Place · imperial capital · Italy
Rome
The market that made the monsoon trade worth running. Pliny complained that India, China and Arabia drained a hundred million sesterces a year from the empire, and Roman gold coin hoards turn up across south India in numbers that make the complaint credible.
- Function
- Authority & administration
- Confidence
- Established / referenced
- Location
- 41.903, 12.496
Worth knowing
An Indian embassy reached Augustus about 20 BCE, and a monk in its train burned himself alive at Athens. Roman pepper was stored in dedicated warehouses; the Vienna papyrus records a single Muziris cargo insured for a sum that would have bought a large Egyptian estate.
Connections (9)
- Trade routeMuziris / Pattanam
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.
- TransmissionBarlaam and Josaphat
Barlaam and Josaphat is the life of the Buddha retold as a Christian saint's life: the sheltered prince, the old man, the sick man, the corpse, the renunciation. The name travelled Bodhisattva to Bodisav in Persian, Budhasaf and then Yudasaf in Arabic, Iodasaph in Georgian, Ioasaph in Greek and Josaphat in Latin. Both Josaphat and Barlaam were entered in the Roman martyrology and the Greek church still keeps the day — so the Buddha has been, technically, a canonised Christian saint.
- Trade routeAntioch
Antioch was where the overland route met the sea and where Rome's eastern luxury trade was assembled. Pliny's complaint that India, China and Arabia drained a hundred million sesterces a year from the empire is about goods that passed through this city, and the Senate legislated repeatedly against silk on the ground that it left the wearer effectively naked. Nobody in either city knew where it came from.
- Trade routeBegram
The Begram hoard is the single clearest demonstration that the Silk Road worked, because the Roman glass from Alexandria, the Chinese lacquer and the Indian ivory were all stacked in the same two rooms in the Hindu Kush. Nothing else in the archaeology of the route puts the three ends of it in one place, and it is why a Kushan summer capital in Afghanistan is on every map of ancient trade.
- Trade routeAlexandria
Cargo from India was landed on the Red Sea, carried by camel to the Nile, shipped to Alexandria and taxed there at the tetarte, a quarter of its assessed value, before going on to Rome. The Muziris papyrus in Vienna is a loan contract for exactly this route, and shows an Alexandrian financier underwriting a single Indian voyage.
- Trade routePompeii
The Pompeii yakshi and the Roman gold hoards of south India are the two halves of Pliny's complaint. Indian luxury goods reached Italian houses; Roman coin reached Tamil villages in enough quantity to be buried there in pots. The balance ran against Rome, which is why a Roman writer treats an ivory ornament as a symptom of moral decline.
- AnalogueCERN, Geneva
Rome received Indian pepper and ivory and complained about the cost; CERN received a Nataraja and put it on a plinth. Two thousand years apart, the two European institutions at the end of this network mark the change from India as a source of goods to India as a partner in an experiment — and the 2004 gift was chosen precisely to make that point.
- Trade routeKodumanal
Kodumanal made crucible steel and worked beryl, and both went west. Roman writers prized Indian beryl and the crucible steel ingots of south India and Sri Lanka became Damascus blades. An interior Tamil craft village is therefore part of the Mediterranean record, and the Iron Age south is best documented not by its own cities but by other people's imports.
- TransmissionKalīla wa Dimna
The Persian Anvar-i Suhayli was turned into French in 1644 as Le Livre des lumieres, ou la conduite des roys, composee par le sage Pilpay indien. La Fontaine's second collection of 1678 credits Pilpay by name. Pilpay is the Sanskrit Vidyapati, worn down through Pahlavi, Arabic and Persian into a French author's name for a book he could not read.
On these journeys
Sources
Wikipedia, “Rome”. Archaeological Survey of India and State Archaeology monument records, and the standard regional literature.
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