The biblical world was wider than one might imagine.

I am writing a historical novel retelling the Exodus from the point of view of twins, one of whom is a woman. When the book opens, she is the widow of a caravan owner who always took her along on his trading expeditions. I wanted to write about her memories of the marriage, so I started looking into ancient commerce in spices to get some idea of how far she might have traveled.
Her world was a lot bigger than I thought.
Just south of the port of Haifa in Israel, archaeologists have dug up flasks that are about 3,000 years old, their contents decomposed but residues intact and able to be tested chemically. The flasks had contained a few precious tablespoons of wine or oil that had been laced with cinnamon — which grew only on the southernmost tip of India at the time, a distance of 4,000 miles over land. Going by sea wouldn’t have been any better: Today’s route stretches 3700 nautical miles, and that’s shortened by the Suez Canal which of course didn’t exist at the time. For comparison, the longest possible trip across the Mediterranean, between Spain and Israel, is about half that distance, as is the ancient track that lapis lazuli took from Afghanistan to Egypt; the Silk Road, which was of similar length, would not be established until Roman times many centuries later.
Pepper, grains of which have been found in the tomb of pharaoh Ramses II, must have traveled just as far. This information was particularly helpful to me, since I assume that the stories of the Exodus are based on events that took place during his reign even though there is no scholarly consensus around that notion.

How would such fabulously exclusive products as Indian spices have made the arduous journey to the northern coast of Africa? I’m guessing that they were, in part, a type of currency in and of themselves. Wine mulled with cinnamon in a hardy, thick-walled flask like those found outside of Haifa could have exchanged hands along a number of different trade routes before ending up where they did.
But this hard evidence of the extraordinary breadth of trade and travel in the second millennium BCE is accompanied by the possibility that intangibles like religious beliefs could have crisscrossed the continents as well. One not uncontroversial theory states that a profound connection exists between the Brahmins of India and Abraham of the Bible. Here’s a list and analysis of multiple astonishing similarities between the book of Genesis and the Vedas, by someone who knows Jewish and Hindu scriptures much better than I do. I’ve recently written about a hypothesis that the god of Israel originated in what is now Saudi Arabia; who knows how well-traveled that concept of divinity might truly be?
War by other means. In the chapter I’m writing about the caravaner and his marriage to one of my narrators, I dreamed up a scene that required an audience who hated Pharaoh as much as a Daughter of Israel might have. I didn’t have to look far. The Canaanites were ruled by Pharaoh during the Ramesside era, and undoubtedly chafed under his domination. I found the ideal setting for the events I had in mind: A Canaanite fortress from the 12th Century BCE that was discovered in central Israel a few years ago, probably right on a river border between Egyptian, Philistine, Canaanite and Israelite spheres of influence.

The article I read about the fortress has a lovely video that shows clearly the strategic position of the stronghold between the Judean hills and the sea. Even though that particular fort was probably built after my characters might have been in the area, there were much older walled cities in the region so it’s possible that a similar garrison might have existed nearby some decades earlier. My female narrator is a musician, so I found a couple of ancient Egyptian songs that she could parody in order to please the Canaanite soldiers stationed there.
It was a ton of fun to work with the lyrics, although I’m the first to admit that I’m no Randy Rainbow. Still, I’m proud to join him in a time-honored tradition. It doesn’t stretch plausibility too far to imagine musical send-ups in the Age of Pharaohs. After all, even in our own time, when politics gets complicated there’s nothing better than a little nasty singalong.

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