Place · Roman-trade port · India

Muziris / Pattanam

/musiri/

Also known as 1341 Periyar flood — Muziris/Cochin transition, 1341 flood

Function

Trade & production

Confidence

Qualified / contested

Location

10.160, 76.200

Worth knowing

A great Periyar flood in 1341 silted the old harbour and opened Cochin's — shifting Kerala's trade from Muziris to a new port.

Connections (9)

• Trade routeArikamedu

  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.

• Shared site withKodungallur & Mar Thoma church

  The Thomas tradition puts the apostle's landing at Kodungallur in 52 CE, which is precisely where the Roman pepper trade was running at the time — so whatever one makes of the tradition, it places the arrival at the one point on the Indian coast that had regular annual sailings from the Red Sea. The Saint Thomas Christian community is demonstrably very old regardless of how the founding story is judged, and its East Syriac liturgy points to a Persian rather than a Mediterranean connection.

• Trade routeKeladi & Ikkeri

  The Keladi Nayakas of the Malnad controlled the pepper of the western Ghats and the routes down to the Kanara ports, and fought the Portuguese over the terms on which it could be bought — a successor state of Vijayanagara whose whole strategic position rested on one commodity. It is the same trade that had made Muziris a thousand years earlier, moved north along the coast as the older harbours silted.

• Excavation of sitePattanam Archaeological Site

  Pattanam on the Periyar, excavated since 2007, is the leading candidate for the site of Muziris: Mediterranean amphorae, Roman glass, a wharf, a dugout canoe and beads in early historic levels, on a mound in the right general place. The identification is not settled and has been argued over sharply, partly because the excavation has been read politically. What is not in doubt is that a substantial Roman-period port stood here.

• Trade routeRome

  Roman fleets crossed from the Red Sea on the south-west monsoon to Muziris on the Kerala coast and came back on the north-east, one round trip a year, carrying out pepper, beryl, ivory and pearls and paying largely in gold coin. Pliny put the drain at a hundred million sesterces a year and called it the price of luxury. The Vienna papyrus records one Muziris cargo valued at about seven million sesterces — enough to buy a large Egyptian estate, on one ship.

• Canonised by textPeriplus of the Erythraean Sea

  The Periplus gives Muziris a paragraph: the pepper, the great ships from Arabia and Greece, the river, the distance from Tyndis. Pliny adds that it was not a desirable port because of pirates nearby. Those two passages are why a mound at Pattanam is excavated and argued over, and why the repository can put a Roman trade port on the Kerala coast at all.

• Maritime routeBerenike

  Ships left Berenike in July on the south-west monsoon and made the Malabar coast in about forty days, returning in December or January on the north-east. Berenike's excavated black pepper, teak and Tamil-Brahmi graffiti and Muziris's amphorae and Roman coin are the two ends of the same voyage, four thousand kilometres apart.

• Power passed toMattancherry Palace, Kochi

  The Periyar flood of 1341 is traditionally credited with silting Muziris and cutting the gap that made Cochin's harbour. Whether one flood did it or the barrier-bar system rearranged itself over decades, the commercial result is clear: the Roman-era pepper port disappears from the record and the Portuguese, Dutch and English all build at Cochin instead.

• Maritime routeAdulis

  Aksum traded directly with the Indian west coast, and Cosmas Indicopleustes is the witness — a Greek-Egyptian merchant known to history as the one who sailed to India, who passed through Adulis in the sixth century and describes both Aksum's commerce and the Indian trade in pepper and silk. Muziris on the Malabar coast was the pepper port that end of the route. Aksumite coins have been reported from Indian west-coast finds, which if confirmed would put Aksumite money in Indian hands rather than only Aksumite ships in Indian ports.

On these journeys

• Indo-Roman & monsoon trade
• Ports transformed by rivers, sediment & coastlines
• Indian port cities — the coast itself

Sources

Pattanam excavation reports; Periplus of the Erythraean Sea

• Wikipedia