The Boundless Sea

by David Abulafia

  This is one of the many great expeditions that have been credited to the Phoenicians, all too often without much evidence; more recent enthusiasts have sent them to the Azores, if not America, and to India, if not Malaysia, and they have even been credited with the building of the city of Great Zimbabwe in southern Africa a mere 1,800 years after the reign of the Pharaoh Necho. The point about the direction in which the sun lay has often been cited to show that they must have sailed along the Atlantic coast of Africa, though other Phoenicians certainly crept down that coast from Gibraltar (maybe including the unfortunate Sataspes), definitely as far as Mogador. Arguments that might disprove the voyage include the rather short length of time, especially when compared with the more reasonable duration of Skylax’s voyage around Arabia, all the more so if the Phoenicians stopped for long periods to watch the grain grow. How would they maintain and repair their boats? And what sort of ships did they use anyhow?6 The most important conclusion from Herodotos’ short and puzzling account is that, whatever they observed, these Phoenicians did not open up new routes into the Indian Ocean. East Africa would be integrated into the great trading network of that ocean in due course; but the pioneers in long-distance traffic across this ocean were the Greeks and the Romans.

  Once the Greeks had wreaked their revenge for past attacks by Darius and Xerxes, and had conquered the Persian Empire, following the lightning campaigns of Alexander the Great in the fourth century BC, the Indian Ocean attracted increased attention both from rulers and from writers. Alexander’s dreams of unlimited empire were only enhanced when he pressed on into north-western India, leaving behind Greek army veterans and a legacy of Greek culture that became intertwined with Buddhism. He was learned in geography, as one might expect of a pupil of the polymath Aristotle, and on one occasion he delivered a speech in which he set out how the various seas, including the Persian Gulf, were related to one another. No doubt Alexander had read about Skylax, who was quite famous, and about other expeditions under the Persian banner. He obviously knew about the circumnavigation reported by Herodotos, for he insisted that ‘from the Persian Gulf our fleet shall sail round to Libya, right up to the Pillars of Herakles’, and opined that one result would be the extension of his rule over all Libya, or Africa, not to mention Asia – his aim was to reach ‘those boundaries which God set for the whole earth’.7

  In 325 BC he commissioned a Cretan officer named Nearchos to set out from the Indus and head up the Persian Gulf. Nearchos was an old and trusted companion of Alexander, and the choice of someone so close to the king to make this voyage indicates that this was not a trivial enterprise, but that it had strategic objectives as well as scientific ones. Alexander was at first reluctant to appoint Nearchos, because he placed such value on his friendship and was well aware of the risk Nearchos would face leading his fleet into uncharted waters; but Nearchos insisted he wanted to do this, and as they reviewed the names of other possible commanders they realized that all of them would prove unreliable, even chicken-hearted. Nearchos said, if Alexander’s biographer Arrian is to be believed: ‘O king! I undertake to lead your fleet! May God help this enterprise! I shall bring your ships and men safe and sound to Persia, if the sea is indeed navigable and this enterprise is not beyond human power.’

  The sailors for this expedition were from Phoenicia, Cyprus and Egypt, though individual ships were placed under Greek commanders from Alexander’s entourage. Some of the ships were partly brought from Cyprus and Phoenicia, extraordinary as this may seem. In accord with common practice, they were dismantled or constructed only in sections on the coast of Lebanon and carried overland to the river system of Mesopotamia. They were taken down to Babylon, where other vessels were built; how they then reached the Indus across the Persian mountains is a mystery.8 The Phoenicians and their Carthaginian descendants were experts at the assembly-line construction of ships, and would number the planks and fittings so that everything could be put together exactly as intended.9 Alexander was hoping for a report on the people, ports and products of the sea coast between Mesopotamia and India, and this voyage became widely known when not just Nearchos but several officers in the fleet recorded their own account of the journey. Alas, only fragments of these accounts have survived, though Arrian offered a connected account based on Nearchos’ words. His account combined high adventure and quite specific description, for the records left by the captains were not, in the main, stirring sea yarns but detailed navigation guides that recorded in great detail the information the king of Macedon had requested.

  There was, though, more than enough material for yarns as well: having travelled down the Indus, the ships were delayed by the monsoon for more than three weeks close to what is now Karachi. Then several ships were lost in gales, even though the men managed to swim to safety; Nearchos cannot have had much understanding of the monsoon season at the start of his voyage, but experience taught him and his captains how important it was to respect the ocean winds. Mastering high seas was only the first serious problem; their reception by the inhabitants of the coastline was often extremely inhospitable. On one occasion, as they sailed along the coast of Baluchistan, Nearchos was challenged by hundreds of half-naked Indians, who are described as extremely hairy, ‘not only their heads but the rest of their bodies’. They had no knowledge of iron, but used their claw-like fingernails as tools with which they ripped apart the raw fish they ate, and otherwise they relied on sharp stones for tools; they dressed in animal skins or even whale skins. He sent a phalanx of men, all capable swimmers, over the side of his ships; these men had apparently swum, or at least waded, to shore in their armour, and they struck terror into the Indians.

  As they moved beyond what Nearchos regarded as India, down the coast of Iran, they encountered peaceful town-dwelling folk who fed the sailors with bread made not from grain but from pounded fish meal obtained from large sea creatures whose flesh had been dried in the sun; they regarded wheat and barley as delicacies. Fresh fish were generally eaten raw; and, rather than being caught out at sea, the fish were scooped out of hollows along the beaches where they, along with crabs and oysters, were found when the tide receded. At one settlement, the local sheep tasted of fish because, according to the report, there was no pasture for animals and so the sheep were fed on fish meal. Even the beams with which they constructed their houses were large whale or fish bones. Food was sometimes hard to find as the fleet coasted along, and those on board had to resort to palm hearts cut from trees along the coast. Apart from the occasional slaughtered camel, they found little on which to gorge themselves in the land of the fish-eaters, and were glad to press on.10

  It was perhaps inevitable that the fabulous should become mixed up with the real, and Arrian reports a visit to an island sacred to the sun where no human had set foot, and where one of the demi-goddesses known to the Greeks as the Nereids had once lived. She had lured sailors to the island, but once they arrived she turned them into fish. The sun god was not amused by this sport and expelled her, as well as turning these fish back into human beings, whereupon they settled on the shore and became fish-eaters. Nearchos had no difficulty in reaching the island and proving that there was nothing magical about the place. But there was still a sense of being half-lost, only vaguely knowing where they should be heading. Mapping the contours of India and Iran was confusing, especially as they approached the Persian Gulf and the Musandam peninsula that juts out from Oman and almost closes off the Gulf. Should they sail down the ocean flank of the peninsula past Arabia or carry on into the Gulf along the coast of Iran? On that side Nearchos had already found land rich in cinnamon, but he realized that the Arabian coast was the outer edge of sandy desert, ‘quite denuded of water’, and rejected the advice of one of his captains that he should follow the shore of Oman south-westwards. He understood that the route up the Gulf would eventually take him to Babylonia. As they sailed up the Gulf they encountered more unconquered tribes living by the shores, and even a wandering Greek, still wearing his Greek cl
oak, who had become detached from Alexander’s army; so, even when coasting along the shores of the Persian heartlands, they were making discoveries and helping the king of Macedon understand how his territories fitted together.11 The voyage was rated a resounding success.

  II

  The expedition had explored a small but important segment of the coast between modern Pakistan and the Persian Gulf; the distance was modest compared to the voyages attributed to the Phoenicians, but the framework for a maritime network spanning the Indian Ocean was gradually coming into being. Alexander ordered the creation of a port named (predictably) Alexandria at the mouth of the Tigris–Euphrates system, to facilitate trade down the Gulf; so there was some hope of capitalizing on Nearchos’ achievements. But Alexander’s ambitions were soon thwarted by his early death at Babylon; for the next few years his generals squabbled over and finally divided his empire. He had sown some seeds: his successors, the Ptolemies in Egypt and the Seleucids in Mesopotamia (actively competing for Syria), became increasingly interested in naval power; and the Persian Gulf gradually re-emerged as an important channel for traders seeking to reach the Indies. Alexander had stretched the Greek world as far as India; partial Hellenization also occurred in the Gulf region, as Greek settlers were encouraged to establish small trading towns that would service the trade in Arabian aromatics and Indian spices. Yet Alexander’s successors were generally more interested in Syria and the Mediterranean, where the Seleucids played out their rivalry with the Ptolemies of Egypt, than they were in the Gulf and the Indian Ocean. Elephants rather than warships were the great symbols of Seleucid military power. Still, the Seleucid kings operated a fleet in the Persian Gulf whose task was to make sure that the sea routes to India remained open, particularly when resurgent Persian power threatened free access to these waters; Parthian soldiers in Persian service may have managed to occupy the northern tip of Oman.12

  This was an age of urban revival in the Gulf. The Seleucid kings dreamed of creating a network of Greek towns along its shores. Such a network could never match the networks created in the Mediterranean, but at least six towns, and maybe nine or more, were established. Exactly where they were has been much debated, for they have vanished from the map. Graves found at the ancient settlement of Bidya, in the small part of the UAE that faces out across the Indian Ocean, have been described as ‘Hellenistic’, in other words from the Seleucid period; they overlaid graves dating back to the second millennium BC. So maybe the Greeks, or rather people infused with Greek culture (including, to judge from finds in the town, fine glass), reached as far as this.13 One town which seems to have developed independently from, and rather more successfully than, the Greek settlements lay at what the Arabs later knew as Thaj, in what is now Saudi Arabia. Most of its inhabitants were probably Arabs, and it was the seat of a state that controlled part of the eastern flank of Arabia.14 On the one hand, there are the ruins of a large city of whose original name no archaeological record survives; and, on the other hand, there are the enthusiastic reports of classical writers, going right back to the time of Alexander the Great, that describe land and sea trade between a place they called Gerrha and Babylonia, making it plain that this was by far the most important trading centre in the region.15 According to the Greek writers, the great speciality of these Arabian merchants was, predictably, incense, which they carried northwards to their city; Gerrha was an entrepôt between the lands rich in frankincense and myrrh and the great empires and royal courts that craved these products and had the means to buy them, to be used in temple worship and to render ever more magnificent the ceremonies of the Seleucid and Ptolemaic courts.

  King Antiochos III was so keen to benefit from this trade that he made a state visit to Gerrha in 205 BC; although he was showing the Seleucid flag in the Persian Gulf, he did not come to Gerrha as a conqueror, and the Greek historian Polybios emphasized that he gladly recognized the ‘perpetual peace and freedom’ of the citizens of Gerrha.16 Antiochos was, however, also happy to go away with massive gifts in frankincense, myrrh and silver; and he hoped he had persuaded the Gerrhaeans to send their merchants to Babylonia rather than to Persia or towards his rivals, the Ptolemaic kings of Egypt, who at this point controlled Syria. To reach the lands of the Ptolemies, as several papyri from Egypt make plain, south Arabian incense travelled overland via Petra or other towns on the edges of Syria in the camel caravans of the Nabataean merchants, and not by ship around Arabia and up the Red Sea. But, in the second century BC, Syria fell under Seleucid rule; and as a result the route from Gerrha to the lands of the Nabataeans was unblocked, as the Seleucid king now stood to gain as much from taxes collected in Syria as from those collected in Babylonia.17

  That is what is known of Gerrha from the Greek historians and geographers. Then there is the physical evidence from Thaj. Whether or not it stands on the site of Gerrha, Thaj had a long history as a centre of trade. Thaj was still being mentioned by pre-Islamic writers of Arabic, fragments of whose works were preserved by the Muslim Arabs as exemplars of fine writing: ‘the flowing wells of Thaj invite the wild she-asses’, wrote ‘Amr ibn Kulṯum some time in the late sixth century AD.18 But much earlier, in the third century BC, this substantial walled town had been taking delivery of Greek black-glazed pottery that had filtered through from the Mediterranean. Rather more pottery arrived from Seleukeia, which was the grand eastern capital of the dynasty, named with typical contemporary immodesty after themselves.19 Seleukeia lay some way up the Tigris, at a point where the distance between the Tigris and Euphrates narrowed briefly. Thaj therefore had distant connections. The city grew and grew, so that it is the largest known archaeological site in the Gulf region. Its area was over 800,000 square metres (Pliny the Elder said the circumference of Gerrha was five Roman miles, making it much the same size).20 But although it had plenty of fresh water it lay more than fifty miles inland from the coast, with good access to a port at al-Jubayl, but also, without doubt, to caravan routes that trekked down the eastern side of Arabia, and that were still being used by coffee traders plodding their way up from Yemen on their camels in the nineteenth century.21 This resolves a difficulty that has left some historians unconvinced that Gerrha and Thaj were the same place. Greek writers thought of Gerrha as a place by the sea; one early Greek description insists that rafts (perhaps he meant reed boats) were sent from Gerrha up the Gulf towards Babylonia; and the geographer Strabo first said it lay by the sea – and then said it lay some way inland.22 Gerrha, like Dilmun, was both a specific and a general term: it was a twin city, of a sort that has been by no means uncommon in the past, combining a large inland metropolis with a small but handsome harbour on the coast; and Gerrha was also a general word for the political unit, of whose government we know nothing, that encompassed both city and port. The greater success of the inland half of Gerrha may not be evidence that the maritime trade of the Gulf was at last taking off; but it is evidence that the broader region was experiencing a renaissance. Even so, the real transformation would occur when the business affairs of the great kings and of the merchants who served them became still more ambitious, and regularly reached as far as India.

  III

  The Ptolemies were not idle while their rivals tried to expand their influence in the Persian Gulf.23 News of Nearchos’ expedition reached Egypt, for some of the crewmen were Egyptian. Ptolemy I, who reigned there from 325 to 285 BC, was more interested in building up Alexandria as a major political, commercial and naval centre from which he could exercise command over the eastern Mediterranean than he was in the treacherous waters of the Red Sea. Even so, there were some important initiatives under the early Ptolemies. One was the re-digging of the ‘Red–Med’ canal that had already been re-dug at the orders of the Persian king Darius; by 400 BC it had silted up and no one had shown much interest in clearing it, even though its closure cut off the trading town of Pithom from its water traffic, and sent it into decline. It was an ancient town, notorious among Jews as one of the ‘store-cities’ built fo
r the pharaohs with the labour of Hebrew slaves. Then, under Ptolemy II Soter, around 270 BC, the city revived as the canal was reopened.24 This initiative was thought worthwhile because an earlier experiment, under Ptolemy I, had been so successful. That king had sent an admiral named Philo down the coast of Africa, in the hope of obtaining elephants for his army, or, if not live animals, ivory for his court. The Ptolemaic army maintained a special elephant contingent, and the elephants were housed in their own park, where the royal animal-keepers could attend to their every need.25 Ptolemy II was agitated to learn that the inhabitants of the lands where elephants roamed were in the habit of slicing steaks off the flanks of living beasts; he wanted his elephants whole and healthy. Since African elephants are rather larger than Indian ones, he had the chance to acquire bigger and more aggressive battle-tanks than his Seleucid rivals.26

  Elephants alone could not sustain the economic life of the small ports that sprang up along the Egyptian coast of the Red Sea, and the trickle of sea trade up the Red Sea from Somalia turned into a regular flow. Egyptian sea captains were venturing with some confidence beyond Aden to the Horn of Africa, but hugging the African coast, while those in Seleucid service were keeping within the Persian Gulf, or close to the shores that led from the Gulf to the edges of India. As for south Arabia, the land of Sabaea, rich in frankincense and myrrh, this was an area that was unconquered and unwelcoming; it sent out its goods, and profited greatly from trade, but the only foreign traders it welcomed were the Nabataeans, who dominated the caravan route up to Petra and the Mediterranean coast. Sabaea’s own merchants were avid buyers of cinnamon from the Horn of Africa. Not just Sabaean isolationism but problems with navigating the open ocean kept Egyptian merchant fleets and Seleucid ones apart. The monsoons still had to be mastered. The ocean was still a place of unpredictable dangers. In the first century AD, Strabo looked back at the attempts made under the Ptolemies to penetrate the Indian Ocean, and stressed how in his day regular traffic linked Alexandria to the Indian Ocean by way of Myos Hormos on the Red Sea, ‘but earlier, under the rule of the Ptolemies, very few people had been bold enough to launch their ships and trade in Indian goods’.27 Myos Hormos will be visited shortly, for it is an extraordinary archaeological site. The early voyages of exploration along the coast of Iran and north-west India had proved that a sea route existed but had not actually opened that route; and one reason was the challenge presented by the monsoons.