Five Thousand Years of Frankincense

Egyptian records describe Punt as Ta Netjer, God’s Land: a region to the south renowned above all for its aromatics, and frankincense and myrrh in particular. Egyptian expeditions travelled there by sea and returned with cargoes of resin, and the name of the place became inseparable from the substance it produced.

The most famous of those voyages was sent by Queen Hatshepsut and recorded in relief at Deir el-Bahari, where the scenes show incense trees being carried aboard and transported to Egypt. It is an unusually literal image of ambition: the relief records more than resin, showing living incense trees lifted from the ground and shipped north.

The evidence connects three layers: Egyptian records of Punt and its incense; an influential Egyptological identification placing Punt on the Somali coast, recounted in recent peer-reviewed work on mummified baboons that explicitly notes this coast produces premium Boswellia frereana resin; and modern botany, with Kew recording northern and north-eastern Somalia as the natural home of the species known there as maidi or meydi.

SourcesThe Met — Hatshepsut Punt relief ↗ · Peer-reviewed Punt / mummified baboon study (PMC) ↗ · Kew, Plants of the World Online — Boswellia frereana ↗

In the Jewish tradition frankincense is levonah, and it is named directly in Exodus 30:34 among the components of the Ketoret, the sacred incense.

Levonah occupies a defined place in that sacred incense, and the phrase levonah zakah — pure frankincense — makes purity part of the textual description itself.

Reference scholarship connects that tradition to the species record. The Encyclopaedia Judaica entry on frankincense explicitly identifies Boswellia frereana of North Somalia among the Boswellia species from which frankincense is extracted — a species-level reference within the Jewish reference literature.

SourcesEncyclopaedia Judaica — frankincense ↗ · Kew, Plants of the World Online — Boswellia frereana ↗

This is one of the most direct species-level branches in the whole record. The CITES species assessment for Boswellia frereana states that the resin is known as maydi or meydi in Somalia and as Coptic frankincense in Europe, and that it is prized as incense in the Coptic Church of Egypt. A scholarly chapter on ancient spices records the same association: Boswellia frereana grows in northern Somalia, is the source of maydi or Coptic frankincense, and is highly esteemed by the Coptic Church. The association is strong enough that “Coptic frankincense” is recorded as a common European name for the species.

Within that tradition frankincense is liturgical material: part of worship and part of continuity, carried through centuries of practice in which the same substance serves the same purpose.

The tree grows in Somalia. In Europe the species is recorded as Coptic frankincense, and its resin remains closely associated with Coptic liturgical use.

SourcesCITES PC25 — Boswellia frereana species assessment ↗ · Ancient spices scholarly chapter — Maydi / Coptic frankincense ↗ · Kew, Plants of the World Online — Boswellia frereana ↗

Classical Islamic literature discusses frankincense under two names, Lubaan and Kundur, and returns to it often. Scholars and physicians wrote about it in connection with memory, with the heart, and with the oral traditions of its use — a substance treated seriously enough to be described, compared and argued over. Ibn al-Baytar described the resin called Kundur as chewed, and associated it with mountainous terrain.

The classical literature names the resin; the species-specific record becomes explicit in botanical and trade sources, and it is particularly clear. Thulin’s monograph on the genus Boswellia describes Boswellia frereana as restricted to northern Somalia, with the resin called maidi or meydi in Somali and luban meiti or luban lami in Arabic, its main use being chewing, and Saudi Arabia and other Middle Eastern countries as the chief consumers. The LSE study of the Somali frankincense economy follows the same identity chain from the tree, yagcar, to meydi in Somalia and luban lami in Arabia.

CITES adds the commercial picture: Saudi Arabia is the largest importer, the chewing grades are popular across the Arabian Peninsula, and the resin is important at weddings, religious festivals and during Hajj. Ibn al-Baytar’s two details still hold: the tree grows on rocky escarpments, and the resin is still chewed as well as burned.

SourcesMats Thulin — The Genus Boswellia (Uppsala, full text) ↗ · LSE thesis — The Milk of the Boswellia Forests ↗ · CITES PC25 — Boswellia frereana species assessment ↗

The Chinese branch begins with a primary source. Fei Xin, who sailed with the Ming treasure fleets, wrote an entry on Mogadishu — 木骨都束國 — in his Xingcha Shenglan, and that entry states plainly: 地产乳香, the land produces frankincense. It is a fifteenth-century Chinese record of a Somali port as a frankincense source.

The Ming History carries the same relationship further along the coast, recording repeated contact with Brava and the Mogadishu-region ports and listing frankincense among the products and tribute associated with them. Zheng He’s fleets reached these harbours; the Somali coast was a known quantity in the maritime world of the period.

The chain then continues into the present. Puntland’s official five-year development plan distinguishes the two trade frankincenses, Maydi and Beeyo, estimates exports at roughly seventy-five per cent Maydi to twenty-five per cent Beeyo, and records government trade agreements covering raw ungraded frankincense of both varieties with China, France and Germany. Kew identifies Maydi as Boswellia frereana. Modern Chinese scientific literature, in turn, studies Boswellia frereana explicitly among the frankincense species.

Read in order — Ming record, modern trade record, botanical identification, modern Chinese scholarship — the evidence appears at both ends of the timeline: Ming records identify Somali frankincense ports, while the modern Puntland record explicitly names Maydi and records Chinese trade in it. The Ming record names the coast and what it produced; modern botany supplies the species name: Boswellia frereana.

SourcesFei Xin, Xingcha Shenglan — Mogadishu (木骨都束國) ↗ · Ming History, vol. 326 — Brava and the Somali coast ↗ · Puntland Five-Year Development Plan (official) ↗ · Kew, Plants of the World Online — Boswellia frereana ↗ · PubMed 38816637 — Chinese review including Boswellia frereana ↗

Within the traditional Ayurvedic framework, frankincense appears in relation to Prana, breath, mind, oral use and internal balance. These are concepts of the Ayurvedic system itself, presented here as part of that traditional framework.

The classical Indian Boswellia tradition centres primarily on Boswellia serrata. It gives wider context for the global Boswellia record, while Maydi’s own documented lineage is rooted in northern Somalia.

Chromatography separated its molecules. Cell models examined its extracts. Species-by-species analysis produced chemical fingerprints — profiles specific enough to tell one Boswellia from another.

One thing became immediately clear: Maydi has a chemical fingerprint of its own. The triterpenoid fraction and the volatile profile each pointed the same way.