Journey
Indo-Roman & monsoon trade
Once the timing of the monsoon was understood, a ship could leave the Egyptian Red Sea in July and be on the Malabar coast in forty days. For three centuries pepper, gems, beryl, ivory, steel and cotton went west, and Roman gold came east in quantities that worried Roman writers.
Stops (18)
- Periplus of the Erythraean Sea · c. 40–70 CE
A Greek sailing manual by an anonymous merchant of Roman Egypt, listing every port from the Red Sea to the Ganges with its harbour, its ruler, what sells there and what to bring. Most of Indian coastal archaeology consists of trying to match excavated sites to the place-names in this one book.
- Alexandria · Ptolemaic and Roman Egypt
The Mediterranean end of the chain. Cargo landed at Berenike or Myos Hormos crossed the desert by camel to Coptos, went down the Nile, and was taxed at Alexandria at a quarter of its value before shipping to Rome. The Library's geographers wrote about India with merchants' information. Ptolemy's Geography, compiled here, maps the Indian coast from sailors' reports.
- Berenike · the monsoon port
Excavation at this Red Sea port has turned up black pepper by the sackful, Indian teak reused as building timber, and potsherds scratched with Tamil-Brahmi names. It is the clearest physical proof that the crossing was routine rather than exceptional, and that Indian crews were on the Egyptian coast. Two Roman legions were stationed on this desert road to protect the caravans.
- 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 coin hoards across south India are numerous enough to make the complaint credible rather than rhetorical. Tiberius told the Senate the empire's silver was going to foreigners for stones.
- Pompeii · before 79 CE
A small carved ivory yakshi figure, made in the Deccan and used as a furniture leg, was found in this Roman town. Vesuvius supplies what archaeology almost never has: an absolute date before which the object must already have travelled from central India to the Bay of Naples. Nothing in any text records the journey it made.
- 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 receiving a monument inscribed as an Indian from Bargosa — that is, from Bharuch. The trade carried people as well as cargo. The trade carried people, and occasionally their deaths, as well as cargo.
- Barbarikon / Banbhore · the Indus mouth
Barbarikon in the Periplus, at the mouth of the Indus, taking cargo upriver to Minnagara and the Saka-Parthian courts of Sindh. Banbhore is the leading candidate for its site and also holds one of the subcontinent's earliest mosques, so the same harbour serves the Roman and the early Arab trade.
- Bharuch (Barygaza) · Barygaza
The Narmada-mouth emporium, the largest port of western India in the Periplus, which sent pilots out to bring ships over the bar in a tidal estuary that could strand them. It exported cotton, long pepper, ivory and agate, and imported wine, glass, copper and Roman coin. Ptolemy and the Periplus both place it precisely, and the town is still a working river port today.
- Sopara · Sopara
Western India's great early port, north of Bombay, named in the Periplus and the findspot of an Ashokan rock edict — the two together date the harbour's importance back three centuries before the Roman trade. It fed the rock-cut monasteries inland, whose inscriptions name its merchants as donors. Its shippers are named as donors in the caves at Kanheri, a few hours inland.
- Kalyan · Kalliena
A creek port at the head of the Ulhas estuary behind Bombay, named in the Periplus and again by Cosmas Indicopleustes five centuries later. Its trade paid for the caves at Kanheri a few kilometres inland, whose donative inscriptions record gifts from its shippers, smiths and merchants. Cosmas Indicopleustes, writing in the sixth century, still lists it as a harbour of the Konkan.
- Bhokardan · the workshop town
A Satavahana-period town in the Jalna district excavated for its ivory carving, bead making and shell working. It is one of the production centres behind the objects that went west from the Konkan ports, and it shows that the trade was manufacturing inland, not only exchange at the shore. The trade was manufacturing inland, not simply exchange at the shore.
- Muziris / Pattanam · the pepper port
Muziris of the Periplus and of Pliny, where Roman gold left the empire and pepper was loaded. Pattanam on the Periyar is the leading candidate for its site, with Roman amphorae, Mediterranean glass and a wharf; the identification is strong but not settled, which is why the repository marks it contested.
- Korkai · the pearl fishery
The Pandya port on the Tamraparni estuary that controlled the Gulf of Mannar pearl banks — the pearls that the Periplus, Pliny and later the Arab geographers all single out. Excavation has found Roman coin and rouletted ware, and the fishery itself was worked continuously into the twentieth century. Pliny reckoned pearls the most valuable commodity on earth, and this is where they came from.
- Kodumanal · the bead and steel town
An early historic craft settlement in the Tamil interior making beryl and carnelian beads, shell bangles and crucible steel, with graffiti-marked pottery and a megalithic cemetery beside it. The beryl the Romans prized came from mines near here rather than from the coast. The beryl the Romans prized came from mines in this district rather than from anywhere on the coast, and the site's megalithic cemetery sits directly beside the workshops.
- Arikamedu · Poduke
Roman amphorae, Arretine ware, a bead industry and a brick warehouse on the Coromandel — the clearest excavated Indo-Roman site in India, dug by Wheeler in 1945. Poduke in the Periplus and Podouke in Ptolemy are generally identified with it, two kilometres from what became French Pondicherry. Wheeler dug it in 1945 and used its stratified Mediterranean pottery to date the whole south Indian sequence.
- Kaveripattinam (Puhar) · Puhar
The Sangam-age Chola port of the Silappadikaram, with a foreign quarter the poems describe in detail, largely taken by the sea. Its eroded and submerged remains are now worked as coastal marine archaeology, which is a different discipline from the one that dug Arikamedu sixty kilometres south. That is a different discipline from the one that dug Arikamedu sixty kilometres to the south.
- Tamralipta / Tamluk · Tamralipta
The Bay of Bengal port at the Ganges mouth, the eastern end of the Periplus's coast and the harbour from which Faxian sailed for Lanka in the fifth century. Ashoka's mission to Lanka is also said to have left from here, so the same estuary carried the Roman trade and the Buddhist one.
- Mantai · the Palk Strait hinge
The pearl and cinnamon port at the northern tip of Lanka, where the Bay of Bengal and the Arabian Sea traffic met and cargo was transhipped rather than sailed around the island. Roman, Sasanian and Chinese material has all been excavated from the same levels. The transhipment across the Jaffna isthmus, rather than a voyage around the island, is what made the town worth having.