The Boundless Sea
Page 19
Some of those who came into the cave to worship were not Indians. The inscriptions include a sizeable wooden tablet in the Aramaic language of Palmyra far away in Syria. The tablet records the prayers of a Nabataean sea captain. The arrival of a Nabataean on the island makes sense: there were Indian embassies to the rulers of south Arabia, whose main motive must have been to discuss the trade in incense; and south Arabian pottery was found by a team of Soviet archaeologists who were let loose on Socotra.10 Some Nabataeans, then, ventured out across the sea and did not rely on the camel caravans across Arabia. And then there were the westerners. One mysterious scrawl says: ‘of the Yavana Cadrabhutimukha’, which is certainly not a Greek name, even though the term Yavana generally means Greek, Roman or someone from the Roman Empire. A perfectly good explanation would be that a Yavana living in India had become assimilated into Indian culture, so much so that he bore a Sanskrit name and used the Brahmi script in which Sanskrit was written. Certainly, there were real Greeks on the island as well, not just because the Periplous and others insisted they were there. Early in the third century a Greek naukleros, or sea captain, left an inscription in Greek in the cave: ‘Septimios Paniskos the naukleros kneeled before the gods and before that [or those] of the cave.’11 Greeks had worshipped Indian gods in far-off Bactria since the time of Alexander the Great. To show them respect while sailing around the outer edge of the world was to follow the natural instinct of the Greeks, Romans and many other peoples.
The history of Socotra was also a story of change. An uninhabited island had been transformed into a centre of exchange, but its people could only survive by trading the tortoiseshell and incense they produced for foodstuffs from Arabia, India or Africa. The greatest change occurred when the inhabitants became Christian, some time around the fourth century; and Socotra remained largely or partly Christian until the seventeenth century. This conversion (assuming it was that, and not a mass migration) took place at a time when the southern Red Sea was becoming the scene of bitter confrontation between the Jews, who had converted the kings of south-west Arabia, and the Christians, whose power was based across the water at Axum in Ethiopia. As Axum flourished, it attracted trade from across the Red Sea and sent its own merchants overseas to sell ivory and other prestige products of the Ethiopian highlands, and to buy incense and spices for the Axumite court; over a hundred Indian coins of the late third century have been found at the monastery of Däbrä Damo in Ethiopia (though there is a mysterious complication: the monastery was only founded a few centuries later). Socotra benefited from this renaissance of trade; the Hoq cave offers proof that Ethiopians visited the island around the sixth century, for one or two left their own names there.12 The early Byzantine traveller Kosmas Indikopleustes (meaning ‘Kosmas who sailed to India’) wrote his own Periplous in the sixth century, in which he described how the Socotrans spoke Greek, ‘having originally been colonists sent thither by the Ptolemies’, and noted that the local priests were ordained by bishops in Persia. Kosmas did not land there, though he coasted past the island; however, he met Greek-speakers from Socotra on the coast of Africa who had evidently come to believe this version of their history.13 His story circulated widely, as the Arab geographer resident at the court of King Roger of Sicily, al-Idrisi, said much the same in the middle of the twelfth century, as did the tenth-century traveller al-Mas‘udi, whose works were widely read. Al-Mas‘udi also mentioned that Socotra was a nest of pirates, and that was one recurrent feature of its history; the pirates he mentioned were Indian ones, who chased after Arab ships bound for India and China, but Greek and Arabian pirates must also have been installed there at different times.
All this proves that a historian ignores the smaller, apparently insignificant places at his or her peril. Socotra was no Barygaza or Bereniké; but this improbably remote island has thrown up evidence for the real nature of contact by sea that is, in its way, as rich as anything in the Periplous or in the excavations at Bereniké and Myos Hormos. The names of its visitors, generally unadorned by profession or origin, still provide enough evidence to remind us what sort of people lived on what they must have thought to be a place on the outer edges of the world.
II
All this is rich evidence for the routes that were not dominated by seafarers from the Roman Empire, but by dhows from Arabia, sewn-plank vessels from India, and ships manned by Malay and Indonesian sailors. Malays would certainly play a prominent role at the end of the Middle Ages, but much changed in a thousand years, with the rise and fall of trading empires on Sumatra and on the Malay peninsula. There is, however, extraordinary evidence that people travelled all the way to east Africa from the eastern end of the Indian Ocean, speakers of the Austronesian languages that include Filipino, Malay and the Polynesian languages. They arrived not just in the ports that marked the southernmost limit of Roman trade, around Zanzibar, but much further south, where they first visited and colonized the Comoros archipelago off the coast of Africa (later famous for its ylang-ylang perfume), and then settled in the greatest of all the Indian Ocean islands, Madagascar. Whether they took a direct route across the ocean to discover Madagascar, until then empty of humans, or edged around the coasts of the Indian Ocean has been much debated. The general consensus is that Malay-speakers gradually made their way along more and more ambitious trade routes leading them to southern India and far beyond. Mostly these Malays were absorbed into host populations over the centuries; but in Madagascar they were alone, apart from Bantu slaves they themselves brought from east African ports such as Kilwa and Zanzibar. So what they created was a Malay – Indonesian society in African waters. Later European observers recognized the distinctive features of Malagasy society when they expressed the view that Madagascar was really part of Asia, not Africa.14
Language provides rich evidence for the links between Madagascar and the opposite end of the Indian Ocean. Glottochronology is, among other things, the science of dating the moments when languages began to diverge into dialects that gradually became mutually incomprehensible, to the point where they can be described as separate languages. It has been seen that Māoris and Hawai’ians could still make sense of what the other side said in the eighteenth century. It is clear that the first settlers in Madagascar spoke a language close to Malay; Malagasy is a language whose cousins mainly lie on the far edge of the Indian Ocean or deep within the Pacific, and the closest relative to the Malagasy language is a dialect spoken in Borneo. Glottochronology suggests that the time of their arrival was late in the first millennium BC; and the evidence of language is confirmed by that of DNA – mitochondrial DNA reveals that 96 per cent of the population is descended at least in part from Asiatic settlers. However, over the centuries the island has received Bantus, Arabs and many others, so that there are other elements in both the bloodline and the language; the Bantu settlers probably arrived from the start of the second millennium AD onwards. There is also similar evidence to suggest the presence of Austronesians on the coast of east Africa, around Pemba and Zanzibar. Finally, there is the unspoken evidence of the plants that have thrived on Madagascar since humans arrived: rice, saffron, coconuts, yams, plus, very probably, a humble addition to the otherwise exotic animal population – chickens.15
Part of the fascination of both Socotra and Madagascar is that these were uninhabited islands far from the mainland that were settled by humans who had to work out what sort of society they would establish there. On Socotra, which was frankly desolate, they could only hope to set up a trade counter to sell what little it offered, and maybe to careen the hulls of passing ships, or send out pirates to capture them. Madagascar offered a very different opportunity. This was a landmass that had floated away from India and had been isolated from the rest of the world for maybe 88,000,000 years, so that, rather like Australia, its animal population developed independently from that of the rest of the world; the lemur, a very early primate, is found nowhere else in the world. The richly forested interior took centuries to tame, but around the coa
st early visitors may have been attracted by apparently unlimited supplies of spices and resins.16 That is to assume with Philippe Beaujard that Madagascar was a happy discovery of Indonesian merchants in search of spices, following on from a series of what he calls strategic commercial voyages; they would then have left behind a core population of settlers, who would have supplied spices to the traders as they came year after year in search of the natural wealth of Madagascar. Why people from what became known as the Spice Islands would go in search of spices on the other side of the ocean then becomes a mystery; taking these spices home would have been the equivalent of carrying coals to Newcastle; but there have been attempts to link this demand to the emergence of the great trading empires of the South China Sea, especially the early medieval kingdom of Śri Vijaya, based on Sumatra, which will be examined shortly.
According to this theory, the settlers expanded in numbers and moved ever inwards into the heart of the island, which they gradually denuded of its thickest tree cover, and where they exterminated some of its most remarkable inhabitants – giant lemurs and massive elephant birds, which may be the enormous rukh that appears in the late medieval tale of Sindbad the Sailor.17 Meanwhile other Indonesian settlers arrived who were attracted by the tales they heard from seafarers who described the lush paradise of Madagascar.18 That is one plausible scenario; another view would present the Indonesians as seafarers similar to the Polynesians, setting out in their catamarans in search of new lands to settle, without a particular interest in the Indian Ocean spice trade. Unfortunately, Malagasy archaeology is in its infancy, and the results of excavations shed little light on this problem. One promising site in the north of Madagascar cannot be dated further back than AD 420, and evidence from earlier times is very patchy. Fragments of locally made pottery from roughly AD 700 have emerged from a rock shelter that may have been used by sailors stopping over on the island before making the long voyage back to Malaya.19 This could be taken to prove that waves of Austronesians arrived over many centuries, with contact continuing right through to the fourteenth century or later, by which time Arab travellers were reporting the existence of this extraordinary miniature continent.20 The settlers knew iron, and their technology was therefore much more sophisticated than that of the Polynesians, who around this time were reviving their colonization of the farther reaches of the Pacific. What their boats looked like and where else they sailed is far from certain, though big ships with outriggers feature among the sculptures at Borobodur in Indonesia, and outriggers are still used on boats both in Indonesia and in east Africa, including Madagascar.21
Even if the first Austronesians to reach Madagascar were not spice merchants, and even if contact between the island and the inhabitants’ mother country was spasmodic, there is enough evidence to show that the Greco-Roman merchants were not the only pioneers in navigating the Indian Ocean at the end of the first millennium BC and the start of the first millennium AD. The great arc from south-east Africa to the East Indies was a space in which human beings moved impressive distances far out of sight of land. They may not have possessed the extraordinary navigational skills of the Polynesians (though conceivably the discoverers of Madagascar possessed some of that knowledge), but the navigators of the Indian Ocean required and acquired a detailed knowledge of its shores and islands.22 The different corners of the Indian Ocean were slowly becoming more connected to one another, and beyond that to the seas that lap the shores of Vietnam, Java and China.
III
These Malay navigators are the unsung heroes of trade and migration in the Indian Ocean and in the South China Sea: unlike the Indian travellers, they are not praised in the Brahmin poems and, unlike the Greco-Roman travellers, they have left no Periplous; the earliest written history from Malaya, the so-called Malay Annals, dates from the early seventeenth century and is rich in stories about fifteenth-century Singapore and Melaka (Malacca), but for earlier centuries it only offers garbled legends about Indian ancestors.23 The boats of the Malays and Indonesians are impossible to describe in any detail, though finding the right woods was no problem: no one knows whether they resembled dhows, junks or catamarans (and the simple term ‘dhow’ is a broad description of a variety of roughly similar ships, varying greatly in size and equipment). Yet they played a crucial part in transforming the links between furthest Asia and the Mediterranean, so that south India became a transit point rather than a terminus, and the terminus shifted eastwards as far as the East Indies and even at times southern China. The decades when Bereniké was beginning its slide under the sand were also those in which south-east Asia and its Malay sailors became a powerful force on the oceans.
The first question is what was known of this region and its inhabitants by those who lived outside it. The Periplous was vague about a ‘golden land’, Chrysé, beyond the Ganges; this indicates that contact with its inhabitants was still quite limited, in the first and second centuries, whether that contact was effected through very rare visits to the land of Chrysé (for example, by embassies trying to reach China, such as the Antun embassy mentioned earlier), or through meeting Malay sailors in the ports of southern India, such as Arikamedu/Poduké. Sometimes Chrysé simply appeared in late classical writings as an island beyond India, on the very edge of the habitable world, but not too distant from the land of the Seres, that is, the silk-weaving Chinese.24 Chrysé and another island called Argyré were said to be so rich in gold and silver that the metals had given their names to these two islands; around AD 40 the Roman writer Pomponius Mela reported a legend that one had soil that consisted of gold, and the other had soil made of silver, but he was not so credulous as to believe the tale.25 This rumour was repeated by the sixth-century Spanish encyclopaedist Isidore of Seville, who knew his classical sources extremely well, and who became the first port of call for many who wished to understand the shape of the continents in later centuries. The Jewish historian Josephus assumed that this was where one could find Ophir, to which King Solomon had sent his ships a thousand years before his own day.26 Ptolemy, as preserved by later Byzantine editors, who may have added their own knowledge and opinions, had a different view: he presented Malaya as a lump sticking out of south-east Asia, so that its shape is closer to that of Indo-China than to the Malay peninsula. He arrived at this conclusion more by accident, no doubt, than because of confusion between precise information about the two neighbouring regions.27 As for information about the people who lived in and around Chrysé, this was the usual mish-mash of startling tales of dark-skinned peoples with barbaric customs, largely conjured out of thin air.
The people outside the region who knew the area and its inhabitants best were the Chinese. They have not appeared often in this book before now. Chinese civilization had developed along the great river systems of east Asia, and the Chinese connection to water involved freshwater more often than the open sea. There were important maritime links to Japan, of which more will be said; and there was plenty of coastal navigation in sizeable junks, ‘storeyed ships’, or louchuan, the sea being a source of fish and salt.28 Evidence for regular long-distance voyages by Chinese sailors is hard to come by in the early centuries of the first millennium AD. Boat traffic was dominated by ethnic groups other than the Han Chinese, who lived in the north and would eventually rule vast expanses of China; perhaps the most practised sailors were the Yueh in southern China, whose culture fell under increasingly strong influence from Han China, but who were not yet fully sinicized. The Yueh created lively commercial links to the coasts of central China.29 Around 221 BC, when the Han dynasty was founded further north, there existed four Yueh kingdoms, maybe more; one of them possessed a capital somewhere in the region of Hanoi, at a place known as Lo Yueh. Here, one could obtain luxuries that were much in demand at the Han court: ‘rhinoceros horns, elephant tusks, tortoise-shells, pearls, fruits and cloth’, as well as kingfisher feathers, silver and copper, which were brought to the Yueh city of Panyu near Guangzhou (Canton) and bought by Chinese merchants who, according
to a Chinese writer of the first century AD, enriched themselves greatly.30 Links to western Asia were maintained across the famous but difficult Silk Road, which took caravans across great swathes of empty desert and through the lands of the Sogdian merchants to the north of Iran, until the route reached trade centres north and south of the Caspian Sea. Exotic products, of which silk was only the most famous, arrived by this route; but it was a hard and slow journey whose safety could only be assured by plenty of guard posts along the way.31 The Silk Road functioned effectively in the first century BC and up to about AD 225, while the Han dynasty could provide this degree of protection.
However, the third century BC was also a period of intense conflict among the ‘Seven Warring States’ of China, and this conflict deflected the Chinese from expansion southwards. Then, between 221 and 214 BC the ruler of the Qin Empire extended his rule over Yueh territory in the face of tough Yueh resistance, and briefly gained control of much of the coastline of the South China Sea, around the Gulf of Tongking. The conquest of the Yueh towns was accompanied by the settlement in the region of ‘criminals, banished men, social parasites and merchants’, according to a snooty Chinese historian of the time, but the long-term effect was that the Han Chinese population grew, particularly in the cities, and flourished through trade with Chinese lands further north. How much of this trade was carried by sea is unclear, as is the degree of contact between the Yueh or the Chinese merchants living in their lands and the inhabitants of the Malay peninsula. Such goods from the Indian Ocean as arrived dribbled through passageways linking the South China Sea to the Indian Ocean.32