Frankincense

For thousands of years, traders carried frankincense resin by camel caravan across the Arabian desert, and it became one of the most valuable commodities in the ancient world, worth its weight in gold in Egyptian, Greek, and Roman marketplaces. Across Arabian, East African, and Ayurvedic traditions, the tears of hardened resin were burned as incense in temples and homes, chewed for their soothing effect on the mouth and gums, and warmed into balms rubbed onto tired, aching joints. In Ayurvedic medicine, a related boswellia species, shallaki, has long held a respected place as a support for stiff and inflamed joints, and this reputation followed Boswellia sacra into modern herbalism. It remains, above all, an herb of ceremony and stillness, something people turned to when they wanted a room, a body, or a mind to settle.