The difficulties Eudoxus faced with his royal patrons notwithstanding, Egypt was now open to the Indian Ocean trade, which flourished to such an extent that special officials were appointed to guard against piracy on the Red Sea. Apart from this, we know little of how the trade was conducted. Whether the majority of the traders at this time were from Egypt and the Mediterranean or from the Indian Ocean; whether Egyptian and Hellenistic merchants sailed in their own ships, in those of Indian or Arabian traders, or both; the volume of the trade; or the profits either to individuals or, in the form of taxes and duties, to the government—all these questions remain for the most part unanswered.
Western Indian Ocean Trade in the Early First Millennium
Even after the opening of the Nile–Red Sea canal under Ptolemy II, traders bound for Egypt usually sailed only as far as Berenike, and sometimes Myos Hormos, but rarely up the Gulf of Suez to Arsinöe. Thus neglected, by the middle of the first century BCE the Ptolemaic canal was impassable. Had it been maintained, the course of Egyptian and Roman history might well have followed a different trajectory. Following the battle of Actium, Cleopatra hoped to elude capture by crossing the Isthmus of Suez and establishing Ptolemaic rule somewhere on the Red Sea. When Marc Antony caught up with her in Alexandria, “he found Cleopatra venturing upon a hazardous and great undertaking … to raise her fleet out of water and drag the ships across [the Isthmus of Suez], and after launching them in the Arabian Gulf with much money and a large force, to settle in parts outside of Egypt, thus escaping war and servitude.” Rome’s Nabataean allies burned several of her ships and, succumbing to Antony’s assurances that all was not lost, she abandoned the effort. Events proved Antony wrong. Within the year both he and Cleopatra were dead, and Rome annexed Egypt.
The Romans took an immediate interest in the Red Sea trade, and in 26 BCE Aelius Gallus was appointed to lead an expedition of ten thousand soldiers to Yemen. Having moved to Arsinöe all the necessary supplies, from building material and weapons to food and water, the Romans built a fleet of 80 warships (biremes, triremes, and lighter vessels) and 130 transports. Gallus lost a number of ships off the Sinai Peninsula, “on account of difficult sailing, but not on account of any enemy.” His expedition to Yemen ended in defeat, but having learned his lesson on returning from Yemen, Gallus had his men disembark at Myos Hormos to march overland to the Nile at Coptos. The kingdoms of southern Arabia—Main, Sabae, Qataban, and Hadramawt—remained independent until the advent of Islam in the seventh century, but Gallus’s expedition in no way inhibited the Roman appetite for oriental luxuries. While land caravans played an important part in the carriage of goods from east to west, the geographer Strabo recorded a dramatic expansion in Red Sea trade. Accompanying Aelius Gallus on a visit to Egypt, he “learned that as many as one hundred twenty vessels were sailing from Myos Hormos to India, whereas formerly, under the Ptolemies, only a very few [not so many as twenty] ventured to undertake the voyage and to carry on traffic in Indian merchandise.” Myrrh and frankincense came from southern Arabia and Somalia, many spices (above all pepper) and precious stones were Indian, while some exotics—Chinese silks, for instance—reached the west by way of India. There was also a reciprocal slave trade. Eudoxus took “music girls … physicians and other artisans” with him to India, and Asian slaves were not uncommon in Rome, but for the time being this was a relatively low-volume trade in people with special talents.
The most exhaustive description of the Indian Ocean trade is the first-century CE Periplus of the Erythraean Sea, written in a plain Greek by a native or resident of Egypt. Apart from this, we know nothing about the author—his (presumably) name, background, experience, or age, or what place he occupied in the hierarchy of the merchant community. Unlike the bookish Agatharchides, the anonymous author was not a compiler of other people’s information. His enumeration of which goods moved between which ports, his emphasis on certain Indian ports, his relative silence on the trade of the Persian Gulf, and the speculative nature of his descriptions of the Bay of Bengal are indicative of firsthand experience trading between Egypt and India. While he refers to some aspects of shiphandling, he focuses on goods and the ports where they could be traded. The surviving text is short—about twenty printed pages—and traces two primary itineraries, one from the northern Red Sea down the coast of Africa as far as Rhapta (near Dar es-Salaam, Tanzania), and another along the coast of Yemen and then across open water to Indian ports between Barbarikon, on the Indus River, and Muziris (Cranganur) on the Malabar Coast.
The author of the Periplus distinguishes five primary trading areas: the Red Sea, East Africa and southern Arabia in the west, and the Persian Gulf (which he all but ignores) and India in the east. The goods can be grouped into nine categories: food and drink; textiles and clothing; household items; raw materials; precious stones; spices and aromatics; drugs and dyes; animals; and slaves. Egypt’s most important exports were utilitarian objects such as metals, tools, blankets, and clothing—goods not unlike those itemized in the description of Queen Hatshepsut’s expedition to Punt fifteen centuries earlier—and horses and mules. The most valuable imports were myrrh, frankincense, Indian pepper, and other luxuries such as tortoiseshell, ivory, rhinoceros horn, and nautilus shell from Africa and Arabia; turquoise, lapis lazuli, onyx, agate, pearls, diamonds, and sapphires from South Asia; and Chinese silks. The author refers to the Indian port of Bharuch more than any other, but he enumerates seventeen ports between there and Cape Comorin, the southern tip of India, which indicates the Romans’ increasing familiarity with the Konkan and Malabar Coasts.
The Periplus mentions a number of foods that may have been intended for elite customers overseas—wine, for example—but which may have been carried simply to satisfy the wants of expatriate merchants, as would likely be the case for olive oil and garum, the Mediterranean fish sauce. Excavations at Berenike have revealed a similar impulse on the part of Indian merchants sailing to Egypt. The remains of coconut, rice, amla, mung bean, and Job’s tears—all staples of Indian cuisine—have been found at the Red Sea port, although no ancient source mentions any of these as a commodity. Expatriate trading colonies would not have depended entirely on goods imported from home, but whether of Mediterranean or Indian Ocean origin, familiar foods would be a comfort to expatriate traders just as they are today. There is other scattered evidence of Indian Ocean travelers even in the Mediterranean, from an early-second-century BCE inscription at Delos by someone from Hadramawt in southern Arabia; to a statuette of Manimekhala, heroine of the Tamil epic Manimekhalai, recovered from the ashes of Pompeii; and notices of Indian embassies to Augustus and of one sent by the Sri Lankan king Bhatikabhaya to the court of either Augustus or Claudius, presumably in response to the needs of the merchant community.
The western port with the strongest ties to the Indian Ocean was Alexandria, whose primacy in the Mediterranean trade was assured by the empire’s need for Egyptian grain, but which was also celebrated for its contacts with trade zones beyond the Greco-Roman world. The first-century orator Dio Chrysostom praised the Alexandrians’ preeminence in the commerce of the Red Sea and the Indian Ocean and noted that “the trade, not merely of islands, ports, a few straits and isthmuses, but of practically the whole world is yours. For Alexandria is situated, as it were, at the crossroads of the whole world, of even the most remote nations.” It was, moreover, “a market which brings together into one place all manner of men, displaying them to one another and, as far as possible, making them a kindred people.”
That this was not just rhetorical gilding of Alexandria’s reputation is borne out by a singular document (in Greek) of the second century detailing the substance of a loan arrangement between a lender in Muziris, India, and a borrower in need of funds to pay for a shipment to Alexandria. As was likely typical, the goods—in this case nard, ivory, and fabric—were pledged as security for the loan, which the borrower promised to repay to the lender or his agents at Alexandria. In the meantime, the shipper-borrow
er was responsible for all costs associated with getting the goods from Muziris to either Berenike or Myos Hormos, from there overland to Coptos, and then down the Nile to Alexandria, where all goods were subject to a 25 percent duty. The contract does not give the name or nationality of the borrower, lender, or agents, but the lender was probably a member of a “Roman” (but certainly Greek-speaking) expatriate community in Muziris, and his agents were probably colleagues from Egypt or elsewhere in the eastern Mediterranean. This agreement, along with Dio’s description of Alexandria’s cosmopolitanism and what we know of Indian Ocean trade generally, indicates the likelihood of other arrangements involving lenders and borrowers from India and elsewhere. Just as trade was not limited to citizens of the Roman Empire, it was not the exclusive preserve of men, either. A second-or third-century inscription tells of “Aelia Isidora and Aelia Olympias, distinguished matrons, naukleroi [shipowners or charterers] and merchants of the Red Sea.” Unfortunately, we know nothing else of their business, except that they were rich enough to make a dedication in an Egyptian temple and that they employed a captain or business agent named Apollinarios, whose name appears after theirs.
From the start of Rome’s Indian Ocean trade, citizens of a certain stripe warned against the constant export of gold to pay for eastern goods. Pliny the Elder complained that Romans squandered their wealth on oriental luxuries, exporting fifty million sesterces per year to Asia (half this amount to India alone) for the purchase of beryl, pearls, ivory, silks, and pepper.b Pliny’s sentiment was widespread, especially among conservatives who worried that Romans were becoming decadent. Augustus’s successor, Tiberius, sought to curb the extravagance of the wealthiest and most ostentatious senators, whom he criticized for their “vast mansions … cosmopolitan hordes of slaves … ponderous gold and silver plate,” and above all, “the feminine specialty—the export of our currency to foreign or enemy countries for precious stones.” He considered imposing new sumptuary laws but succumbed to political pressure and in the end did nothing.
Southern Indian Maritime Trade in the Early First Millennium
The testimony of Mediterranean merchants, geographers, and politicians about Rome’s eastern trade is corroborated by the archaeological record and contemporary writings from southern India, some of which tell of people called Yavanas. At the time of Alexander, this referred to Ionian Greeks but Yavana eventually came to be used for westerners generally—Greeks, Romans, Arabs, and Persians—who traded to and resided in southern India. Roman and imitation-Roman pottery has been found at sites on the Bay of Bengal, notably the Chola town of Arikamedu, near modern Puducherry (formerly Pondicherry), which was a center of local, regional, and international trade for a thousand years from about the third century BCE. These finds are too few and widespread to indicate the existence of a permanent foreign population; they may be the remains of amphorae that made their way via either a coastal route dominated by indigenous traders or by overland and riverine trade from west coast ports such as Bharuch. In addition, archaeologists have recovered hoards of silver denarii bearing the images of Augustus and Tiberius, and gold aurii of the first, second, and fifth centuries. These would have been valued as bullion in the Deccan, where copper and lead coins circulated, and in southern India, where there was no local currency.
This was a period of formative change in southern India, the economy of which depended on agriculture, crafts, and the mining of iron and semiprecious stones. But the growth of the southern kingdoms was tied to their pepper crops and their location at the intersection of the sea-lanes between Africa and the Near East and Southeast Asia, and the coastal routes around India and Sri Lanka. The Tamil-speaking Chola, Pandya, and Chera people coalesced into independent kingdoms in the early centuries of the common era. Frequently at war with each other and states to the north, they demonstrated their own expansionist tendencies by their forays into Sri Lanka. The Coromandel Coast of southeast India was the meeting ground of a far more varied mix of ethnicities, religions, and languages than the somewhat homogeneous Mediterranean, or indeed anywhere else except Sri Lanka. The people and products of Southeast Asia, fifteen hundred miles across the Bay of Bengal, had little in common with those of the Ganga-Brahmaputra delta, about twelve hundred miles to the northeast, who differed in their turn from those of the Persian Gulf or the Red Sea, about two thousand miles northwest and twentyfive hundred miles west, respectively. Catering to these visitors involved a broad cross section of the community who supplied merchants with trade goods, food, gear for their vessels, and protection from theft. Tamil poets of the early first millennium revel in their bustling ports and the networks of trade that connected them to distant shores. Far from inhabiting a subcontinent backwater, they live in cities that do not sleep, whose people not only embrace but exalt the cosmopolitan opportunities of trade. What it lacks in the catalogues of goods and destinations found in contemporary Latin, Greek, or Chinese sources, Tamil literature more than makes up for in its shimmering descriptions of the vitality of sea trade and the wealth it brings, and by extension it helps to animate our impressions of other ports of the period.
Ilanko Atikal’s second-century Cilappatikaram, or The Tale of an Anklet, is a love story about Kannaki and Kovalan, both children of prosperous merchants from Puhar (also called Kaveripattinam), the seaport capital of the early Chola kingdom on the Bay of Bengal. Kannaki is a “Noble daughter of a prince among merchants”—a characterization reminiscent of Isaiah’s description of the Tyrians, “whose merchants were princes.” Puhar is “the city that prospered from the wealth of the ocean,” where “lofty banners seemed to proclaim: ‘In this expanse of white sand is the wealth Brought in ships by men who have voyaged From their native lands to live here.’ ” Ilanko Atikal writes how at night the port glows with the lights of artisans, jewelers, fishmongers, peddlers from the interior, and “with the undying lamps of foreigners Speaking strange tongues; and with the lamps Of guards watching over piles of merchandise.” Along the shore of her sheltered coves, “with the beacons lit up to guide ships …were row Upon row of boats overburdened with a profusion / Of fresh produce from the hills and seas.”
Kaveripattinam and its merchants are equally celebrated in Uruthirankannanar’s fourth-century Pattinappalai, which presents a livelier accounting of trade than is found in most other sources. In addition to the fish, grain, pepper, and precious stones of southern India, Uruthirankannanar writes of “Swift, prancing steeds [brought] by sea in ships”—horses were a staple export from Persia and Arabia for hundreds of years—gold and gems from the Himalayas, sandalwood, pearls, and red coral from Southeast Asia, manufactured goods from Myanmar, and food from Sri Lanka. Uruthirankannanar is at pains to stress the ethical conduct of Kaveripattinam’s seafarers and notes that “For others’ goods they have / The same regard as for their own In trade. Nor do they try to get Too much in selling their own goods, Nor give too little when they buy. They set a fair price on all things.” A passage in a sequel to the Cilappatikaram suggests that the people of Kaveripattinam were relative newcomers to fair dealing and that their initial prosperity may have grown from more rough-and-tumble pursuits. “In the past, we have made feast, devouring the bodies of the survivors of the very many ships that have been wrecked in the sea not far from our shores. We have plundered all the goods they carried, their cargoes of precious aloes and sweet-scented sandalwood, their bales of cloth, their precious objects—gold, diamonds, and rubies—and other booty of shipwreck.” The metamorphosis from plunder to productive trade seems to have been made within living memory, but it recalls a comparable transformation in attitudes toward piracy noted by Thucydides in the ancient Mediterranean and notable elsewhere throughout history. The existence of piracy presumes the presence of a lucrative trade, but it only flourishes in the absence of legitimate state power with the means to contain it and redirect pirates’ entrepreneurship. The eradication of piracy therefore depend
s on the ability of states not just to overpower pirates, but to create lawful alternatives for gain. By this time, trade in southern India had passed a critical threshold that facilitated the growth of maritime commerce to the benefit of merchants and kings.
Sasanian-Byzantine Rivalry in the Indian Ocean
The Pattinappalai’s mention of food from Sri Lanka is one of the few references to exports from that island, which was best known to Greek and Chinese authors for its transit trade, although these rarely differentiate between products native to Sri Lanka and those that came to the island from elsewhere. A sixth-century Egyptian merchant-turned-monk named Cosmas Indicopleustes (literally, “sailor to India”) wrote about Sri Lanka and its trade from personal experience and was particularly impressed by its wealth of goods “from the remotest countries, I mean Tzinitsa [China] and other trading places,” including “silks, aloes, cloves, sandalwood, and other products.” The silk was Chinese, the aloes and sandalwood Indonesian, and the cloves came from the Spice Islands.
Among the traders in Sri Lanka who caught Cosmas’s attention were Nestorian Christians (Cosmas may have been one himself), many of whom had migrated down the coast of India from Persia. (Saint Thomas the Apostle reputedly preached in southern India.) Commerce in the Persian Gulf had grown markedly following the rise of Ardashir, founder of the Sasanian Dynasty (224–651). A native of Fars, Ardashir paid special attention to the provinces bordering the Persian Gulf and he founded or revived several river and coastal ports, including Astarabad-Ardashir (the old Charax Spasinou) and Rev-Ardashir (Rishahr). Now part of Bushehr, one of modern Iran’s foremost ports, and about 150 miles from the Shatt al-Arab, Rev-Ardashir has been occupied off and on since the fifth millennium BCE. Although water had to be brought in via a forty-kilometer-long canal built in the Achaemenid period, by Sasanian times it was a sprawling metropolis of 450 hectares (1,100 acres), one of the largest cities on the Persian Gulf before the twentieth century. The peninsula sheltered two harbors, one of which boasted a fort overlooking a hundred-meter-long jetty, and seems to have had a combined commercial and naval orientation. Ardashir’s son Shapur I extended Persian rule across the gulf to the region of al-Bahrayn, the Arabian coast from present-day Qatar to Kuwait. Taking advantage of internal discord in the Sasanian Empire in the early fourth century, Arab tribes crossed the gulf and seized a number of ports on the Persian coast, but despite occasional setbacks over the course of the next three centuries, Sasanian control gradually spread along the shores of the Indian Ocean east to the Indus and west to the Red Sea by both conquest and diplomacy. A fourth-century Chinese source mentions the Persian king’s wooing of a Sri Lankan princess, and in the 400s a successor acquired the port of Daybul (Banbhore, Pakistan) as part of a dowry.
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