Plain of Sharon

Shar'un "a plain" (Acts 9:35). Extremely fertile coastal plain between Joppa on the S. and Mount Carmel on the N. Sharon and was noted for its flowery beauty (Isa 35:2; Song 2:1). It was famous for its forests and lush vegetation (Is 33:9; Song 2:1), rich pasture and David appointed his overseer for the herds that grazed there (I Chr 27:29). The Via Maris (a favorite caravan route) passed through the Plain of Sharon, connecting Egypt to Palestine and Syria, Asia Minor, and Mesopotamia with many cities along the road (according to the lists of the Egyptian Kings). Amenophis II traveled this route on his way to northern Syria (according to his list).

In the Persian and Hellenistic periods there are many Phoenician colonies built along this coast. In the Roman period it was called drymos which means "forest", with some of the major cities at that time built along the coast.

Some well-known biblical cities located in this plain were: Dor, Lydda, Joppa, Caesarea, Rakkon, and Antipatris.

Today the area is filled with citrus farms and numerous settlements.

Isa 35:1-2 "The wilderness and the wasteland shall be glad for them, And the desert shall rejoice and blossom as the rose;

NKJVIt shall blossom abundantly and rejoice, Even with joy and singing. The glory of Lebanon shall be given to it,

The excellence of Carmel and Sharon. They shall see the glory of the LORD, The excellency of our God."

1 Chr. 5:16; 27, 29; Isa. 33:9


Mount Carmel’s rich red soil is covered by a typical Mediterranean shrub forest. There are beautiful Kermes Oak groves and not only flowering trees and delicious fragrant herbs, but all the flora of the North of Israel seems gathered in this favored spot.
So early as November, the crocus, narcissus, pink cistus, and large daisy are in bloom, and the hawthorn in bud.
In spring, wild tulips, dark red anemones, pink phlox, cyclamen, purple stocks, marigolds, geranium, and pink (Cistus salvifolius) and white (Cistus creticus) rock-roses make it spectacular.

MYRRH

Myrrh, aromatic gum resin, of which the true form is obtained from a tree in Africa and Arabia. Although similar trees yield a similar product, the quality is inferior. Myrrh consists of a mixture of resin, gum, and the essential oil myrrhol, which produces the characteristic odor. It has a bitter, pungent taste, and ranges in color from yellowish brown to reddish brown. Myrrh was highly valued in ancient times as an ingredient of perfume and incense and was also used as an ointment. The myrrh mentioned in the Bible (see Psalms 45:8; Song 4:14) is believed to have been a mixture of myrrh and the oleoresin labdanum from plant Cistus Creticus*. One of the three gifts of the Magi to Jesus Christ (see Matthew 2:11) was myrrh. The gum resin was also used as a stimulant tonic and is used today as an antiseptic in mouthwashes and dentifrices.

*Cistus Creticus grows in Eastern Μediterraneo.

Ambergis

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Ambergris is produced in the hindgut of the sperm whale, Physeter catodon L. It is usually associated with the beaks of the whale's principal food, the common cuttlefish, Sepia officinalis. It consists of 80% ambrein, a cholesterol derivative which may be either an indigestible component of the squid or a secretion of the whale's gut in response to the constant irritation caused by the sharp beaks of the squid. It is thought that the production of ambergris is pathological in nature but there is limited evidence for this assumption. In the gut of the whale it is a black, semiviscous and foul-smelling liquid. On exposure to sunlight and air it quickly oxidizes and hardens to a pleasantly aromatic, marbled, grayish, waxy, pellucid substance in which the squid beaks are still embedded. When warmed it produces a very pleasant, mild, sweet, earthy aroma. From ancient times it has been used in the West as a fixative for rare perfumes since it has the effect of making other fragrances last much longer than they would otherwise. It is said that a single drop of tincture of ambergris applied to a paper and placed in a book will remain fragrant after 40 years and that once handled, the fingers will smell of it even after several days and several washings.




Chinese

Before 1,000 AD the Chinese referred to ambergris as lung sien hiang, "dragon's spittle perfume," because it was thought that it originated from the drooling of dragons sleeping on rocks at the edge of the sea. In the Orient it is still known by this name and is used as an aphrodisiac and as a spice for food and wine. The Japanese have also known ambergris from ancient times and called it kunsurano fuu, "whale droppings," a curiously onomatopoeic term to the Western ear! It was used to fix floral fragrances in perfumes.


Arabs


Ambergris was known to the Arabs as 'anbar and was originally called amber in the West It was used by the Arabs as medicine for the heart and brain. The Arabs believed that raw ambergris emanated from springs near the sea. In the Thousand and One Nights, Sinbad is shipwrecked on a desert island and discovers a spring of stinking crude ambergris which flows like wax into the sea where it is swallowed by giant fishes and vomited up again as fragrant lumps to be cast up on the shore.

Greeks

The Greeks also believed that ambergris came from springs in or near the sea. They believed that it enhances the effects of alcohol when smelled before drinking wine or when it is added to wine. Many a bacchanal profited from a pinch of ambergris, no doubt.

Ambergris from Sea Bird Droppings

In the West

In the West, true amber (yellow amber or Prussian amber, the succinum of the Romans and the [elektron] of the Greeks) and ambergris were thought to have the same or similar origins, probably because both were fragrant, rare, costly, somewhat similar in appearance and found cast up on seashores. To the earliest Western chroniclers, ambergris was variously thought to come from the same bituminous sea founts as amber, from the sperm of fishes or whales, from the droppings of strange sea birds (probably because of confusion over the included beaks of squid) or from the large hives of bees living near the sea. Marco Polo was the first Western chronicler who correctly attributed ambergris to sperm whales which he saw hunted on the island of Socotra in the Indian Ocean but which he also thought vomited it up after having eaten it in the depths of the sea.

In 1783.

In 1783 the great botanist Joseph Banks presented a paper by Dr. Franz Xavier Schwediawer, a German physician living in London at the time, before the Royal Society which ended, forever, Western confusion over ambergris and its origins. It correctly identified ambergris as a production of the often morbidly distended gut of sick sperm whales and associated its production with the beaks of the whale's principal foods, squid and cuttlefish.

In 1820.

In 1820 two French chemists, Joseph-Bienaimι Carentou and Pierre-Joseph Pelletier first isolated, characterized and named ambrein, the principal active fragrant ingredient of ambergris. Since then a great deal has been published on the chemistry of compounds with an ambergris-like scent, especially the more fragrant oxidative derivatives of ambrein like ambrox. They are all labdanoid terpenes which occur in a remarkable variety of plants, animals and microorganisms.Cistus (Rock Rose)., classical source of labdanum. These, and other, botanical extracts are the base for fixatives and woody, sweet fragrances in the modern perfumery industry which, for the most part, uses synthetics in place of natural substances.

There are many different labdanum absolutes available.

Labdanum has a typically balsamic odour, rather flowery, herbaceous, amber-like and very tenacious. The absolute derived from labdanum from plant Cistus Creticus, is the finest, the most amber like and the least coloured.

Trade in ambergris has been banned worldwide for years by treaty and by various national marine mammal protection acts. The romance of ambergris is now only a distant memory. Once it was eaten with eggs for breakfast at the tables of Dutch burgers and English squires. Now that sperm whales are returning to our seas a curious beachcomber may once again hope to find a lump of ambergris some day.

Nabatean - Petra -Jordan

During 1200 years approximately, group of Arab named "Nabatean" has lived and acted in the Negev, Jordan, Sinai and the Hijaj (north Saudia). Nabatean remainders are located in the Negev Desert, hardly to be ignored. Avdat, Sivta and Halutza, beside more sites, some big and impressive in their sophisticated system, some more modest, are silent record to the Nabatean presence in the wide Negev desert. Resourcefulness, unique social codes and deep recognition of their environment and its factors, has been needed to obtain this weave of life in uncertainty conditions and rigid climate.
This article is based on Renate Rosenthal-Heginbottom article, from the catalog "The Nabatean in the Negev", published by Haifa University.

About the Nabateans

Historical Background

Who were the Nabateans? It is easier to define who they were not: they were definitely not an ethnic identity or a nation or state in the 19th-century concept.
They defined themselves by tribe and family. They had a strong sense of personal freedom and considered themselves a society of free Arabs, for whom the king was primus inter pares - the first among equals. He ruled the city of Petra in the manner of a Hellenistic sovereign and remained at the same time the sheikh of the tribe, and indeed the majority of the people living in his realm were not Nabateans. On the other hand, Nabatean inscriptions have come to light in areas that were never part of the kingdom and date from a time when it no longer existed.
The few ancient authors who mention the Nabateans have partly or fully misunderstood the political, social, and economic "stratigraphy" of their society. A reliable source on Nabatean society is the 1st century-BCE Greek scholar Diodorus Siculus, who, drawing from the writings of earlier historians, informs us of """ .Arabia. The land is situated between Syria and Egypt and is divided among many peoples of diverse characteristics. Now the eastern parts are inhabited by Arabs, who bear the name of Nabateans and range over a country which is partly desert and partly waterless, though a small section of it is fruitful" (Bibliotheca 11,48,1-2). On their way of life Diodorus says: "They are exceptionally fond of freedom," (XIX, 94, J). "Consequently the Arabs who inhabit this country, being difficult to overcome in war, remain always unresolved; furthermore, they never at any time accept a man of another country as their over-lord and continue to maintain their liberty unimpaired" (11,48,4). The Nabatean economy is also described: "Some of them raise camels, others sheep, pasturing them in the desert. While there are many Arabian tribes who use the desert as pasture, the Nabateans far surpass the others in wealth although they are not much more than ten thousand in number; for not a few of them are accustomed to bring down to the sea frankincense and myrrh and the most valuable kind of spices, which they procure from those who convey them from what is called Arabia Eudaemon", i.e. Arabia, the Blessed (XIX, 94, 4-5).
Considering the significant Nabatean economic and cultural impact, historical information from the 3rd and 2nd centuries BCE is rather meager. Apart from mention of Aretas, the first Nabatean king, in the Second Book of the Maccabees 5: 8- J 0 and in an inscription from Elusa (J 69 BCE), a continuous succession of rulers extends from 120/110 BCE until 106 CE, the year of the formation of Provincia Arabia. Territorial and administrative changes were introduced in the late third century CE under the emperor Dioe/etian and about a hundred years later Petra and the south of the province as well as the Negev became the nucleus of the Provincia Palaestina Tertia. In the 5th century Christianity spread and many churches were constructed.1bn the basis of Nabatean names recorded in inscriptions and papyri, it appears that the autochthonic population did not change in the Byzantine period.

Trade Routes

In the 1st millennium BCE the burning of incense became part of daily life in the Mediterranean basin. Consumer demand for frankincense (called olibanum ), used in ritual and medical practices, grew rapidly and prices soared to exceeding heights. The aromatic gum resin was obtained from trees of the genus Boswellia carterii, which grow in southern Arabia (Dhofar and Hadhramaut) and Somalia. From there it was transported by ship to the harbor of Qana and then by camel caravans northward to the Mediterranean coast and beyond. At the time of the Nabateans, their center and holy precinct of Petra served as a place of reloading, with one route crossing the Negev to the port of Gaza and another leading through Damascus to Mesopotamia in the east and Phoenicia in the west. Gaza developed into a prosperous city, and already in the 3rd century BCE, when the Egyptian official Zenon visited the city, he encountered an officer in charge of the incense trade. While frankincense was the main trading commodity, other aromatics and spices were also traded. Arabian balsam was used mainly in healing preparations and as an addition to incense; myrrh was an ingredient of perfumes, cosmetics and medicines, and necessary for embalming; labdanum was used in perfumery. Indian, Chinese and Oriental spices like pepper, cinnamon and cassia, cardamon and ginger were in great demand. Indigo, the blue dye obtained from plants of the genus Indigofera, may also have been imported, since the color occurs on textiles from Nabatean sites). These commodities were brought by ship to the ports in southern Arabia from India and the Far East and transported overland to the Mediterranean by the Nabateans, who served as intermediaries.
The area of the Horn of Africa and the Gulf of Aden with the Bab el-Mandeb passage was controlled by the Sa beans, the inhabitants of one of the four main states of Arabia Felix, which emerged in the 8th century BCE along the south-north trade route running parallel to the Red Sea for a distance of some 200 km. This was the principal connection that came to be known as the "spice and incense route", yet it was only part of an extensive network of routes connecting the Arabian Peninsula to the Mediterranean. Another major route from Oana through the Wadi Hadhramaut and the Sabean capital of Shabwa lead across the Arabian peninsula and to the port of Gerrha on the Persian Gulf.
The Nabateans gained control of the northern Arabian Desert, the Negev and the Sinai Peninsula in the Persian period. Inscriptions provide evidence that Nabatean merchants traveled further west to the Aegean Islands (Delos, Cos) and reached the Bay of Naples (Puteoli, modern Pozzuoli), thus establishing trade connections with the Romans.
The historian Strabo (63 BCE-19 CE) visited Egypt at about the time when Augustus sent an expedition, under the command of the prefect Aelius Gallus, from Egypt to Arabia and Ethiopia (24 BCE). The aim of the Roman expedition was to forcefully participate in the enormous trade profits enjoyed by the Arabs. The expedition failed, the Roman army suffered heavy casualties and an unknown number perished in the desert of southern Arabia. The Romans held the Nabateans responsible and accused them of treacherous behavior. Nevertheless, the event heralded a shift in the incense and spice route towards Egypt, as reported by Strabo who mentions the old route through Petra as well as the new route via the west coast of the Red Sea and the Nile: "Now the loads of aromatics are conveyed from Leuke Kome to Pet ra, and thence to Rhinocolura, which is in Phoenicia near Egypt, and thence to the other peoples; but at the present time they are for the most part transported by the Nile to Alexandria; and they are landed from Arabia and India at Myos Hormos" (XVI,4,24). Eventually, the rerouting of the trade caused the decline of Nabatean economic prosperity, resulting in Roman occupation and annexation to the Provincia Arabia in the year 106 CE. By that time the Greek seafarer Hippalus had understood the system of the monsoon wind cycles and it became possible to sail from Egypt through the Red Sea to southern Arabia and India. This was the Roman opportunity to control transportation and trade and push the Nabateans aside.