The Boundless Sea

by David Abulafia

  The impression, both at Roman Bereniké and at Myos Hormos, is that these were intermediary ports, and not in themselves significant centres of consumption; they did not contain splendid buildings, even if their better houses were comfortable enough; and they owed their existence entirely to the need to have somewhere on the dusty shores of the Red Sea where it was possible to do business and to sit out contrary winds. These ports were funnels through which trade from the Red Sea and far beyond reached Egypt and the Mediterranean, and vice versa – as far away, indeed, as Vietnam, Java and Thailand, to which some beads found in Roman levels at Bereniké have been attributed. The express passage first navigated by Hippalos, or other routes that struck India even further south, became the standard routes to and from India, and the lack of finds from the Persian Gulf in Bereniké underlines this fact: ships bypassed the Oman peninsula, and headed across open water to Barygaza and southern India. Some of the Indian pots found at Bereniké were no doubt used by Indian merchants who had taken up residence there, for the port acted as host to a varied population; inscriptions in Indian scripts and the distinctive script of south Arabia are no real surprise, and there are such close similarities between some south Arabian inscriptions found at Bereniké and others from Myos Hormos that it seems the same Arabian merchant was author of both sets, and moved back and forth between these two ports and his homeland in Yemen.54

  The principal Indian product to reach Bereniké was pepper, particularly black pepper from south India, for there can be no doubt that traders regularly set out from Bereniké for India in search of this commodity. This is confirmed by passages in Tamil poetry dated somewhere between 300 BC and AD 300 that tell of the Yavanas, broadly meaning ‘westerners’ (though derived from the term ‘Ionians’), ‘whose prosperity never waned’. They were not just merchants but mercenaries, ‘the valiant-eyed Yavanas whose bodies were strong and of terrible aspect’; they wielded ‘murderous swords’, with which they guarded the gates of the south Indian cities. The Yavana merchants paid in gold for what they called black gold, that is, pepper: ‘rich Muziris, the place where the large and well-crafted ships of the Yavanas come with gold and leave carrying pepper’. Muziris, we are told, ‘resounded with the noise’ of this trade.55 One poem speaks of ‘the gifts of gold brought by the ships’ to the port of Muziris, and ‘those who crowd the port in the turmoil created by the sacks of pepper piled up in the houses’.56 Late in the first century AD, the Horrea Piperataria, or ‘Pepper Warehouses’, were built in Rome; the ground floor alone had capacity for 5,800 tons of pepper, though it was also used for other spices and for storing incense. The aroma of all these spices, rather arbitrarily mixed together under one roof, turned into a stink, and the Horrea were fitted with troughs of water that were intended to increase humidity and somehow offset the pungency.57

  The evidence from Roman and Indian literature is confirmed by the excavations at Bereniké, which have unearthed two Indian storage jars in the temple of the Egyptian deity Sarapis, dating to the first century AD; one of these contained considerable quantities of peppercorns (7.55 kg). Nowhere else in the Roman world have so many peppercorns been found as in Bereniké, where they appear not just within the temple precincts but on house floors, in the street and in piles of refuse. Many were burnt, notably within another shrine dedicated to a number of gods ranging from the Roman emperor to a god worshipped in Palmyra, in Syria, called Yarhibol; they were almost certainly used in religious rituals.58 The archaeologists were also able to identify grains of Indian rice, and they surmise that rice-based meals were eaten off the Indian plates aplenty they found on the same site. Sorghum, a staple foodstuff of east Africa, was also found, indicating connections with Africa as well as India, as do finds of the Ethiopian pea. Other Indian products included coconuts, Indian sesame, mung beans and Indian gooseberries. But there was also plenty of evidence that fruits arrived from the Mediterranean, including walnuts, hazelnuts, almonds, peaches, plums, apples, grapes and olives. The presence of these foods does more than add colour to the picture of life in the Red Sea ports. It serves as a reminder that the Periplous, with its elaborate lists of luxury items, does not tell a complete story. Spices, gems and exotic luxuries such as ebony and ivory were certainly a great attraction for India-bound merchants. But even the pepper they brought back was for general consumption. The standard of living in the greatest cities of the Roman Mediterranean – Rome, Carthage, Alexandria, eventually Constantinople – was perhaps higher than at any time before the eighteenth century, and the India trade contributed to the comfort of the wealthy, the urban middle classes and, in some measure, people of more modest means as well. Meanwhile the inhabitants of Bereniké and other Red Sea ports had their own expectations, of south Italian wine and olive oil among other items. These reminded them of their homes in Egypt, Syria, Greece and further afield, and could also be passed on to the towns and courts of India to their great profit.59

  The identification of these foods shows how archaeology has applied ever more sophisticated methods to analyse the smallest finds, those that would once have been discarded or not even noticed. Traditionally, pottery has been the humble but trustworthy source of information. At Bereniké it is certainly a rich source of data. Among the finest pottery from Bereniké are pieces of ‘rouletted ware’, which hails from eastern India. The Indian ceramics are not the only evidence of exotic contacts. There is pottery from the kingdom of Axum, which, as has been seen, possessed a port on the Red Sea at Adulis. Not much pottery arrived from south Arabia before the fourth century, when a fair amount reached Myos Hormos and Ayla (Aqaba–Eilat) at the very top of the Red Sea. From the first century BC onwards a Roman port on the Arabian side of the Red Sea, across from Bereniké and Myos Hormos, serviced sea traffic from Yemen towards Petra – ships would dock at Leuké Komé, ‘White Village’, and unload Arabian incense for carriage overland. Here is proof that sea transport, with the opportunity to load very large amounts of goods in each vessel, had now become entirely standard and was regarded as a safe, efficient way to keep goods on the move.60 Some marble slabs were brought up to Bereniké from south Arabia. At the same time, the fine red tableware of the Mediterranean, much of it made as far away as Gaul, was also used in Bereniké, while the amphorae used for storing wine and oil came from all around the Mediterranean – southern Spain, Italy, Rhodes, and maybe Gaza, as well as Ayla. Bereniké merchants were active in the jewellery trade as well. Gemstones could be found in the hills around Bereniké itself, notably at Mons Smaragdus, ‘Emerald Mountain’, a source of rather indifferent emeralds and of beryl stones; and peridots have also been found. The best evidence for a trade in gemstones comes from a couple of sapphires which are thought to have been brought from Ceylon.61

  It is important to distinguish the different phases in the relationship between Bereniké and the Mediterranean. In the early phases, the Red Sea ports could obtain all they liked from the Mediterranean; Roberta Tomber remarks that ‘essentially everything that was available in Alexandria was found along the Red Sea coast in varying amounts’. It has been seen that among the most exciting finds from Bereniké are inscribed ostraka dating to the first century AD that were issued as customs passes in Koptos. Several of these mention amphorae filled with Italian wine. Some of this wine may have been consumed locally and some of it may have been drunk by sailors. But a reference in a Tamil poem to ‘cool fragrant wine brought by the Yavanas’ leaves little doubt that wine, whether Italian, Greek or Syrian, was gratefully received in India. Up to fifty sites in India have yielded fragments of amphorae from the Mediterranean, and Roman writers insisted that Indian kings greatly enjoyed a tipple. Hard physical evidence of the wine trade also comes from the rare wrecks that have been discovered in the Red Sea: one boat from the early first century AD that sank near Myos Hormos was carrying south Italian wine amphorae; and another, wrecked off the coast of Sudan, apparently carried wine of the Greek island of Kos, another source of wine treated with salt.62 All this confirm
s the claim found in the Periplous, which at first reading seems extraordinary, that wine was exported all the way from the Mediterranean to the Indian Ocean. So was olive oil, to judge from the ostraka, and the stinking fish sauce known as garum, to judge from amphorae found at Arikamedu in southern India.63 In this sense, the label ‘Indo-Roman’ trade makes sense, even if the merchants whom historians obstinately call ‘Roman’ were predominantly Greeks and Hellenized Egyptians. This was not just trade between Egypt and the Indies, but between the Roman Mediterranean and the Indies. Investors lived as far away as Italy, whether they were spice merchants in Rome or prosperous citizens of towns such as Puteoli near Naples; there, the Annii, a prominent business family, extended the sweep of their maritime trade far beyond the Mediterranean and took a healthy interest in the Indian Ocean as well.64

  It was a trade route that, according to the Elder Pliny, sucked valuable specie out of the Roman Empire:

  Each year, India, China and the Arabian peninsula take at the very least one hundred million sesterces from our empire; that is what our luxuries and women cost us. For what fraction of these imports is intended for sacrifices to the gods, I want to know, or on behalf of the spirits of the dead?65

  Pliny wanted to make a traditional patrician point about the way love of luxury eroded established Roman values, and whether quite so much was paid for the goods of the East is doubtful. Even so, there were Roman senators whose wealth can be valued at 600,000,000 sesterces, in which case the amount of money lost to India was not as vast as it sounds.66 Pliny’s comment has given the business affairs of Greco-Roman traders such a high profile that it becomes easy to forget the role of the Indians themselves, or other intermediaries; this is particularly true of the routes that stretched beyond Ceylon towards the Malay peninsula. The excavator of Bereniké, Steven Sidebotham, has hazarded a guess that Roman objects found as far afield as Korea and Thailand may have arrived through the Red Sea, though they would have been passed down a lengthy chain of merchants rather than being carried most of the way by a single merchant.

  IV

  Most of what has been written about navigation in the Indian Ocean at this time has been constructed around the assumption that the term ‘Roman trade’ carries some meaning. It does, in the sense that links between the Indian Ocean and the Mediterranean heartlands of the Roman Empire were forged by generations of hardy sailors and traders who funnelled pepper and the exotic produce of the East up the Red Sea into the Mediterranean. But, as one historian wrote, ‘to the Indians Rome and Roman meant Alexandria and Alexandrians’, so that Egyptian merchants, and the Jews who now began to arrive on the Malabar coast, were all ‘Romans’.67 It is always important to remember that the economy of coastal India was not sustained simply by contact with the Roman Empire. Whispers about native merchants are frustrating, because much more needs to be known about them, not least in order to place the ‘Romans’ in perspective. A twelfth-century writer from southern Italy, Peter the Deacon, quoting a fourth-century pilgrim named Egeria, mentioned Indian merchants who regularly brought their fine ships all the way to Klysma in the Gulf of Suez, though braving the stiff north winds of the northern Red Sea was always a challenge, and that was one reason why Bereniké and Myos Hormos further down the Red Sea coast were preferred.68

  To write about the opening of the Indian Ocean solely from the perspective of Roman trade is to look at the sea through blinkers. But the evidence from the Indian side is too fragmentary. One must work with the evidence that is there, and at least 90 per cent of it concerns the ‘Romans’. Indian historians have debated the impact of these long-distance connections on the development of the urban civilization of their country. Such controversies are part of a much wider debate, often intertwined with increasingly obscure ideological discussions, about the way external economic factors can generate social change; they can be inspired as much by Karl Marx as they are by the hard evidence. The neatest argument is that the Romans reached India because it was worth their while to visit already flourishing towns, whose business life had been stimulated by demand for fine products at the courts of local kings and at the Buddhist monasteries that were spreading in the region, for the monks, with their substantial resources, were not averse to a little luxury. After all, the vast majority of objects found on these ancient sites are not connected with Roman trade but are the day-to-day products of local industry and short-distance commerce.69

  Two areas should be examined more closely, because they provide clues to the presence or absence of the Roman navigators known to the Tamils as Yavanas. One is Ceylon, or Sri Lanka, and the other is the great expanse of sea between India and the Malay peninsula, including the Bay of Bengal. The second-century geographer Ptolemy, who was fascinated by the Indies, said a great amount about Ceylon. Sometimes his imagination triumphed; his assumption that one could capture tigers there was simply wrong. But he knew that the island was a source of ginger, sapphires, beryl, precious metals and a type of ‘honey’ which must be sugar; and Strabo reported that ivory and tortoiseshell were sent from Ceylon to the Indian towns where Roman merchants picked up these goods. The impression from Ptolemy is that Ceylon had only just become well known to the Roman emperor’s subjects, and it is striking that the Roman coins that have been found in Ceylon are mainly later than his own time, dating from the third to the seventh centuries AD. As well as Roman coins, some coins of the Sasanian kings of Persia and even the rulers of Axum in east Africa have turned up.70 So by the end of this period Ceylon had become the hinge of Indian Ocean trade and navigation, looking both eastwards to Malaya and westwards to Arabia, Byzantine Egypt and the Horn of Africa. In the early twentieth century, those who found these coins, mostly of base metal and well worn, would often pass them into circulation, so one might receive money of Emperor Arcadius in one’s small change.71 As in the Periplous, Ptolemy magnified the island; but he only made it fourteen times its true size, and he abandoned the idea set out in the Periplous that it was the tip of a great southern continent. His southern landmass consisted, rather, of a belt of uninhabited, uninhabitable, land stretching from the southern tip of Africa eastwards to the Golden Chersonese that transformed the Indian Ocean into a closed sea, a massive Mediterranean.

  Beyond Ceylon, the presence of these Yavanas was surely more intermittent, as the more enterprising, or perhaps foolhardy, captains tried their luck in less familiar waters. In the second century AD, the geographer Ptolemy named nearly forty Tamil towns and kingdoms that lay inland, and the sheer detail of his knowledge of southern India has led to speculation that Romans (by whom should be understood subjects of the emperor, probably Greek or Egyptian) lived in some of these places, and continued to spread eastwards into the Bay of Bengal. The Periplous described how Kamara (Puhar), Poduké and Sōpatma were the home ports of local ships which sailed as far as Limyriké, which is the author’s name for the far south-west of India, and this is precious evidence that the mastery of the seas was shared by ‘Romans’ and Indians. A Tamil poet eulogized Puhar and its trade in these words:

  The sun shines over the open terraces and the warehouses near the harbour. It shines over the turrets that have wide windows like the eyes of a deer. In different places at Puhar the gaze of the observer is attracted by the residences of the Yavanas, whose prosperity is without limits. At the harbour there are sailors from distant lands, but in all appearance they live as one community.72

  The town was ablaze with colourful flags and banners, and contained fine houses with platforms above street level that were reached by ladders. However, this was not for fear of robbers; the Tamil poets were sure that it was a safe and prosperous city, and they delighted in the comings and goings of the great ships that came into port. Some may have come from the Red Sea, but most must have been Indian and Malay vessels, Arab dhows, maybe even the occasional ship that had wended its way from the South China Sea – links to the Pacific will be examined in the next chapter. Archaeology has not offered much help in confirming the v
ivid images of the Tamil poet. Puhar seems to have disappeared beneath the waves around AD 500; a tsunami may well have destroyed the city in a few hours, and one theory places the blame on an early eruption of Krakatoa in 535, even if it was less violent than the astonishing one of 1883.73 Both Puhar and Poduké began as Indian towns; they were not created by the Yavanas, and it was the Yavanas who came to seek them out.

  One place thought to have been settled by merchants from the Far West lay at Arikamedu, a village that stood just inside the small enclave of Pondicherry, ruled by France for roughly two centuries until 1954. Seventeen years earlier a French collector had become excited when some children showed him what may have been a cameo carved with a portrait of a Roman emperor, though it was carried away to Hanoi and has now vanished. Then a few years later a trial excavation there uncovered wine amphorae brought from the area around Naples, as well as olive oil jars from the northern Adriatic and jars of fish sauce from Spain. It has been suggested that the oil and garum sauce were for foreign settlers, and the wine (which was often resinated) was for everybody, as further fragments of wine amphorae have turned up inland. Setting aside doubts about whether Western goods betoken Western settlers, which have been expressed by the most recent excavator, Arikamedu looks like a classic ‘port city’, a meeting place for locals and foreigners, including some who had come from very far away.74 This was a town where different communities intermingled and probably intermarried – in the first century AD a woman called Indiké, ‘the Indian woman’, who lived in Egypt, wrote a letter on papyrus to a female friend or relative, and there must have been many women like her.75 In these emporia, there were plenty of opportunities to mix in social life, in religious cults and in doing business. The excavators found pieces of the typical red pottery made in Roman Arezzo, in faraway Etruria, dating from the first quarter of the first century AD – the date of the settlement can probably be pushed still further back in time, as far back as the third century BC.76 As they probed further into a site that has, unfortunately, been partly washed away by the river on which it stands, the archaeologists also brought to light Greco-Roman glassware. There were upmarket objects too: a gem made of rock crystal and decorated with a figure of Cupid and a bird may have been made in the Mediterranean or, more likely, be of local workmanship, but in the latter case that would still show the cultural influence of the Greco-Roman world as far away as south-eastern India.77