Roman ships sailing beyond Eudaimon Arabia (Aden) left Saba-Himyarite territory and entered the Hadramawt Kingdom which ruled east Yemen and Dhofar. The Hadramawt were a well-defended regime who had risen to power after the collapse of the Sabaean Kingdom in the late first century BC. During the Sabaean decline the Hadramawt seized the seaboard of Dhofar and captured the main frankincense groves on the highland coast. Under Hadramawt administration these trees were managed as a state-run business and all produce belonged to the king. By the first century AD the Hadramawt controlled a seaboard approximately 500 miles long which stretched from Yemen to Oman. The Periplus calls Hadramawt territory, ‘the Frankincense-Bearing land’ or ‘the Kingdom of Eleazos’.1 Eleazos is probably a Greek rendition of the dynastic name Il’azz which is attested in Hadramawt royal inscriptions.2
The main Hadramawt port was 220 miles east of Eudaimon at a fortified outpost called Qana. The coast between these trade centres was populated by communities of local nomads and the inhabitants of small fishing villages.3 As Roman ships approached Qana they passed sandy shorelines where jagged black volcanic rocks jutted into the sea. It was possible to sail from Berenice to Qana in just over four weeks, provided the summer trade winds were blowing and the merchants did not delay at any intermediate ports. Pliny confirms that from Egypt, ‘it takes about thirty days to reach the Arabian port of Cane (Qana) in the frankincense-producing district’.4
Qana was just outside the frankincense-growing region and it functioned as the main depot for gathering incense from the Hadramawt Kingdom. The harvests were collected at outposts in the incense-producing highlands and from these places all loads were sent west to Qana by land and sea. The Periplus explains that ‘all the frankincense grown in the land is brought into Qana as if it were a single warehouse’.5 The land routes passed through mountain valleys where guard-stations and checkpoints could monitor the caravans headed for Qana.6 Other stocks were shipped by sea, aboard ‘boats and rafts of a local type made of leather bags’.7
The port of Qana lay on a large sandy bay overlooked by a flat-topped volcanic promontory that rose 450 feet above the beach.8 As Qana was the reception centre for Hadramawt incense, the promontory was a guarded installation managed by royal agents. The regime had built stone storerooms into the cliff face to contain the incoming frankincense. Excavations have revealed several large chambers, each with rows of internal pillars and a storage area of about 1,000 square feet.9 More than eight of these chambers would have been needed to store the entire summer harvest of frankincense as it arrived at the installation and was stacked in wicker baskets.10 Adjacent to these facilities was a trade-station inhabited by a cosmopolitan community of merchants from many parts of the Indian Ocean.
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