Tradition · maritime institution
The Chola fleet and the merchant guilds
Not a state navy in the modern sense but a combination: royal ships, and the armed merchant corporations — the Ayyavole Five Hundred and the Manigramam — whose agents, capital and ports made the overseas campaigns possible and whose inscriptions turn up from Sumatra to south China.
- Function
- Trade & production
- Confidence
- Not assessed
- Location
- 10.760, 79.840
Worth knowing
The guilds outlasted the dynasty. A Tamil inscription of 1088 at Barus in Sumatra records the Ayyavole operating there, and the bilingual Tamil-Chinese inscription of 1281 at Quanzhou was set up by a Tamil merchant community in a Chinese port two and a half centuries after the campaign. The war was temporary; the trade network was not.
Connections (2)
- Trade routeQuanzhou
The bilingual Tamil-Chinese inscription of 1281 at Quanzhou, and the carved remains of a Shiva temple built there by Tamil merchants, are the furthest trace of the network the Chola campaigns were fought to keep open — two and a half centuries after the fleet sailed and long after the dynasty had gone. The inscription's donor asks for the welfare of the Yuan emperor, which is a merchant community making its accommodation with a foreign state in stone.
- Trade routeÓc Eo
The Ayyavole Five Hundred and the Manigramam left inscriptions from Karnataka to Sumatra and Thailand, and the archaeology of the route — rouletted ware, carnelian, Roman and Indian coin — runs from Arikamedu and the Coromandel to Óc Eo in the Mekong delta. The guilds are the continuity: states fought over the straits for a thousand years and the same merchant corporations kept trading through all of it.
On these journeys
Sources
Wikipedia, “Chola Navy”. The Thanjavur (Brihadishvara) inscriptions in South Indian Inscriptions II; Hermann Kulke, K. Kesavapany and Vijay Sakhuja (eds), Nagapattinam to Suvarnadwipa (2009).
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