Myrrh

Myrrh is the aromatic gum resin of thorny Commiphora trees of the dry Horn of Africa and southern Arabia, tapped from the bark and hardened into reddish tears. Its name goes back to a Semitic root for bitter, and bitterness, of taste and of association, runs through its uses. It was one of the great commodities of the ancient incense trade that ran up western Arabia, costly and far-travelled, and it was burned as incense, compounded into perfume and medicine, and used in embalming. Pliny describes the trade and the many grades of the resin at length.

The exact botanical source of ancient myrrh remains genuinely debated: Commiphora myrrha is the principal commercial species today, but classical writers describe a trade dominated by Commiphora erythraea, and some scholars argue the myrrh named in the Hebrew Bible is better matched to yet another species, Commiphora guidottii, so that ancient myrrh may not correspond neatly to any single modern species and the trade name has likely covered several related resins across different periods. Modern genetic testing of myrrh sold in the international market has found that only a small fraction of commercial samples, in one study as few as eight per cent, reliably matched the species specified by current pharmacopoeias, showing the ancient confusion has never been fully resolved even by contemporary trade regulation.

In the Hebrew Bible myrrh is a principal ingredient of the sacred anointing oil compounded in Exodus 30 and a recurring note of luxury and love in the Song of Songs. In the Gospels it frames the life of Jesus at both ends: it is one of the three gifts of the Magi, traditionally read as pointing to his death because myrrh was a burial spice, and it returns at the end when Nicodemus brings a mixture of myrrh and aloes to prepare the body for the tomb. Greek myth gives the resin a darker origin in Ovid, where the girl Myrrha, punished for an incestuous love, is transformed into the weeping tree whose drops are her tears, the bitter resin as grief made fragrant.

Myrrh's bitter resin does have real antimicrobial and mild analgesic properties confirmed by modern pharmacological study, which is likely why it proved effective as an embalming agent and why myrrh-based compounds are still used today in some dental and mouth-care preparations for minor gum complaints, one of the more genuinely evidence-supported traditional uses recorded in this atlas rather than a purely symbolic one. Wine mixed with myrrh, offered to Jesus at the crucifixion in Mark's Gospel and traditionally understood as a crude analgesic, was refused by him according to the text, a detail read by commentators as a refusal to have his suffering dulled.