Fearsome: The fortress of the Nizwa Oasis is so powerful and so ingeniously built that it could never be taken.
Bild: picture alliance / Zoonar
Not oil and gas, but history and tradition are the true treasures of Oman, where past and present merge seamlessly. You will hardly find a prouder country on the Arabian Peninsula, nor a more beautiful and happier one.
We stand at the cradle of globalization and are at least two and a half thousand years too late. Had we arrived in time, we would now see the traders of India’s Pepper Coast bartering their precious spices in the lagoon of Wadi Darbat for the even more precious frankincense, that legendary tree resin which drives away even the breath of death. We saw merchants from Mesopotamia, sailors from Persia and the Omani Bedouins loading their caravans for the long march across the Rub al-Kali, the largest sandy desert on earth, for the Pharaohs of Egypt to embalm with the sweat of the gods and the Emperors in Rome with the scent of life. And we might even see the emissaries of the Queen of Sheba very close by, who are just getting sacks of incense as a gift for their ruler’s visit to King Solomon in Jerusalem.
Instead, we face the ruins of Sumhuram in the extreme south of Oman, the remains of a city that long existed only as a myth until twenty-five years ago, thanks to Italian archaeologists, it became a certainty: Sumhuram is in fact the port that was the hub for a millennium of the worldwide trade in frankincense – this gift of the gods, which was highly coveted not only because of its cultic qualities, but also as a medicine, as a cortisone and antibiotic of antiquity, weighed with gold and silver and nowhere to be obtained in such a pure form as from the Boswellia Trees in southern Oman with its limestone soils and the ideal mix of desert drought and heavy monsoon rains.