Richard Reece

Liturgy and Architecture: from the early church to the Middle Ages. By Allan Doig. 242mm. Pp xxii + 224, 49 b&w and 10 col ills. Aldershot, Hants: Ashgate Publishing Limited, 2008. ISBN 9780754652724. £55 (hbk). ISBN 9780754652748. £15.99 (Pbk).

arrived as a consequence of a seaborne trade in incense in which Qana’ and Aden were pivotal ports: ships that had travelled from Egypt to the south Arabian coast (or further east) with heavy goods, including wine and bullion, returned to the west with a much lighter cargo, namely incense, and needed to take on the ballast for stability. Associated finds imply that the ballast from Aden is earlier in date, and the authors suggest that this port lost importance after it was sacked by the Romans, probably in the early Augustan period, and that Qana’ thereafter took its place. In any case, the new evidence illustrates the significance of the maritime route via Egypt, quicker and safer than the caravan route through Arabia, which required up to ninety days’ travel under the constant threat of brigandage. Another substantial essay is that of Alexander Sedov summarizing the results of Russian excavations of the settlement at Qana’, where the discoveries include a warehouse containing actual remains of incense. Briefer are Caroline Singer’s general account of the South Arabian incense trade and its organization, Sunil Gupta’s analysis from an Indian perspective (he sees the export of incense from South Arabia to the west as part of a ‘triangular’ traffic in which western goods were taken to India and cloth, grain and oil brought back from India to Arabia), and Myra Shackley’s survey of the modern uses of frankincense and myrrh and their role in a developing tourist trade. Two further papers do not fit the general theme so well. A short essay by David Peacock and Lucy Blue on recent fieldwork at Adulis in Eritrea offers no positive evidence for its involvement in the incense trade apart from a literary reference of the sixth century AD. A study by Joanna Bird (already published elsewhere) on the use of incense in Mithraic ritual is even more marginal in its relevance. Her evidence comes mainly from pottery vessels and artistic representations in the Roman world, and the incense with which she is concerned was obtained primarily, it appears, from the burning of pine cones. Marginal or not, Bird’s paper is well written and presented. Several of the others are defective in this respect – poorly expressed, peppered with grammatical and typing errors, and wayward in punctuation. The book also needs more detailed maps: those provided are mostly too small in scale and omit places mentioned in the text. Singer’s account of overland routes could have done with maps indicating the physical geography and political boundaries, not just the position of sites, while the piece on Adulis lacks any form of site plan. There is also a minor disaster at the bottom of the first page where several lines of the text seem to have been omitted. In a book which is finely produced in terms of paper, printing and binding the reader has a right to expect higher standards of editing and production. Nonetheless, this is an interesting and informative publication, and the report on the analysis of ballast from the Red Sea ports and its bearing on the incense trade is of prime importance.