Past the mouth of the Persian Gulf, the sailors would hit the Makran coast. From here, the ships would sail more directly east towards the Indus delta. The Periplus confirms that Sindh and parts of Gujarat were controlled by the Sakas (Scythians) and Parthians at that time. This fits with Satvahana inscriptions mentioned earlier that tell us of their wars with the Sakas.
Beyond the Indus, the text says that there was a large gulf that ran inland but was too shallow to be navigable. This is the Rann of Kutchh and one can see that, by AD first century, it was no longer possible to sail across it as in Harappan times. Next along the coast was the town of Baraca (probably Dwarka) after which the land gradually became more fertile and yielded a variety of crops—wheat, rice, sesame and, most importantly, cotton.
Having sailed past Saurashtra and the Gulf of Khambhat, the tired merchant ships would finally reach the estuary of the Narmada that led to the great port of Barygaza (Bharuch). The Periplus describes how shifting silt and sandbars made the entrance to the river perilous. Thus, the king of Barygaza appointed experienced fishermen as pilots to guide merchant ships. We are also warned of a wicked bore tide that could tear a ship from its moorings. The nautical details are so vivid that it is very likely that the author of The Periplus had personally visited the place.
The most important exports from Barygaza were different kinds of cotton textiles, which are still exported from this region. Iron and steel products would have also been exported as we know that these were coveted by communities living along the Red Sea. In exchange, one of the most important products ancient Indians imported was wine—and we are told that Italian wine was preferred over the Arabian and Syrian stuff; modern Indians would certainly agree with the verdict. The local kings also seem to have imported ‘beautiful maidens for the harem’. With imported Italian wines and beautiful maidens, it is fair to say that the Saka and Indian nobility of that period knew how to lead the high life.
The Periplus shows that the Romans were aware that from Barygaza, India’s western coast ran south in almost a straight line. The text lists a number of ports down the coast but arguably the most important was Muzeris (or Mucheripatanam as the Indians called it) which was the source of black pepper. We are told of how Arab and Greek ships flocked to the port. Excavations at the village of Pattanam, just north of modern Kochi, have recently allowed archaeologists to exactly identify the location of this ancient port. Many kinds of imported artefacts have been found here but some of the most common are wine and olive oil amphorae from as far away as France, Spain, Egypt and Turkey.13
The reason that the port of Muzeris was going through such a boom in international trade during the period The Periplus was written is that mariners had worked out in the previous century that they could use monsoon winds to sail directly between Socotra and southern India without hugging the coast. The author of The Periplus credits this discovery to a Greek pilot called Hippalus. It is curious that it took a Greek to work out how to harness the monsoon winds in the Arabian Sea when the Indians had been using them for generations in the Bay of Bengal to visit South East Asia. Perhaps ancient Arab and Indian mariners would have disputed Hippalus’s claim.
The Periplus mentions Greeks and Arabs in Muzeris but not the Jews. However, a small Jewish trading community would have existed by the time the manual was written and, within a few decades, an influx of refugees would expand it significantly. After the Second Temple in Jerusalem was destroyed by the Romans in AD 70, many Jewish refugees came to settle around Muzeris. Thus, India became home to one of the oldest Jewish communities in the world. Their numbers have dwindled in recent decades due to emigration to Israel but their synagogues can still be visited in the Kochi–Kodungallur area.
Similarly, the Syrian Christian community claims descent from converts made by St Thomas who is said to have visited these parts in AD first century. Although the historical veracity of St Thomas’ visit has been disputed by scholars, it is reasonably certain that Christians visited and settled along the Kerala coast at an early stage.14 We know that a group of Christians fleeing persecution in the Persian empire came to India under the leadership of Thomas of Cana in AD 345. Seventy-two families settled near Muzeris and were given special trading privileges by the local Hindu king.15 A few centuries later, early Muslims would build the Cheraman Masjid, the world’s second oldest mosque, in the same general area. It is a testimony to the importance of ancient Muzeris that these early Jewish, Christian and Islamic sites are all located within a very short distance of each other. This is saying something at a time when the Christian community in Syria and Iraq is being systematically wiped out by the so-called Islamic State.
From The Periplus, we can gather that the Romans knew that the coast south of Muzeris ended in a cape—Kanyakumari—and that the island of Taprobane (i.e. Sri Lanka) lay beyond it. Given the repeated mention of the Pandyas, but not of the rival clans, it seems that The Periplus was composed at a time when the Pandyas were dominant.
We know from archaeological excavations that Roman traders made their way up the east coast as far as Arikamedu, close to modern Puducherry. It is a beautiful turn in the river but the visitor will find little to reflect its ancient history except a large number of pottery shards that lie scattered about. The Periplus gets increasingly garbled as one goes further up the east coast. It shows an awareness of the Gangetic delta and mentions oriental tribes, but the details are quite blurred. The inland city of Thinae is mentioned as the source of silk (is this a reference to China?). So, it is fair to say that this was the limit of what the Romans knew about the Indian Ocean in AD first century.
Indo-Roman trade boomed in AD first and second centuries. Emperor Trajan had the Nile–Suez canal re-excavated; it began just south of modern Cairo and headed due east to the Red Sea.16 About 120 ships made the round trip between India and the Red Sea ports every year. The availability of eastern luxuries transformed Roman tastes but the problem was that the empire ran a persistent trade deficit with India. This deficit had to be paid in gold and silver coins. Roman writer Pliny (AD 23–79) complained bitterly that, ‘Not a year passed in which India did not take fifty million sesterces away from Rome.’
In a world where precious metals were used for minting coins, this was equivalent to severe monetary tightening. The Romans initially tried to solve the problem by curtailing trade but eventually they would resort to debasing their coins (i.e. reducing the content of gold and silver). This would eventually cause distortions and inflation in the Roman empire. Interestingly, the Indians continued to accept the debased coins although they recognized the higher quality of the older, high-content coins which continued to circulate in the Indian Ocean long after the reigns of emperors who had issued them.
Notice the similarity with the modern world where China runs a persistent surplus against the United States and accepts dollars in exchange. Everyone accuses the US of printing too many dollars but China keeps accumulating them as reserves. In this way a symbiotic imbalance keeps the world economy going despite the distortions it causes. Indeed, such imbalances have been at the heart of most periods of global economic expansion and can be surprisingly persistent.17
Note that merchants were not the only people who travelled between the Roman empire and India. We know, for instance, that it was fashionable for wealthy Roman women to consult Indian astrologers. We also have the story of Demetrius, a student of Greek philosophy, who was wrongly accused of stealing from a temple and arrested in Egypt. After he was exonerated and freed with compensation, he gifted all his property to a friend and sailed to India to study Vedic philosophy.18 In other words, the shipping lines provided the infrastructure for all kinds of people to move back and forth across the seas.
The Waqwaq
Given the country’s central location, it is not surprising that links between the eastern and western Indian Ocean were routed through India. However, as the knowledge of the winds and sea currents improved, seafarers became confident enough to cr
oss the ocean directly. One of the most intriguing examples of this is the colonization of Madagascar by the Indonesians.
Madagascar is located close to Africa but, as discussed earlier, the two land masses had separated about 160 million years ago when Gondwana split up. Thus, the island’s flora and fauna had evolved in isolation for a very long time and bore little resemblance to that of Africa next door. For instance, it was home to the elephant bird that stood three metres tall and weighed half a ton, the largest bird ever. Then there was the giant lemur that was larger than a gorilla and was the world’s largest primate.
At some point in the fifth century, Indonesian sailors in their outrigger boats began to visit the island. In terms of seamanship, this matches the exploits of their Polynesian cousins in the Pacific. Thus, an island so close to the origin of our species in Africa was first colonized from the other side of the Indian Ocean. Recent genetic studies show that the first permanent settlement of the island was done by a tiny group from Indonesia around AD 800, and may have included just thirty women.19 Similarly, the island’s main language, Malagasy, has been traced back to south Borneo. Reflecting the spread of Indic influences in their homeland, the settlers also brought certain Hindu rituals and words from Sanskrit that survive in traces.
Predictably, humans were a shock to the isolated and fragile ecosystem of the island. The extinction of the elephant bird and the giant lemur coincided with the arrival of people and it is difficult to escape the conclusion that these events are somehow related. We saw how the arrival of humans in Australia had a very similar impact.
The settlers would come to be known as the Waqwaq, probably after their ‘waqa’ canoes, and would be feared as pirates by medieval Arab merchants sailing down the East African coast. The Waqwaq also made regular raids on the mainland to acquire slaves. We have records of how they even made an unsuccessful attempt to capture the fortified port of Qanbalu, on the island of Pemba (in present-day Tanzania) in AD 945.20
Despite their notoriety, the Indonesians also introduced new crops to Africa. It is believed that many staples like banana, yam, breadfruit and sugar cane were brought here by the Waqwaq (note that there is a rival theory that some of these were introduced by the Indians). These crops would spread into the continent’s interior and would become a very important part of the local diet.
Over time, however, coastal Madagascar came to be dominated by the Arabs and Africans. Many of the Waqwaq then withdrew to the island’s central highlands where they slowly forgot their maritime culture. As Richard Hall puts it in Empires of the Monsoon, ‘Although they still buried their rulers in silver canoes, they could never go home again.’
Stitched Ships
One of the most common observations made by ancient and medieval travellers is that the ships of the Indian Ocean had hulls that were ‘stitched’ together with rope rather than nailed around a frame. This design most likely originated in India but seems to have been adopted by the Yemeni and Omani Arabs at an early stage. It is unclear why the Indians preferred to stitch together their ships when they were more than familiar with iron nails. Indeed, as demonstrated by Delhi’s famous Iron Pillar, they even had the technology for rust-resistant iron.
One possibility is that the stitched technique gave the hull a degree of flexibility. This meant that the ship was less likely to break up if it ran into a shoal or sandbar. This was no small concern given that the Indian coastline has few natural harbours and most of the ports were either in an estuary or require sailing through a narrow passage like that of Lake Chilika. Moreover, using the monsoon winds implied that the sailing season coincided with rough surf. This meant that arriving ships were often beached rather than tied by the quayside.
The Indo-Arab stitched ships, however, were not the only ones plying the Indian Ocean. The South East Asians had their own design derived from the outrigger canoes that their prehistoric ancestors had used when they left the flooding coasts of Sundaland to settle in the islands. Perhaps the best depiction of eighth-century Indonesian outrigger ships is carved on the panels of Borobudur, Java. Using the panels as their guide, a group of enthusiasts recently recreated the ‘Borobudur Ship’. Between August 2003 and February 2004, they further proved their point by sailing the reconstructed ship, named Samudra Raksha, from Java to Madagascar and then all the way to Ghana! The ship is now displayed at a museum in Borobudur.21
In addition to the local ship designs, the Indian Ocean also witnessed maritime technologies derived from outside the region. Greco-Roman ships were adapted from the designs that plied the Mediterranean. Later the Indian Ocean would see the entry of Chinese ships culminating in the voyages of Admiral Zheng He’s ‘Treasure Fleet’ in the fifteenth century. In other words, the Indians and Arabs were quite familiar with different ship designs. The advantages of the stitched design must have been significant if it remained the preferred technique till the Europeans arrived at the end of the fifteenth century. There are still a few coastal villages in India that have preserved the skill of stitching together fishing boats but it is a dying art.
The Bantu Migrations
Even as the Indian Ocean world was witnessing a boom in maritime trade, the interiors of sub-Saharan Africa were experiencing profound demographic changes. Today sub-Saharan Africa is so dominated by Bantu-speaking people that we tend to assume that Africa was always like this. However, linguistic and, more recently, genetic data confirm that the Bantu people originated in what is now Nigeria and Cameroon around 5000 years ago, that is, the third millennium BC.22
Around the first millennium BC, they began to expand out of their original homeland. Roughly speaking, one branch pushed directly south into equatorial central Africa, through what is now the Democratic Republic of Congo. Another branch pushed east towards the East African Rift Valley before migrating south through what is now Kenya, Tanzania, Malawi and Zimbabwe.
As they pushed into these new areas, the Bantu replaced or assimilated with the people who already lived there. Till their arrival, hunter–gatherers related to the Khoi-San had inhabited eastern and southern Africa. Central Africa had similarly been inhabited by the Pygmies. This fits in with a story told by Herodotus about an ancient expedition that had crossed the Sahara and come upon a land with forests and Pygmies.
The Bantu, however, steadily replaced both groups. The success of the Bantu seems to have been driven initially by their skills at farming but from around 600 BC, it was strengthened by locally developed iron technology. In Gabon, for instance, archaeological evidence shows iron-using farmers replacing the stone-tool users around 300 BC.23
The process of migration still took many centuries and had not yet penetrated the southern tip of Africa when the Europeans arrived there. Thus, when Bartholomew Diaz and Vasco Da Gama arrived at the Cape of Good Hope at the end of the fifteenth century, they encountered Khoi-San pastoralists and hunter–gatherers. It is estimated that the Khoi-San population at that time was around 50,000 in the south-western Cape. However, they would steadily lose territory to the Bantu tribes and to the Europeans who contemptuously called them the ‘Hottentots’.
6
Arabian Knights
The trade routes of the Indian Ocean became even more firmly established in AD fourth and fifth centuries. By this time, we find records of people from far outside the Indian Ocean rim, such as Chinese pilgrims and merchants, visiting India and criss-crossing the seas. Anchoring this period of prosperity and globalization was the remarkable empire of the Guptas.
The Gupta empire had its origins in the eastern Gangetic plains, in what is now Bihar and eastern Uttar Pradesh, where the dynasty’s first emperor, Chandragupta I, established his power base. However, it was his son Samudragupta (AD 336–370) who dramatically expanded the empire. In a series of military campaigns he established direct or indirect control over nearly all of India. After establishing Gupta rule across the northern plains and central India, he led a campaign along the eastern coast into the deep south where he def
eated in turn the rulers of Odisha and Andhra, and eventually Pallava king Vishnugopa of Kanchi. The northern conquests were directly ruled from the capital Pataliputra while the southern kings were allowed to rule their kingdoms as tribute-paying subordinates.
The empire was expended further by Samudragupta’s son Chandragupta II (also called Vikramaditya), who reigned between AD 375 and 413. From certain accounts it appears that he ascended the throne by removing his unpopular elder brother, Ramagupta.
According to a few surviving passages of a lost play called Devi-Chandragupta, the Gupta empire was invaded by the Sakas (Scythians) after Samudragupta’s death. The new king Ramagupta found himself trapped and appealed for peace. One of the terms imposed by the Sakas was that Queen Dhruva-devi would have to be handed over to them. This insult to the family incensed the king’s younger brother. Disguising himself as Dhruva-devi, he entered the Saka camp and killed their king before escaping. The invaders were forced to withdraw in disorder. This turned Chandragupta into a popular hero, but Ramagupta resented this and tried to assassinate his younger sibling. In the ensuing power struggle, Chandragupta finally killed his elder brother. He then crowned himself emperor and married Dhruva-devi.
This colourful story may not be an accurate rendition of real historical events, but Gupta-era inscriptions do show that Chandragupta II had a queen called Dhruva-devi and had children by her.1 We also know that he led a number of successful military campaigns against the Saka and other Central Asian groups that had encroached into western India. The famous iron pillar in Delhi tells us that he crossed the estuary of the Indus and defeated the Bahlikas (Bactrians). This would have brought the ports of Gujarat and Sindh under Gupta control. We also have rock inscriptions mentioning Chandragupta Vikramaditya in the remote Hunza valley, in Gilgit–Baltistan to the far north, suggesting that Gupta armies had pushed beyond the Kashmir valley into the Pamirs.
The Ocean of Churn: How the Indian Ocean Shaped Human History Page 11
