The Boundless Sea
Page 15
An ‘Arabian barrier’ therefore existed, and the challenge of finding a way past the Sabaean lands only made the Ptolemies keener to bring the barrier down. These rulers were, after all, patrons of the great library of Alexandria, which was the home of scholars who knew, or thought they knew, how all the lands of the world were joined together. Euergetes II, who ruled Egypt in the middle of the second century BC, enjoyed the company of Alexandrian scholars who were experts in geography; the most important was Agatharchides of Knidos, who wrote a book about the Red Sea, mostly lost. He based his account on a wide variety of travellers’ tales and documents in the royal archive.28 One lengthy passage from his writings, preserved in a Byzantine manuscript, gives some clues to the ambitions of the Ptolemies, for pure knowledge was not the end of the matter. Agatharchides whetted the appetite of the Ptolemies, who were big spenders and big consumers. Offering a survey of Arabia, Agatharchides described lands rich in pure gold nuggets, the smallest the size of a fruit pip and the largest the size of a walnut, mined from the earth by native peoples who regarded gold as utterly commonplace, and who valued iron, bronze and silver much more highly; in their eyes silver was worth ten times the value of gold, weight for weight. Rather than Gerrha, Agatharchides took the view that Sabas, the capital of the Sabaeans, rich in frankincense and myrrh, was the finest town in Arabia. Between them, he says, the Gerrhaeans and the Sabaeans ‘have made Ptolemy’s Syria rich in gold’.29
The adventures of one mariner, Eudoxos of Kyzikos from 118 BC onwards, were long remembered by ancient writers. When an Indian traveller was swept across the seas by the winds and cast all alone upon the shore of the Red Sea, royal guards found him and had the clever idea of carrying him off to the court of the inquisitive King Euergetes. This was someone who would surely know the route to the Indies. He guided the sailor Eudoxos to India, and they brought back a splendid cargo of aromatics and spices. Eudoxos had been looking forward to enjoying the profits from the expedition, but his greedy king took everything for himself. However, after Euergetes died, Queen Cleopatra II of Egypt sent Eudoxos out once again. Once again the royal court took everything. After his ill-treatment by the Ptolemies, Eudoxos was exasperated, for he had hoped for a better outcome under what he assumed to be the benign patronage of the queen. Eudoxos decided he would find a different route to India, this time without royal interference; he would set out from the Mediterranean and circumnavigate Africa to reach India. He invested a great amount of money in this expedition, and even took boy and girl musicians with him, hoping to impress the kings of India with them. But he never reached much further than the Canary Islands, or somewhere in that region, and had to turn back. He attempted the route round Africa a second time, but his little fleet was shipwrecked and everyone, including Eudoxos, was lost, presumed drowned.30 Eudoxos was, then, a pioneer whose career was filled with frustration and failure, for even when he reached the Indies he was not able to enjoy the fruits of his expeditions. Yet his career also shows that the route to the Indies was now a subject of serious interest at the court of the Ptolemies. The question how best to reach these rich and fabled lands by sea fascinated kings and sea captains long before Columbus and Vasco da Gama.
Once a sea route to India was open, the Ptolemies amassed vast amounts of Indian goods, and the next king of Egypt, Ptolemy Soter II, was said to have been very popular among the merchants of Delos at a time when this island had become the hub of eastern Mediterranean trade routes. The eminent ancient historian Rostovtzeff remarked that he was so popular because the Delians thought of him as Soter, ‘the man of business, the great merchant’, rather than Soter, the king of Egypt. The presence of all these Indian luxuries brought further riches to an island that was already experiencing a great boom. So much ivory arrived from Egypt that Delian merchants were forced to sell it at lower prices than they had wished.31 Gradually the Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean were beginning to interact. Those placed in the middle – the kings and merchants of Egypt – were fully aware of the advantages this would bring, in profits and in the luxuries they could enjoy.
6
Mastering the Monsoon
I
Strabo’s remark that there was now constant traffic between Egypt and the Indies is all the more remarkable because this traffic must have built up in a relatively brief period of no more than a century and a half. This was exactly the period when major changes within the Mediterranean were taking place, which saw first Rhodes and then the much smaller holy island of Delos become the focal points of commercial networks that tied together Alexandria, Rome (which was becoming the master of wider and wider tracts of the eastern Mediterranean) and the Syrian coast. Perfumes carried by the Nabataean merchants filled the market stalls on Delos, which was described as ‘the greatest emporium on earth’, and boasted a population of 30,000 people crammed into not much more than one square mile.1 Alexandria, with its teeming population of Greeks, Jews and Egyptians, buzzed with business, and that business looked not just towards Syria, Greece and Rome but towards the Red Sea and, at last, the Indian Ocean. A tariff list from Alexandria, probably from the start of the second century AD, offers a pungent list of the spices and aromatics that mainly arrived from the Indian Ocean; to read it is to enter the spice markets of the modern as well as the ancient Middle East, before moving to the jeweller’s souk: cinnamon, cardamom, pepper, ginger, myrrh, cassia wood; and then pearls, diamonds, sapphires, emeralds, beryl, turquoise; and beyond that silk, raw and processed, as well as wild animals – lions, leopards, panthers – and, amid all these wonderful cargoes, Indian eunuchs.2
The route across the desert linking the Nile to the Red Sea ports was made as safe as possible by setting up watchtowers manned by Roman soldiers, and by providing inns for caravans where both people and camels could be watered and fed, and goods could be stored safely overnight. According to Strabo, the Romans invested funds and energy in digging great cisterns to collect the sparse rainwater of the desert.3 When trouble was taken to clear the easily clogged canals that linked the Nile to the Gulf of Suez, it was even possible to travel directly from the Nile to Klysma (modern Suez) and then down the Red Sea, generally changing boat at Klysma. The satirist Lucian of Samosata, who wrote in the second century AD, told the tale of a young man who went down the Nile to Klysma and decided to take ship for India; meanwhile his friends, puzzled at his disappearance, assumed he had been drowned while travelling downriver.4 By the reign of Augustus, who died in AD 14, the India trade was already booming. By the reign of Tiberius (AD 14–37), coins were flooding into northern and western India, and were even reaching Ceylon and some parts of eastern India. They were used as money or as bullion, or even as ornaments (some were pierced, so they could be worn on a necklace).5
Mastering the ocean would only become possible when the monsoon season was properly understood, and this was the work of Hippalos, whose discovery of the way these winds worked led to the south-west monsoon being given the name ‘Hippalos’ by later generations of Greek sailors. Eventually they forgot that the wind was named after a pioneering navigator who showed some of the adventurousness of a Columbus. Hippalos was a Greek merchant who made his voyage somewhere around AD 20. He already knew the coast of India; and he understood the basic pattern of the monsoons, whose seasonal switch was by now familiar. The question was not when these winds usually blew, but how they could be exploited to make faster journeys out of sight of land, shooting past Arabia to India.6 A Greek merchant whose description of the Indian Ocean will be examined in a moment wrote: ‘the ship captain Hippalos, by plotting the location of the ports of trade and the configuration of the sea, was the first to discover the route across open water’.7 Setting off from the south-west corner of Arabia with the monsoon wind behind him, Hippalos headed out across the open sea and struck land near the mouth of the Indus. An express route from Egypt down the Red Sea and straight on to India was now open, and Greek and Roman traders were quick to take full advantage. As time went by they lear
ned to strike out for points further and further south along the west coast of India, right down to its southern tip.8
Soon after Hippalos braved the open sea, an unnamed sailor who knew not just the sea but the coastline of the western Indian Ocean wrote, in Greek, a detailed description of the sea route to India. He was clearly a merchant rather than a professional sailor, because he was much more interested in the products of the lands he visited than in detailed information about navigation.9 The author was also an Egyptian Greek, because he talks of Egypt as home, mentioning ‘the trees we have in Egypt’; but he was no armchair traveller: he described how his ship set a course and put on speed. His style was matter of fact and lacks grace, but he was capable of literary flight as well, for he offers a dramatic description of the fearsome tides off Barygaza in north-west India. Sir Mortimer Wheeler enthused: ‘I should describe it, indeed, as one of the most fascinating books to have come down to us from antiquity.’10 The original title of this work is Periplous tēs Eruthras thalassēs, ‘Sea journey around the Red Sea’, for the term ‘Erythraean Sea’ literally meant that, though what he intended is what is now called the Indian Ocean. What is now known as the Red Sea was often termed the ‘Arabian Gulf’, not least by the author of the Periplous.11 Around AD 900 someone in the Byzantine Empire thought it worthwhile to make a rather messy copy of this work, which is how it has survived; but when it was originally written is not certain, and some of those who reject a date in the first century AD would prefer to assign a date in the early second or even early third century instead.12 The Periplous describes a thriving network of trade that begins at the Red Sea ports of Myos Hormos and Bereniké, which will be discussed later since they have yielded superb archaeological finds. But Bereniké was devastated by an epidemic in AD 166, after which its trade withered, so the Periplous was surely written before then. Moreover, the author became very vague when he attempted to describe the waters beyond India, and the little book must have been written before ships under the Roman flag began to pass beyond Ceylon, and before Ceylon was identified as an island rather than the tip of another continent, as he believed.13 It is clear that the tentative exploration of the early Seleucids had been transformed, perhaps within a century, into regular, intensive traffic. Not merely the scale was unprecedented; the creation of links between India (and also Ceylon) and Alexandria, a connection that would thrive during many later centuries, vastly expanded the range of contact by sea. For, even if Greek and Roman merchants did not venture into the eastern Indian Ocean at the time when the anonymous author sailed the seas, by reaching southern India he and his contemporaries made contact with the spice merchants from barely known lands much further to the east.
One cannot do better than follow the author on his Periplous, before backtracking to examine some equally eloquent archaeological sites and what contemporary Romans, such as Pliny the Elder, had to say. This way one can gain an idea of which areas were valued by sea traders and which they tended to avoid, whether because they produced little or because the inhabitants were regarded as hostile barbarians. Interestingly, such people could be found not far south of Bereniké, well within the Red Sea (following modern use of the term). Overall, the image of the Red Sea is of an unwelcoming place, a passageway that for long stretches offers little of its own apart from tortoise shell at a harbour-less port, suitable only for small boats, named Ptolemaïs Thērōn, whose name indicates that it had been founded before the Romans conquered Egypt, and while the Ptolemies ruled there. The south-western shores of the Red Sea were much more promising. The big attraction of Adulis was that elephant ivory and rhinoceros horn were carried there from the lordly city of Axum and from the Ethiopian highlands; sometimes the great beasts themselves wandered down to the shore near Adulis. But the serious drawback to Adulis was that raiders interfered with shipping, and it was vital to moor by an offshore island for safety’s sake.
Further south lay the realm of King Zoskales, ‘mean in his way of life and with an eye to the main chance, but otherwise high-minded, and skilled in writing Greek’.14 Greek cultural influence had, then, penetrated far south, and it is easy to see why: the author lists the goods that the Adulians bought, including Egyptian cloths, linen goods, glassware, brass, copper pans, iron for the spears with which they brought elephants low, and some, but not much, olive oil and Syrian or Italian wine. They clearly craved the products of Egypt and the Roman Mediterranean, but their parsimonious king was not terribly interested in gold or silver objects, unless the price was low.15 That, however, was only part of the story. You could also sell them goods you had brought from India. They liked Indian steel and iron, as well as Indian cotton fabrics. Carrying on southwards, the Periplous mentioned harbours either side of the Bab al-Mandeb Strait that offered cassia, myrrh and sometimes frankincense. It noted too that shipping would arrive regularly from India bearing basic foodstuffs such as grain, rice, clarified butter (ghee) and sesame oil. There is a particularly precious reference to ‘the cane honey called sakchari’ – cane sugar, still an exotic product of India and lands even further to the east, which the Romans used therapeutically rather than as a sweetener.16 Ships from Egypt might tramp up and down the coast, making up and disposing of their cargoes as they went, or they might head straight for one of the ports the Periplous singled out.
The Indian Ocean of the Periplous stretched in two directions. The author was keen to explain what can be found along the east coast of Africa as well as to spell out the route to India. The whole arc from somewhere near Zanzibar to western India was becoming a single, vast trading zone. Indeed, the king of part of Yemen, Charibaël, also ruled part of the African shore. Unfortunately it is impossible to be sure where the last port of trade in ‘Azania’, that is, east Africa, that the author mentioned might have stood; it could be Pemba island, or it could be Zanzibar itself. The name he used was Rhapta, which means ‘sewn’, and referred to the sewn-plank boats that the locals used for fishing and for hunting turtles.17 A remarkable feature of this piece of coast is, the Periplous says, that it is ruled by the Arabians of Mouza, which corresponds to part of Yemen. This relationship was to last many centuries; in the nineteenth century the sultans of Oman based themselves at Zanzibar. When the Periplous was written, the main attraction of this region was ivory, rhinoceros horn and very good tortoiseshell. But beyond that lay an unexplored coastline, of which the Periplous could only say that the land tended westwards, until finally the Indian Ocean joined the ‘western sea’, that is, the Atlantic. This traveller was not, then, convinced by the argument that the Indian Ocean was a sealed sea surrounded by a greatly elongated tongue of land that stretched from southern Africa to the Golden Chersonese (Malaya). However, this view gained great influence in later centuries, as it was confidently supported by the great Alexandrian geographer Ptolemy.18 Finds of Roman and Indian coins along the African coast, mainly of the fourth century AD, confirm that contact with ‘Azania’ was maintained over a long period.19
Arabian captains sailed back and forth from Mouza, and some of them intermarried with the native population, among whom the men were big-bodied and independent-minded; these Arab sailors learned to speak the local language.20 The author of the Periplous was impressed by the Arabian merchants. Describing Mouza itself, he says that ‘the whole place teems with Arabs – shipowners or charterers and sailors – and is astir with commercial activity. For they share in the trade across the water and with Barygaza, using their own vessels.’21 Barygaza is Bharuch in north-western India, so this acts as a reminder that the arrival of Greek and Roman merchants in the Indian Ocean did not mean that the newcomers gained a monopoly on business. At some stage, impossible to determine, Arabian and Indian seafarers had followed or anticipated Hippalos, and had forged links across the Indian Ocean.22 Local Indian rulers decorated their coins with pictures of ships, notably in the Satavahana Empire between AD 88 and 194; this empire embraced large tracts of central India as well as part of the east coast.23 The ocean was awakening; an
d this was the work of its own inhabitants as much as, very probably more than, it was the work of subjects of the Roman emperor.
II
The author of the Periplous was aware that something new had been happening. He talked of a seaside village on the site of present-day Aden, named Eudaimōn Arabia, or ‘Happy Arabia’, that had previously been a proper city, ‘when, since vessels from India did not go on to Egypt and those from Egypt did not dare sail to the places further on but only came this far, it used to receive cargoes of both, just as Alexandria receives cargoes from overseas as well as from Egypt’.24 He thought it had been sacked by someone named in the manuscript as ‘Caesar’, which could be a reference to an attempt by Augustus to attack Aden with 130 warships. Strabo believed this expedition had been a success, but all the evidence suggests the opposite.25 The author of the Periplous was much more interested in offering a vivid explanation of how frankincense formed on the bark of trees, in a mountainous, misty corner of Arabia that was so unhealthy that slaves and convicts were put to work collecting the gum; it was dangerous even to pass this coast on a ship because it was so disease-ridden, and the frankincense workers died of either sickness or malnutrition. This would be the western corner of modern Oman, celebrated today precisely because it is cool and misty, and unusually fertile by comparison with the rest of Arabia. The local ruler had the foresight, though, to construct a sturdy fort and warehouse in which to store the frankincense.26 The rulers of southern Arabia were beginning to become not just prosperous but powerful. Describing a bay on the south coast of Arabia, the Periplous declared that frankincense can only be loaded with the king’s permission; royal agents exchanged frankincense for grain, oil and cotton textiles.27 Maritime trade was drawing a great variety of people to their land.