| Nineteen hundred years before Christ, Joseph was sold by his brothers to "a company of Ishmaelites come from Gilead, with their camels bearing spicery and balm and myrrh, going to carry it down to Egypt." |
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| Spices were used and traded from the earliest times. In the Bible, they were mentioned as valuable good. Queen of Sheba included spices among gold and jewels as gifts to King Solomon. | |
| For centuries Arabs , who acted as middlemen in the trade with the Orient and Africa, have kept secret the source of their supply to preserve their monopoly. They were telling only of dark and menacing distant lands, while their caravans, numbering sometimes as may as four thousand camels laden with gold as well as spices, crossed vast Asian territories. |
Phoenicians were mong the first traders distributing spices around the Mediterranean until Alexandria in Egypt, became the meeting place for merchants from East to West. The oldest route was probably from the Malabar coast of India up tp the Persian Gulf and either via Tigris and Euphrates valleys to Babylon and Antioch or the the coast of Arabia up to the Red Sea. |
| 900 - Venice has risen as a commercial power, principally in spices, as she begins to lead Europe out of the Dark Ages. | |