Place · Red Sea monsoon port · Egypt
Myos Hormos / Quseir al-Qadim
The Egyptian Red Sea port from which the monsoon fleets left for India, and the place where the Indian end of that trade is legible in a way it rarely is anywhere. Excavation at Quseir al-Qadim has produced potsherds inscribed in Tamil-Brahmi — personal names scratched on storage jars by the people who owned their contents — along with Indian pepper, teak and rice. Strabo says a hundred and twenty ships a year sailed from here for India under Augustus.
- Function
- Trade & production
- Confidence
- Mixed / layered
- Location
- 26.157, 34.242
Worth knowing
The sherds carry names, not cargo manifests: somebody wrote his own name in Tamil on a jar in an Egyptian port, which is the least official and most direct evidence that Tamil merchants were physically present rather than trading through intermediaries.
Tamil-Brahmi finds are documented at this port and at Berenike, both on the Red Sea coast. Reports of Tamil, Sanskrit or Prakrit inscriptions in the Valley of the Kings are not substantiated in the published record.
Connections (2)
- In the same set asBerenike
The two Egyptian Red Sea ports where the Indian end of the monsoon trade is physically legible. Both Myos Hormos at Quseir al-Qadim and Berenike further south have produced potsherds inscribed in Tamil-Brahmi — personal names scratched by owners onto storage jars — along with Indian pepper, teak, rice and coconut. Strabo says a hundred and twenty ships a year left for India from Myos Hormos under Augustus. The sherds are the difference between knowing the trade existed and knowing that Tamil-speaking people were standing on that quay.
- Maritime routeArikamedu
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
Wikipedia, “Myos Hormos”. D. Peacock and L. Blue, Myos Hormos–Quseir al-Qadim excavation reports (2006, 2011); Iravatham Mahadevan on the Tamil-Brahmi sherds; Strabo, Geography II.5.12.
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