The Spice, the Anointing Oil, and a Fabulous Bird

Cinnamon is the aromatic inner bark of Cinnamomum trees, dried into quills, and in the ancient Mediterranean it was a costly import whose true source, South and Southeast Asia, was hidden behind the traders who carried it. It is named among the ingredients of the holy anointing oil in Exodus 30, and it recurs as a mark of luxury and delight in Proverbs, the Song of Songs and the lament over fallen Babylon in Revelation. Pliny, drawing on Herodotus, repeats the fable that cinnamon was gathered from the nests of a great bird that built with the sticks in inaccessible cliffs, a story the Arabian middlemen were happy to encourage, since it concealed the real trade route and justified the price.

Control of true cinnamon shaped the colonial history of Sri Lanka much as nutmeg and clove shaped the Moluccas: the Portuguese, then the Dutch East India Company, and finally the British East India Company each in turn fought for and held a monopoly over the island's cinnamon-producing coastal regions from the sixteenth century onward, a valuable trade that helped draw three successive European colonial powers to the same island in succession. Sri Lanka remains the source of the great majority of the world's true cinnamon today, its export still marketed internationally as Ceylon cinnamon to distinguish it from the cheaper cassia grown mainly in Indonesia and China.