Mikhail D. Bukharin

A unique description of one of the branches of the transarabian «Incense Road» is given by Pliny the Elder in his Naturalis Historia. Paragraphs 157–159 of its 6th book contain enumeration of 61 place-names and ethnonyms. The author proposes their identifications and reconstructs on their basis the way from the Western Hadramawt and Yemeni Highlands to the North-West Arabia. Peculiarities of rendering of local names in Latin let the author suppose that the informant of Pliny was Hebrew or, less probably, Aramaic speaker and crossed the West and Southwest Arabia about the end of the 1st century BC.