The Incense Route

1 · POSITION

The Incense Route was the network that carried frankincense and myrrh from southern Arabia — Yemen and Oman — north to the ports of the Mediterranean, more than two thousand kilometres. It flourished from the third century BC to the second century AD, and it moved people and ideas as well as resin. The register holds it as a road whose every stage had to be provided for: water, food, security and a market for the next leg. [1]

2 · THE NABATAEAN STRETCH

Its northern end ran from Petra, capital of the Nabataeans, to the sea. The best-preserved section crosses a hundred kilometres of the Negev, from Moa on the Jordanian border to Haluza, and UNESCO inscribed it in 2005: four towns — Haluza, Mamshit, Avdat and Shivta — four fortresses, and two caravanserais at Moa and Saharonim. [1, 2]

3 · FARMING THE DESERT TO FEED THE ROAD

The towns lived on water they made themselves. Dams, channels, cisterns and reservoirs gathered the desert’s rare runoff and supported farming on a large scale, so that a caravan could be fed where the land gave nothing. The caravanserai and the cistern are the same idea: a station built so that the next day’s march was possible. [1]

4 · WHERE THE REGISTER HOLDS ITS STOPS

The register files the route’s stations under their own codes — the Nabataean towns of the Negev, Avdat, Shivta and Mamshit, and Petra itself — and keeps the route here as the thread that joins them. AlUla, in the Saudi part of the road, is recorded by the register as one of its strategic stops. [1]

5 · ⚑ CANDOUR

⚑ Checked on 22 October 2026. AlUla as a stop on the incense road is confirmed: Hegra, its Nabataean city, sat on the route. UNESCO’s own text gives the trade’s end as the second century in one place and the fourth in another; the second is used here. [1–3]