Place · Arabian Sea entrepot · Yemen
Aden
Also known as Adan, Aden, Eudaemon Arabia
The volcanic harbour at the mouth of the Red Sea through which almost all Indian cargo bound for Egypt and the Mediterranean passed. Under the Rasulids and their predecessors it levied the customs that made Yemen rich, and the Cairo Geniza letters show Gujarati and Malabar goods and Jewish India traders moving through it constantly.
- Function
- Trade & production
- Confidence
- Established / referenced
- Location
- 12.786, 45.019
Worth knowing
Albuquerque failed to take Aden in 1513, and that failure is why the Red Sea stayed open and the old Venice–Cairo spice route survived another century alongside the Portuguese Cape route. The British took it in 1839 and administered it from Bombay for ninety-eight years.
Connections (2)
- Craft tradition ofBeypore
The urus built at Beypore in Nilambur teak carried the Arabian Sea trade to Aden, Muscat and the Gulf, and are still built for Gulf owners by Khalasi shipwrights working without drawings. The craft outlasted the trade that created it: the vessel type is the same one the Periplus and the Geniza letters describe, still in production.
- Alternative toHormuz
Aden and Hormuz were the two exits from the Indian Ocean, one to the Red Sea and Egypt, the other to the Gulf, Basra and the Levant. Which one a cargo took depended on which sultan was taxing less and which route was at war. Albuquerque took Hormuz and failed at Aden, which split the traffic for a century: Portuguese Gulf, Muslim Red Sea.
On these journeys
Sources
Wikipedia, “Aden”. S.D. Goitein and Mordechai Friedman, India Traders of the Middle Ages: Documents from the Cairo Geniza (2008); Casson, The Periplus Maris Erythraei.
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