164 CHARACTER, MANNERS, AND CUSTOMS 



midsummer. The former collection was reckoned 

 of inferior quality.* 



Theophrastus and Pliny after him relate, that all 

 the thuriferous trees were the property of 300 fami- 

 lies, who were reputed holy; each having their 

 separate allotment, and reserving a portion of the 

 harvest for their gods. But as neither of these 

 writers travelled in the country, their reports do not 

 merit implicit credit. The author of the Erythraean 

 Periplus, who had navigated this sea and visited the 

 coasts of Arabia, takes no notice of those sacred 

 families, but he has recorded the stories told him by 

 others. The incense, he informs us, grew in places 

 so unhealthy, that nobody but slaves and malefactors 

 were employed in gathering it ; that it belonged en- 

 tirely to the government, and was so immediately 

 under the protection of the gods, that certain destruc- 

 tion was sure to overtake all who should dare to pro- 

 cure it by contraband means. The terror of serpents 

 and offended divinities was probably an invention of 

 the Arabs to protect their commerce from foreign 

 intrusion, and to frighten strangers away from the 

 places where the balm-trees grew, that they might 

 preserve the monopoly of incense to themselves. 



Myrrh was also one of the productions of Yemen ; 

 but we are assured by Strabo, Arrian, and Diodorus, 

 that it was obtained in greater quantities and of a 

 superior quality in the neighbouring countries of 

 Africa. The kind of tree that yielded it has not 

 been exactly described, but there is little doubt that 

 it was a species of the amyris. The ancients inform 

 us, that its branches required frequent priming, and 

 that it was nowhere found in its wild state in Arabia, 



* Pliny's account, of the incense is throughout extremely 

 curious. Thousands of famihes were employed at Alexandria 

 in preparing it. The workmen, he says, wore masks, and were 

 stripped naked, to prevent them from abstracting the smallest 

 particle. — Lib. xii. c. 14. 



