Place · Indo-Roman trading port · India
Arikamedu
The excavated Roman trading settlement at Ariyankuppam in Puducherry (Union Territory of Puducherry), the clearest excavated Indo-Roman contact site on the Coromandel coast. Mortimer Wheeler's 1945 excavation and subsequent French work recovered Roman amphorae, Arretine ware (red-slip Italian pottery of the 1st c. BCE-1st c. CE), stamped Mediterranean lamps, Roman coins, and a bead-grinding industry producing carnelian and glass beads for export back to the Mediterranean. The site peaked in the 1st-2nd centuries CE as a secondary Roman emporium alongside Muziris. Arikamedu may be the Poduke of the Periplus. The 1990s French excavations under Vimala Begley reconfirmed the Roman dating.
- Function
- Trade & production
- Confidence
- Established / referenced
- Location
- 11.893, 79.817
Connections (6)
- Trade routeMuziris / Pattanam
Muziris on the Malabar coast and Arikamedu on the Coromandel are the two ends of the Indo-Roman trade, on opposite sides of the peninsula, and the difference between them is instructive. Muziris is known from texts — the Periplus, Pliny, the Peutinger Table, the Muziris papyrus — and its site is still argued over; Arikamedu is known from excavation, with Roman amphorae, Arretine ware and a bead industry, and hardly appears in any text at all.
- Trade routeMantai
Mantai at the Palk Strait was the hinge between the Arabian Sea and the Bay of Bengal, where a ship that did not want to round Sri Lanka transhipped its cargo — which is why so small a place mattered so much, and why it has Roman, Persian, Chinese and Indian material in the same levels. Arikamedu on the Coromandel is a few days' sail north, and the two were the working ends of the same eastern circuit.
- Trade routeWootz steel region, Telangana
Crucible steel ingots made in the Deccan left through the Coromandel ports for Persia and the Levant, where they were forged into the blades Europe called Damascus. The trade is attested from the early centuries CE onward and was still running in the seventeenth; what ended it, around 1750, was probably the exhaustion of the specific ore with its trace vanadium rather than any loss of skill. Arikamedu's own industry was beads, but the export mechanism was the same.
- Trade routeÓc Eo
Óc Eo in the Mekong delta and Arikamedu on the Coromandel are the two excavated ends of the early maritime route, and they have the same things in them — Roman coins and glass, Indian carnelian and gold intaglios, rouletted ware. The pottery in particular is diagnostic: the same rouletted dishes turn up at Arikamedu, in Sri Lanka, at Óc Eo and in Java, which is the single clearest archaeological trace of the Bay of Bengal traffic.
- Site adjacencyKaveripattinam (Puhar)
Arikamedu and Kaveripattinam are sixty kilometres apart on the Coromandel and are the two ends of the same problem: one is a well-excavated Indo-Roman station with stratified Mediterranean pottery, the other a Sangam-poem port largely eroded into the sea. Between them they show why the Tamil evidence is literary in one place and archaeological in the other.
- Maritime routeMyos Hormos / Quseir al-Qadim
The two ends of the monsoon run. Arikamedu on the Coromandel coast has Roman amphorae, Arretine ware and Mediterranean glass in stratified levels; Myos Hormos has Indian teak, pepper, rice and Tamil-Brahmi graffiti. A ship left Egypt in July with the south-west monsoon and came back with the north-east, which made the round trip predictable and therefore financeable — and the Muziris papyrus shows the scale of the credit involved. Each port holds the other's rubbish, which is the most reliable evidence there is.
On these journeys
Sources
Arikamedu excavation reports, Wheeler 1946
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