Journey

India connected to the world

Forty centuries of India in other people's places: Harappan beads in a Sumerian royal grave, Rigvedic gods in a Hittite treaty, a Deccan ivory buried at Pompeii, Indian numerals at Cordoba, Indian steel forged at Damascus, a Sanskrit chair at Oxford and a Nataraja standing outside a particle accelerator in Geneva.

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Stops (29)

Dilmun / Qalʿat al-Bahrain · c. 2200 BCE
The Bronze Age harbour on Bahrain, the Dilmun of Mesopotamian texts, and the transhipment point between the Indus and Sumer. Harappan weights, Indus-style seals and a local hybrid seal type have all been excavated there — an intermediary that adopted both sides' systems of measurement. Mesopotamian texts call the source of the goods Meluhha, which is generally taken to mean the Indus.
Ur · c. 2500 BCE
The Sumerian city whose royal graves, dug by Woolley in the 1920s, held long carnelian beads etched in white — made on the Gujarat coast and carried up the Gulf. Harappan seals and cubical stone weights have been found in the same city. It is the oldest documented Indian export anywhere.
Mitanni · c. 1380 BCE
A Hurrian-speaking kingdom of northern Syria whose ruling class carried Indo-Aryan names — Tushratta, Artatama, Shattiwaza — and whose treaty with the Hittites swears by Mitra, Varuna, Indra and the Nasatya twins. The gods of the Rigveda appear in a Bronze Age Anatolian state document. A Hittite horse-training manual from the same archive counts its training circuits in Indo-Aryan numerals.
Tell el-Amarna · c. 1350 BCE
Akhenaten's capital, whose clay-tablet archive is the fullest record of Late Bronze Age diplomacy — letters in Akkadian between Egypt, Babylon, Assyria, the Hittites and Mitanni. The Mitanni correspondence in it is how the Indo-Aryan names of that dynasty are known at all. Tushratta's letters to Amenhotep III about a marriage alliance are the fullest of them, and they are written in Akkadian by a king with a Sanskrit name.
Babylon · c. 305 BCE
Seleucus ruled from Babylon and Seleucia when he marched east against Chandragupta Maurya, lost, and settled: he ceded the eastern satrapies as far as Gandhara, took five hundred war elephants in exchange, and concluded a marriage alliance. Megasthenes was his ambassador to Pataliputra afterwards. Megasthenes went to Pataliputra as his ambassador afterwards, and his lost Indika is quoted by every later Greek writer on India.
Athens · c. 20 BCE
Strabo and Dio Cassius record an Indian embassy reaching Augustus, and one of its party — a sramana the Greeks called Zarmanochegas — burning himself alive at Athens and being given a monument inscribed as an Indian from Bargosa, which is Bharuch. It is the only inscription in Europe that names an Indian port as somebody's home town, and the man it commemorates chose to die in public.
Berenike · 1st century CE
The Roman Red Sea port from which ships left for India on the monsoon. Excavation has turned up black pepper by the sackful, Indian teak reused as building timber, and potsherds scratched with Tamil-Brahmi names — Indian crews, not only Indian cargo, on the Egyptian coast. Ships left in July on the south-west monsoon and came back in December or January on the north-east.
Alexandria · the Mediterranean terminus
The Ptolemaic capital, with the largest library in the ancient world and the customs house that taxed Indian goods at a quarter of their value. The Muziris papyrus, a loan contract for a single Indian voyage, is an Alexandrian document, and the city's geographers wrote about India on merchants' information.
Rome · the market
Pliny complained that India, China and Arabia drained a hundred million sesterces a year out of the empire and that pepper was bought by weight for no reason but appetite. Roman gold hoards across south India are numerous enough to make the complaint arithmetic rather than rhetoric. South Indian hoards of Roman aurei and denarii run into the tens of thousands of coins.
Pompeii · before 79 CE
A carved ivory yakshi, made in the Deccan and used as a furniture leg, was found in this Roman town. Vesuvius supplies what archaeology almost never does: an absolute date before which the object had already reached the Bay of Naples from central India. The figure was the leg of a piece of furniture, which is the ordinary fate of an imported luxury.
Aksum · 3rd–6th century
The capital of an East African kingdom that minted its own gold coinage and traded across the Red Sea and the western Indian Ocean, exchanging ivory, gold and emeralds for Indian cotton, iron and spices through the Konkan and Malabar ports. Aksumite coins have been found in south India. Aksumite gold coins have been excavated in south India, so the exchange ran both ways.
Gimhae · 48 CE by tradition
The old capital of the Geumgwan Gaya confederacy in southern Korea, holding the tomb attributed to Queen Heo Hwang-ok, who the thirteenth-century Samguk Yusa says arrived by sea from a country it calls Ayuta and married King Suro. Modern Ayodhya and Gimhae have a formal sister-city relationship on the strength of it.
Balkh · the Bactrian hinge
Balkh sat where the routes from Iran, the Oxus steppe and India met, and the Kushans ruled from both sides of it. Buddhism moved north through this city, and Islam came south through it. Ibn Battuta found it still in ruins a century after the Mongols destroyed it. Islam then came south through the same city, in the other direction.
Ai-Khanoum · c. 300–145 BCE
A Hellenistic city on the Oxus with a gymnasium, a theatre, Greek inscriptions and an Indian sundial, abandoned when the nomads came. It shows what the Greek and Iranian and Indian interfaces of the post-Alexander world actually looked like on the ground rather than in a text. It was excavated by a French mission in the 1960s and 70s and thoroughly looted after 1992.
Begram · 1st–2nd century CE
The Kushan site whose sealed storerooms held Roman bronzes, Chinese lacquer, Alexandrian glass and Indian ivory panels in one place. It is the single best physical demonstration that the overland and maritime networks were one system, and it was looted and shelled in the 1990s. The storerooms were sealed, which is why the assemblage survived intact; the site was shelled and looted in the 1990s.
Damascus · from the early centuries CE
The market and forging centre that gave its name to Damascus steel, whose watered surface pattern comes from crucible steel ingots imported from south India and Sri Lanka, where the technique had been worked out centuries earlier. The blade is Syrian; the metal is Tamil and Sinhala. The technique was lost in the eighteenth century and only reconstructed by metallurgists in the twentieth.
Córdoba · 10th century
The Umayyad capital of al-Andalus, whose library and translators carried Arabic mathematics, astronomy and medicine into Latin Europe — and with them the decimal place-value numerals that Arabic writers called al-arqam al-hindiyya, the Indian figures. Europe learned to count from India by way of Spain. Al-Khwarizmi's treatise on Indian reckoning is the text Cordoba's translators passed on to Latin Europe.
Aden · the Red Sea gate
Aden's customs made Yemen rich on Indian cargo bound for Egypt, and the Cairo Geniza letters show Jewish India traders living between Aden, Mangalore and Malabar for years at a time. It is the best-documented merchant network of the medieval Indian Ocean, and it is documented in a synagogue storeroom.
Quanzhou · 1281
The great southern Chinese port of the Song and Yuan, with a Tamil inscription recording a Shiva temple dedicated by a merchant, and the temple's carvings now built into a mosque and a museum. It is the eastern terminus of the Tamil merchant-guild network. Its Tamil merchant guilds had a standing presence in the city, negotiated as corporate bodies, and left inscriptions in two languages.
Mount Kōya · founded 816
The monastic mountain south of Osaka founded by Kukai as the seat of Shingon Buddhism, where esoteric ritual brought from Tang China — and behind that from India — has been practised continuously for twelve hundred years. Sanskrit mantras are still chanted there in Japanese transcription. Sanskrit mantras are still chanted there in Japanese transcription, twelve hundred years after they arrived.
Nagasaki · 1597
The Japanese port opened to Portuguese trade in 1571 and administered ecclesiastically from Goa. Twenty-six Christians were crucified above the city in 1597, among them Goncalo Garcia, born at Vasai near Bombay — the first person born in India to be canonised. He had travelled the eastern half of the Portuguese carreira as a merchant before he was crucified at the end of it, and he was canonised in 1862.
Oxford · 1832 and after
The Boden chair of Sanskrit, founded in 1832 and fought over in a public election in 1860 between Monier Monier-Williams and Max Muller, made Oxford the institutional centre of British Sanskrit scholarship and of the fifty volumes of the Sacred Books of the East. The chair had been endowed explicitly to help convert India, and was won by the candidate less interested in doing so.
Weimar · 1791
The small German court town where Goethe read Forster's German version of William Jones's translation of Kalidasa's Shakuntala and wrote a four-line eulogy that became the most quoted European response to Indian literature. German Indology, and with it comparative philology, starts in this reading. German Indology, and with it comparative philology and the whole Indo-European hypothesis, starts in that reading.
CERN, Geneva · 2004
Outside the Microcosm building at the European particle physics laboratory stands a two-metre bronze Nataraja, given by the Government of India in 2004 to mark India's long association with CERN. It is the most recent entry in this network, and the one that is entirely a gift rather than a trade.
Alexander of Macedon · 326 BCE
He crossed the Indus, allied with Ambhi of Taxila, beat Porus on the Jhelum and turned back at the Beas when his army refused to go on. Arrian says he saw crocodiles in the Indus and beans like Egyptian ones on its banks and concluded the river was the upper Nile, which is part of why he sailed down it. He held nothing.
Ambhi of Taxila · the alliance
The ruler of Taxila, Omphis or Taxiles in the Greek accounts, who submitted before the Indus crossing, supplied elephants, five thousand troops and provisions, and was confirmed as satrap of his own kingdom. His motive was his quarrel with Porus. Without this alliance there is no march to the Hydaspes, and Chandragupta absorbed the kingdom within a generation.
Seleucus I Nicator · c. 305 BCE
Alexander's cavalry officer, who took the eastern satrapies and ruled them from Babylon, marched against Chandragupta Maurya, lost, and settled: everything as far as Gandhara and Arachosia for five hundred war elephants and a marriage alliance. Those elephants then decided Ipsus in 301 and so the shape of the Hellenistic world.
Megasthenes · resident at Pataliputra
Seleucus's ambassador to Chandragupta, and the author of an Indika that is lost and survives only in quotation by Strabo, Arrian, Diodorus and Pliny. He wrote that he had seen the great cities of the east, Susa and Ecbatana among them, and that none of them matched Pataliputra — fourteen kilometres of timber wall, five hundred and seventy towers, sixty-four gates.
Bindusāra · c. 297–273 BCE
Chandragupta's son and Ashoka's father, whom the Greeks called Amitrochates. Athenaeus preserves a letter in which he asks Antiochus I of Syria for sweet wine, dried figs and a Greek philosopher; Antiochus sent the wine and the figs and replied that Greek law did not permit the sale of philosophers. Deimachus was Antiochus's resident ambassador at his court.