Specimens of true myrrh sent from Somaliland show clearly that no sculptor could have intended to depict by the rich foliage on the reliefs, the bare, thorny, trifoliate but almost leafless myrrh tree, nor yet the almost equally leafless varieties of Somaliland frankincense. This tree is clearly Boswellia Carteri, the frankincense of the rich plain of Dhofar in Southern Arabia. This is the only place producing frankincense where the trees can be cultivated on a fertile plain by the shore, in the midst of green fields and cattle. There is no place on the African coast which meets these conditions. Naville’s objection that the natives are “not Arabs,” i. e., not Semitic, is really in favor of such a belief ; they were the pre-Semitic, Cushite race whose domin- ions centered at Dhofar, and who are represented there by the modern Gara tribe. There can be no question that the trees in that relief are the frankincense of Dhofar, the “Sachalitic frankincense” of the Periplus, the modern Shehri luban.
