Boswellia: History and Traditional Use

Table of Contents

1. A Tree That Weeps Perfume: Botany and the Name
2. Punt and the Pharaohs: The First Recorded Incense Voyage
3. The Incense Route: Arabia, the Nabataeans and Rome
4. Herodotus, Theophrastus, Dioscorides and Pliny
5. Salai Guggal: Boswellia serrata in Ayurveda
6. Temple, Church and Household: Frankincense as Ritual and Remedy
7. From Resin to Molecule: The Boswellic Acids (1932–1992)
8. The Clinical Chapter: Trials, Reviews and Regulators
9. Tradition, Evidence and a Threatened Tree
10. Key Research Papers
11. Connections
12. Featured Videos

A Tree That Weeps Perfume: Botany and the Name

Boswellia is a genus of small, drought-hardy trees in the torchwood family, Burseraceae — the same family as myrrh (Commiphora). Its members grow on rocky, sun-baked ground where little else will: the dry deciduous hill forests of central India, the limestone escarpments of southern Arabia, the Horn of Africa, and the island of Socotra. All of them share the trait that made them famous. When the papery bark is wounded, the tree exudes an oleo-gum-resin — a mixture of volatile oil, water-soluble gum and true resin — that dries in the air into translucent lumps traditionally called "tears." Frankincense is simply that dried exudate.

Several species have supplied it. Boswellia sacra grows in the Dhofar region of Oman, eastern Yemen and northern Somalia, and is the classic frankincense of the ancient Arabian trade; the Somali trees were long treated as a separate species, B. carterii, and the two names are still used side by side in commerce, although a 1987 revision of the group in the Kew Bulletin by Mats Thulin and Ahmed Warfa treated the Arabian and Somali populations together. Boswellia papyrifera, of Ethiopia, Eritrea and Sudan, is today the largest single source of frankincense resin by volume. And Boswellia serrata, the Indian species, grows across the dry forests of Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, Gujarat, Odisha and neighbouring states; its resin is salai guggal in Hindi, shallaki in Sanskrit, and Indian olibanum in the old trade. It is B. serrata that Ayurveda used and that nearly every modern trial has tested, so this article follows the Indian tree while giving the wider frankincense story its due.

The names carry their own history. Olibanum, the apothecaries' Latin term, descends from the Greek libanos, which in turn comes from a Semitic root meaning "white" — the Hebrew levonah and the Arabic lubān are the same word, describing the milky colour of fresh resin. Frankincense is medieval French: franc encens, "true" or "high-quality incense," the adjective marking it out from lesser aromatic gums. The botanical name is much younger. The genus Boswellia was published in 1807 in the ninth volume of Asiatick Researches, the journal of the Asiatic Society in Calcutta; the name is credited to the Scottish botanist William Roxburgh, superintendent of the Calcutta botanic garden, with the description validated by his colleague Henry Thomas Colebrooke, and the type species was the Indian tree, Boswellia serrata Roxb. The genus honours John Boswell (1710–1780), an Edinburgh physician and botanist and, as it happens, the uncle of James Boswell, Samuel Johnson's biographer; serrata refers to the saw-toothed leaflets.

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Punt and the Pharaohs: The First Recorded Incense Voyage

The oldest detailed picture of the frankincense trade is carved in stone. On the walls of the mortuary temple of the female pharaoh Hatshepsut at Deir el-Bahari, across the Nile from Luxor, a long relief sequence records an expedition she sent to the "Land of Punt" in about the fifteenth century BCE (her reign is conventionally dated to roughly 1479–1458 BCE). Punt lay somewhere to the south-east of Egypt — most scholars place it on the Red Sea coast of what is now Eritrea, eastern Sudan or Somalia, with some arguing for southern Arabia — and it was Egypt's source of aromatic resins. The reliefs show Egyptian ships arriving, the Puntite chief and queen, stilt-houses among incense trees, and the loading of the return cargo: gold, ebony, ivory, animals, heaps of resin and, most striking of all, living trees carried aboard in baskets slung from poles.

The inscriptions call these ntyw-trees, and an accompanying text says they were planted in the garden of the god Amun. About thirty are shown or counted in the reliefs; tree-pits that could have held them have been excavated on the temple's terraces. Whether ntyw meant frankincense (Boswellia) or myrrh (Commiphora) — or was used loosely for aromatic resin trees in general — is a question Egyptologists still debate, and the stylised carvings do not settle it. What is not in doubt is the intent: one of the earliest recorded plant transplantations in history was an attempt to bring the incense tree home, because Egyptian temples burned resin in enormous quantities — in the daily liturgy, in embalming, and in the fumigations that ancient medicine everywhere used against disease and bad air.

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The Incense Route: Arabia, the Nabataeans and Rome

For roughly a thousand years, from the early first millennium BCE to the second century CE, frankincense was the economic engine of southern Arabia. The trees grew in a narrow band of favourable country in Dhofar (southern Oman) and Hadramawt (eastern Yemen), where the summer monsoon brushes the coastal mountains, and in Somalia across the water. The resin was tapped by cutting the bark in the dry season, leaving the exudate to harden for some weeks, then scraping off the tears — a method essentially unchanged today. From there it moved overland along the Incense Route, a network of caravan tracks running some two thousand kilometres up the western side of the peninsula, through the oasis kingdoms of Saba (biblical Sheba), Ma'in, Qataban and Hadramawt, to the Nabataean capital at Petra and the Mediterranean at Gaza. The domestication of the dromedary as a pack animal, in the late second or early first millennium BCE, is generally regarded as the precondition for the whole trade.

Two UNESCO World Heritage listings now mark the ends of the route. In Oman, the "Land of Frankincense" (inscribed 2000) groups four sites in Dhofar: the ancient frankincense groves of Wadi Dawkah, where the trees still stand on their gravel plain; the caravan oasis of Shisr on the desert's edge; and the fortified ports of Khor Rori (ancient Sumhuram, founded by the Hadramawt kingdom) and Al-Baleed, from which resin was shipped to India and the Red Sea. At the other end, the "Incense Route — Desert Cities in the Negev" (inscribed 2005) preserves the Nabataean towns of Haluza, Mamshit, Avdat and Shivta with their forts and caravanserais, the last stages before the coast. The Nabataeans grew rich as middlemen between the third century BCE and the second century CE; when Rome annexed their kingdom in 106 CE, the empire took over the terminus of the most profitable luxury trade in its world. By the first century CE, when the Greek sailing manual known as the Periplus of the Erythraean Sea described the Arabian and Somali frankincense ports, much of the traffic had shifted to ships riding the monsoon winds directly to Egypt's Red Sea harbours.

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Herodotus, Theophrastus, Dioscorides and Pliny

Greek and Roman writers were fascinated by a substance that came from the edge of the known world. Herodotus, writing in the fifth century BCE, reports in Book 3 of his Histories that Arabia is the only country producing frankincense, myrrh, cassia and cinnamon, and passes on the traders' tale that the trees are guarded by small winged serpents driven off only by the smoke of storax — a story that says more about how jealously the Arabian middlemen guarded their sources than about botany. A century and a half later Theophrastus, Aristotle's successor and the founder of scientific botany, gave a sober account in Book 9 of his Enquiry into Plants, comparing merchants' reports with the observations of a Greek expedition along the Arabian coast in 324 BCE. He describes the trees, the tapping, and the way the harvested resin was piled in a temple of the Sabaeans, with each grower's heap labelled and a fixed share set aside for the god.

The first century CE produced the two texts that fixed frankincense in Western medicine for the next fifteen hundred years. Pedanius Dioscorides, a Greek physician who served with the Roman army, devoted an entry to libanos in Book 1 of his De Materia Medica, distinguishing grades by origin and describing frankincense, its bark, and its soot (the residue of burning it, collected for eye salves) as separate drugs; the Byzantine manuscripts of his work, such as the tenth-century codex now in the Morgan Library in New York, illustrate them under those Greek names. Dioscorides' uses — to warm, to close and dry wounds, to stop bleeding, in plasters and in eye and ear remedies — were repeated by Galen and copied through the medieval Arabic and Latin pharmacopoeias. Pliny the Elder, in Book 12 of his Natural History, is the great source on the trade itself: he names the Sabaean incense country, describes the two harvests (an autumn crop of white, purest tears and a lesser reddish spring crop), gives the route stage by stage with the tolls paid along it, and complains about the fortune Rome sent east each year for perfumes.

Frankincense also appears in the Hebrew scriptures as an ingredient of the temple incense (Exodus 30:34), and in the Gospel of Matthew (2:11) as one of the three gifts, with gold and myrrh, brought by the Magi to the infant Jesus — the verse that kept the word alive in European languages long after the Roman trade collapsed.

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Salai Guggal: Boswellia serrata in Ayurveda

India's own frankincense tree has a separate and much more medical history. In Ayurveda, the classical medical system of the subcontinent, the oleo-gum-resin of Boswellia serrata is shallaki (Sanskrit) or salai guggal (Hindi), the second word linking it to guggul, the related resin of Commiphora wightii, with which it was often paired. Modern pharmacological reviews trace its use to the classical compendia — the Charaka Samhita, whose surviving text is usually dated to the early centuries CE on foundations that are older, and the seventh-century Ashtanga Hridaya — though tracing an exact passage through the layers of a Sanskrit medical text is specialist work, and the honest summary is that shallaki is well attested in the Ayurvedic tradition rather than pinned to a single dated sentence.

What the tradition used it for is clearer. The resin, taken internally or applied in pastes and plasters, was a remedy for painful and swollen joints, and it is under that heading that the modern literature almost always introduces it. Ayurvedic sources also record it for coughs and breathlessness, for diarrhoea and dysentery, for skin complaints, ulcers and wounds, and as a "drying" agent in the humoural language of the system, in which shallaki is astringent and bitter and is held to pacify the kapha and pitta doshas — the constitutional principles of Ayurvedic theory, presented here as the framework its practitioners used, not as an account of how the resin acts. The resin was also a household incense and fumigant, and in the twentieth century salai gum became a bulk raw material for varnish, paint and paper, which is one reason the Indian forest departments held long tapping records when pharmacologists came looking.

Tapping in India follows the Arabian logic: mature trees are incised from November to May, before the monsoon, and a single tree yields on the order of a kilogram of gum in a season; Rajasthan, Gujarat and Madhya Pradesh have historically produced most of it. Which tree a given medieval "frankincense" shipment came from is often impossible to say — a caution worth keeping whenever an old text uses the bare word.

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Temple, Church and Household: Frankincense as Ritual and Remedy

For most of its history frankincense was first a sacred smoke and only second a medicine, and the two roles were never far apart. In Egypt, Mesopotamia, Israel, Greece and Rome, incense was burned to honour the gods, to accompany the dead and to purify spaces; the physician's fumigation against pestilence and the priest's censer were, in practice, the same act. Christianity inherited the practice from the temple and the synagogue, and by late antiquity incense — predominantly frankincense, alone or blended — had become part of the liturgy of the Eastern and Western churches, where it remains. Church demand sustained a modest trade through the medieval and early modern centuries after the Roman luxury market had gone; the Ethiopian church, sitting nearest the trees, used it most freely, and Ethiopian B. papyrifera remains its principal supply.

In the Islamic world frankincense (lubān) was chewed, burned in homes to perfume rooms and clothing, and prescribed by physicians who inherited Dioscorides and Galen; in Oman and Yemen it is still burned daily, and water in which the tears have soaked is drunk as a traditional tonic. In Somalia B. frereana resin is chewed as gum; in India salai goes into incense sticks and traditional joint formulas. These recurrent household uses — a paste for swellings, a smoke for coughs and the sick-room, a gum chewed for the teeth — are tradition, reported here as such; they do not show that the resin works, only that people who lived with the tree reached for it consistently in the same situations, which is the kind of pattern that made pharmacologists curious in the 1980s. When Boswellia returned to Western medicine at the end of the twentieth century it came not through the old apothecary tradition but from India, and from a modern question about an enzyme.

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From Resin to Molecule: The Boswellic Acids (1932–1992)

The acidic fraction that gives the resin much of its bulk was isolated from olibanum tears and named boswellic acid by Winterstein and Stein in 1932, and over the following decades it was shown to be a family of pentacyclic triterpene acids — large, five-ring molecules of the same broad class as the ursolic and oleanolic acids of apple peel and rosemary. The detailed structural work on B. serrata resin was largely Indian: a 1978 study by Pardhy and Bhattacharyya in the Indian Journal of Chemistry characterised the principal acids, including the 11-keto and acetylated forms, so that by 1980 the six major boswellic acids were known by name. The one that would matter most has an unlovely one: 3-O-acetyl-11-keto-β-boswellic acid, mercifully abbreviated AKBA.

The pharmacological chapter opened in Jammu. At the Regional Research Laboratory there, G. B. Singh and C. K. Atal published in 1986, in the journal Agents and Actions, a systematic study of an alcoholic extract of salai guggal in the standard animal models of inflammation and arthritis, reporting anti-inflammatory and anti-arthritic activity without the stomach-ulcerating effect of the conventional non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs). They described it, in the paper's title, as "a new non-steroidal anti-inflammatory agent." That paper moved Boswellia from the traditional-formula shelf onto the laboratory bench.

The decisive mechanistic step was taken in Germany. At the University of Tübingen, the pharmacologists Hasan Safayhi and Hermann P. T. Ammon and their colleagues asked how the resin worked, and in 1992 reported in the Journal of Pharmacology and Experimental Therapeutics that boswellic acids isolated from B. serrata were "novel, specific, nonredox inhibitors of 5-lipoxygenase." The distinction is important enough to spell out. Inflammation runs along two great enzyme pathways that both start from the fatty acid arachidonic acid: the cyclooxygenase (COX) pathway, which produces prostaglandins and is what aspirin and ibuprofen block, and the 5-lipoxygenase (5-LOX) pathway, which produces leukotrienes, the messengers behind much of the swelling in asthma, inflammatory bowel disease and chronic arthritis. Boswellic acids left COX largely alone and shut down 5-LOX, and they did so not by the crude chemical trick (mopping up the enzyme's iron) used by earlier experimental inhibitors but by binding a specific site on the enzyme. Among the acids tested, AKBA was the most potent. Over the following decade the Tübingen group mapped the structural requirements for that binding and showed that boswellic acids also inhibit human leukocyte elastase, a tissue-destroying enzyme released by white cells. That work is why a resin burned in the temples of Punt sits on pharmacy shelves today labelled "standardised to 65% boswellic acids."

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The Clinical Chapter: Trials, Reviews and Regulators

Human trials followed the mechanism. Through the 1990s German and Indian investigators ran small studies of a standardised B. serrata extract in the conditions where leukotrienes were thought to matter. Gupta and colleagues reported in 1997 that the gum resin performed comparably to the standard drug sulfasalazine in a small trial in ulcerative colitis, and in 1998 that it improved lung function and symptoms in a six-week, placebo-controlled study of forty people with bronchial asthma; Gerhardt and colleagues reported in 2001 that the extract was comparable to mesalazine in active Crohn's disease. All were small, and the later, larger and better-designed trial in Crohn's (2011) found the extract safe but no better than placebo at maintaining remission — a reminder that early positive studies must be tested again before they are believed.

The joints proved the more durable story, returning the resin to its oldest Ayurvedic indication. In 2003 Kimmatkar and colleagues in Nagpur published a randomised, double-blind, placebo-controlled crossover trial of a B. serrata extract in thirty people with knee osteoarthritis, reporting less pain, better bending of the knee and longer walking distance on the extract. In 2008 Sengupta and colleagues reported a ninety-day placebo-controlled trial of an AKBA-enriched extract in seventy-five knee-osteoarthritis patients, with significant, dose-related reductions in pain and improvements in function, some of them apparent within a week. These are the two trials every later review leans on. In 2014 the Cochrane Collaboration's systematic review of oral herbal therapies for osteoarthritis — the most independent assessment available — concluded that B. serrata was among the products with moderate-quality evidence of benefit and a low rate of adverse events, while stressing how small the trials were. A 2020 meta-analysis pooling seven randomised trials and 545 patients found improvements in pain, stiffness and function and recommended a trial of at least four weeks, again with the caveat that trial quality was medium to low.

The regulatory record is more modest than the marketing sometimes suggests, and it is worth stating plainly. The German Commission E, whose monographs of the 1980s and 1990s underpin much of European phytotherapy, did not assess Boswellia at all — there is no Commission E monograph, positive or negative. The European Medicines Agency's herbal committee has likewise not issued an EU monograph for it. The European Scientific Cooperative on Phytotherapy (ESCOP), a scientific rather than regulatory body, has published a monograph on Indian frankincense covering its use in painful arthritis and inflammatory bowel disease. In India the resin is an official Ayurvedic drug; in the United States it is sold as a dietary supplement, a category that requires no proof of efficacy. The clinical evidence has run ahead of formal recognition, and the trials remain small.

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Tradition, Evidence and a Threatened Tree

Few herbs show as clean a line from traditional use to modern hypothesis as Boswellia. Ayurveda used shallaki for swollen joints; the 1986 animal work found anti-arthritic activity; the 1992 enzyme work supplied a mechanism; the osteoarthritis trials of 2003 and 2008 tested it in people; and the independent reviews of 2014 and 2020 found the signal real but the studies small. That is what a promising but unfinished evidence base looks like. The respiratory and bowel uses tradition also recorded have fared less well in trials. And the incense half of the story continues almost unchanged: the churches of Ethiopia and the households of Dhofar still burn the tears Hatshepsut's sailors carried home.

The final chapter is ecological, and it is recent. Frankincense is still almost entirely a wild-harvested product, and the trees are in trouble. Field studies in northern Ethiopia published in the Journal of Applied Ecology by Groenendijk, Bongers and colleagues (2011) found that populations of B. papyrifera — the world's main commercial source — had essentially stopped regenerating: seedlings failed to become saplings under grazing and fire, adult trees were dying at high rates, and heavy tapping was draining the survivors. A 2019 analysis in Nature Sustainability, drawing on inventories of more than twenty thousand trees across twenty-three populations, projected that frankincense production could halve within twenty years without changes in management. The Arabian tree, B. sacra, is assessed as Near Threatened on the IUCN Red List, on data from 1998, and several Socotran species are considered at higher risk. In India, B. serrata is widespread and not regarded as endangered, though the supplement trade has put a new pressure on a tree that for most of its history supplied only incense.

The practical lesson of the history is the scientific one. Boswellia earned its place through a well-described mechanism and a handful of genuine trials in osteoarthritis, not through antiquity; claims that lean on the Magi rather than on Safayhi and Kimmatkar are marketing. The evidence is set out on the Boswellia Benefits pages, and the joint trials in detail under Joint and Osteoarthritis.

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Key Research Papers

The list gathers the landmarks of Boswellia's scientific history — the first modern pharmacology, the 5-lipoxygenase discovery, the first osteoarthritis trials, the independent reviews, the taxonomic revision of the Arabian trees and the ecological studies. Historical primary texts (Herodotus, Theophrastus, Dioscorides, Pliny, the Ayurvedic compendia) are named in the article, not cited here.

1. Singh GB, Atal CK (1986). Pharmacology of an extract of salai guggal ex-Boswellia serrata, a new non-steroidal anti-inflammatory agent. Agents and Actions. — doi:10.1007/BF01965005
2. Safayhi H, Mack T, Sabieraj J, Anazodo MI, Subramanian LR, Ammon HP (1992). Boswellic acids: novel, specific, nonredox inhibitors of 5-lipoxygenase. The Journal of Pharmacology and Experimental Therapeutics. — PubMed PMID: 1602379
3. Ammon HP (2006). Boswellic acids in chronic inflammatory diseases. Planta Medica. — PubMed PMID: 17024588
4. Kimmatkar N, Thawani V, Hingorani L, Khiyani R (2003). Efficacy and tolerability of Boswellia serrata extract in treatment of osteoarthritis of knee — a randomized double blind placebo controlled trial. Phytomedicine. — PubMed PMID: 12622457
5. Sengupta K, Alluri KV, Satish AR, et al. (2008). A double blind, randomized, placebo controlled study of the efficacy and safety of 5-Loxin for treatment of osteoarthritis of the knee. Arthritis Research & Therapy. — doi:10.1186/ar2461
6. Cameron M, Chrubasik S (2014). Oral herbal therapies for treating osteoarthritis. Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews. — doi:10.1002/14651858.CD002947.pub2
7. Yu G, Xiang W, Zhang T, Zeng L, Yang K, Li J (2020). Effectiveness of Boswellia and Boswellia extract for osteoarthritis patients: a systematic review and meta-analysis. BMC Complementary Medicine and Therapies. — doi:10.1186/s12906-020-02985-6
8. Siddiqui MZ (2011). Boswellia serrata, a potential antiinflammatory agent: an overview. Indian Journal of Pharmaceutical Sciences. — PubMed PMID: 22457547
9. Thulin M, Warfa AM (1987). The Frankincense Trees (Boswellia spp., Burseraceae) of Northern Somalia and Southern Arabia. Kew Bulletin. — doi:10.2307/4110063
10. Groenendijk P, Eshete A, Sterck FJ, Zuidema PA, Bongers F (2011). Limitations to sustainable frankincense production: blocked regeneration, high adult mortality and declining populations. Journal of Applied Ecology. — doi:10.1111/j.1365-2664.2011.02078.x
11. Bongers F, Groenendijk P, Bekele T, et al. (2019). Frankincense in peril. Nature Sustainability. — doi:10.1038/s41893-019-0322-2

PubMed Topic Searches

1. PubMed: Boswellia ethnobotany and traditional use
2. PubMed: Boswellia history of pharmacology
3. PubMed: Boswellia serrata osteoarthritis trials

External Authoritative Resources

• UNESCO World Heritage — Land of Frankincense (Oman)
• UNESCO World Heritage — Incense Route: Desert Cities in the Negev
• International Plant Names Index — Boswellia Roxb. ex Colebr. (1807)
• PubMed — All research on Boswellia / boswellic acids

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Connections

• All Herbs
• Boswellia Hub
• Boswellia Benefits
• Boswellia for Joints and Osteoarthritis
• Myrrh
• Turmeric
• Willow Bark
• Devil's Claw
• Osteoarthritis
• Asthma
• Crohn's Disease

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