The Lost Empire of Atlantis

by Gavin Menzies

  Assuming for the moment that the Minoans did use the Red Sea– Nile canal, quite possibly in company with Egyptian sailors or ships, they would have entered the northern Red Sea – the adventurer’s route to the heady lands of Punt and India. If the Minoans had used the canal frequently, I reasoned, there could still be some concrete evidence left. I wondered if I could uncover any of the traces left behind, in the form of Bronze Age ports or buildings on the land which borders the Red Sea – either in Egypt, Arabia or the Yemen.

  The hoards of bronze near the stone megaliths of Tihamah speak of trade. A photograph of axe heads in the hoard is shown in the first colour plate section. Not only that, but the megaliths themselves also tell their own story, a story I shall return to later on in this book.

  The important thing is this. From the Yemen, reputedly the Land of Punt, to India is some four weeks’ sailing on the southwest monsoon, which starts in June.

  CHAPTER 17

  INDIAN OCEAN TRADE

  IN THE BRONZE AGE

  Sailing in the Indian Ocean is determined by the monsoon wind, which is caused by the difference in temperature between the massive Himalayan Plateau and the sea (see map). In summer the Asian land mass becomes hotter than the ocean, sucking winds and water vapour off the sea. In April the southwest monsoon is heralded by westerly winds in the Indian Ocean. By May the southwest monsoon hits Indochina, to reach its peak and constancy in July, by which time winds reach 30 knots in the South China Sea. By then, India is inundated with monsoon rain. During September the temperature drops and by November, when the Himalayas have become bitterly cold, air is drawn off the mountains by the warmer seas.

  The northeast monsoon starts in late December, after which the wind gradually abates until April, when the cycle begins again. Sailing ships voyaging between Egypt, Africa, India and China would have had to take advantage of the monsoons in order to sail before the wind, returning on the next monsoon to their respective countries. They awaited the change in a sheltered harbour. Hence the need for capacious ports around the Indian Ocean, where goods could be stored from one monsoon season to the next.

  Monsoons are so predictable – and so important – that they were later incorporated into calendars, which illustrated the highly synchronised system of regular shipping between Egypt, East Africa, India and the Gulf. For example one such calendar has this for day 68 (March 16): ‘End of sailing of Indian ships from India to Aden: no one sets sail after this day’ and ‘on day 100 (April 15) the last fleet from India was scheduled to arrive in Aden . . . on Aug 14 (day 220) the last ship from Egypt arrived in Aden. Six days later ships from Sri Lanka and Coromandel set out on their voyage home.’28

  The last departure from Aden, powered by the monsoon, was on day 250 (September 13).

  In short, ships sailing from Egypt for India would be carried by the southwest monsoon which ends in September. They could then trade in India until it was time for the northeast monsoon starting in December, which would carry them back home to Egypt and, via the Red Sea–Nile canal, to the Mediterranean. They had a free ride each way. The west coast of India has many great rivers carrying melted snow down from the mountains. Their estuaries provide the opportunity: wonderful ports could be built in the shelter of most of them, from which to export the riches of India. Marcella and I decided to take advantage of an invitation to speak at a naval academy event. The coasts of India beckoned: and who were we to gainsay that?

  I reasoned that there should be Bronze Age ports from Karachi in the north of India all the way down the coast to Kerala, in the south. As I began my research, I realised that three ports – Lothal, Cambay and Muziris – were important in the Bronze Age, specialising in exports.

  LOTHAL – AN INDIAN BRONZE AGE PORT

  In a series of articles published between 1955 and1962, Professor S. R. Rao, an Indian marine archaeologist, describes his excavation of a port at Lothal, inland from the Gulf of Cambay in northwest India. Lothal was then much closer to the sea than today (see map).

  In those seven years, Professor Rao and his team unearthed channels and locks leading from the river to a large rectangular port area. The dockyard itself was lined with well-made bricks and was designed to control the flow of water through a sluice from the river into the dockyard. Lothal had the world’s first lock system.

  The town that surrounded the dockyard was built between 2500 BC and 1900 BC. The dockyard itself provided sheltered mooring in an enclosed harbour measuring 214 × 36 metres (702 by 118 feet) – absolutely enormous for 4,500 years ago. The entire settlement was divided into two parts: a citadel or acropolis for the ruler and wealthy merchants and a lower town for the workers. Acropolis houses were built on 3-metre-high (10 foot) brick platforms and were provided with running hot and cold water, a well for drinking water and a sewage system that was designed for flushing out and for solid waste to be removed. A large warehouse which was situated at the southwest corner of the Acropolis was again raised on 3-metre stands. Goods were protected from flood or theft by being raised from the ground, by wooden walls on four sides and by a wooden roof.

  The surrounding land was well watered and produced fine Indian cotton and plentiful rice. The sea coast provided shellfish and the river had beads in profusion.

  Thus, with an abundance of fresh water and with a river leading to the sea, Lothal became the most important port in India – and from the point of view of archaeological finds one of the richest sites in the subcontinent. These finds are now exhibited at Lothal in a modern archaeological museum that was established in 1976. To summarise the official description:

  The museum has three galleries. In the front gallery, a canvas depicts an artist’s impression of how the town was laid out. There are also introductory maps and descriptions to explain the importance of Lothal. The left hand gallery displays showcases with beads, terra-cotta ornaments, seals, shells, ivory, copper and bronze objects, bronze tools and pottery. The right hand gallery has games, and human figurines, weights, painted pottery, burial and ritual objects and a scale model of the whole site. (www.indianetzone.com)

  The famous Indian beads found in local rivers are of cornelian, agate, amethyst, onyx, semi- precious stones and faience. Tiny micro beads can be seen through magnifying glasses.

  The seals are engraved on steatite with Indian writing and animal figurines on the face. Shells are made up into bangles, necklaces, games and musical instruments.

  Copper ingots of 99.8 per cent purity were imported, as was tin. These were smelted to make a wide array of weapons, tools and cooking implements. Pottery, including huge pithoi for storage, came in all shapes and sizes. There were games made of bone, shell and ivory as well as clay figurines representing subjects such as a gorilla, or humans. The gold work was extremely fine, with minute golden balls that require a microscope to view them properly. The people who had made the artefacts had a standardised weight system, using weights made of cornelian, jasper, agate and ivory.

  The similarities between these archaeological artefacts excavated from Lothal and those found in Minoan sites or Minoan wrecks are striking – even astounding. The same can be said for the layout and construction of the town.

  A comparison between forty-six artefacts excavated at Lothal with those at Minoan sites or in Minoan wrecks of the same era – the 3rd and 2nd millennia BC – discloses that all forty-six are very similar, or identical. Could these artefacts have developed independently? Did the Minoan and Indian civilisations develop at the same time, needing the same goods? I believe this argument breaks down for three principal reasons. Firstly, Lothal imported copper and bronze. For reasons which will be considered in more detail later, the copper ingot found at Lothal was of over 99.8 per cent purity. The only mines which produced copper of that purity in 2500 BC were the mines of Isle Royale and Lake Superior. Ships must have brought that copper, crossing the Atlantic to do so. Minoans had ships capable of such journeys. Secondly, items unique to India – elephant tusks and Indian beads fo
und in Indian rivers – have been found in Minoan palaces and wrecked ships (Uluburun). So, I would argue that Minoan ships must have sailed to India to collect those items. Thirdly, it’s worth noting the scale of the coincidence – if there were a dozen excavated artefacts one could just about attribute it to chance, but 46 ?! You can make up your own mind by visiting the gallery pages on our website.

  What is I think possible, even likely, is that there was a substantial exchange of goods and ideas. Minoan ships took copper and tin to India and returned with ivory and cotton and perhaps many Indian ideas about town planning, civic engineering and astronomy. Sooner or later, Indian shipowners would have wanted their vessels to accompany Minoan ships across the world, to collect valuable goods for themselves.

  It is time to leave Lothal and travel southwards once more down India’s beautiful seaboard. We had intended to visit Cambay, north of Bombay, knowing Cambay had been a great international port in the Bronze Age. However we learned that the town is now beneath the sea, due to a shift in the continental plates. So we must push on further south knowing little of the ports of southern India.

  How can we narrow our search to find ports which flourished in the 2nd millennium BC? I’ve prepared a plan, which involves starting with the accounts of those celebrated authors who had described trade in prehistoric times. Professor A. Sreedhara Menon, in A Survey of Kerala History, has provided a very useful summary. He describes classical writers giving vivid accounts of the thriving spice trade between the Kerala coast and the Roman Empire through the ports of Muziris (South India), Tyndis and Barace – the classical writers being the Greek ambassador Megasthenes (4th century BC), the anonymous author of The Periplus of the Erythraean Sea (1st century AD) and Ptolemy (2nd century AD). And the Peutingerian Table, a set of maps dating from about AD 226 that is reputed to have been copied from fresco paintings in Rome, is said to show a temple of Augustus near Muziris and a Roman army being stationed in Muziris for the protection of the Roman spice trade with India. The location of Muziris will be discussed later.

  To match these Roman and Greek accounts, Professor Menon cites Sanskrit works. The Mahabharata mentions the king of Kerala providing provisions; the 4th century BC Arthashastra mentions the River Periyar as one of the rivers of Kerala where pearls can be found. The Puranas also mention Kerala. Apart from Sanskrit (language of North India), Tamil writings in the language of South India are also important sources of information: ancient Tamil literature is replete with references to the land of Kerala, its rulers and its people and its well-developed civilisation. The Patittupattu (Ten Decads) is an anthology of 100 poems which reconstruct the history of ancient Kerala and her trade.

  To these classical, Tamil and Sanskrit accounts, we can add those of the Chinese: Hiuen Tsang in the 7th century AD; Wang da Yuan in Descriptions of the Barbarians of the Isles (1330–49); and Ma Huan, who accompanied Admiral Zheng and describes Cochin and Calicut with great verve.

  Arab writers al-Idrisi (AD 1154) and Yaqut al-Hamawi (1189– 1229) give descriptions of Kerala’s coastal towns and their trade, Al-Kazwini (1236–1275) provides information about Quilon and Dimishqi (AD 1325) writes about the Malabar coast. Also, the accounts of Ibn Battuta describe his six visits to Calicut and the pepper trade operating out of the port of Quilon, where there were huge Chinese junks.

  Finally we have the early European travellers who describe a very old spice trade between Kerala and the Arab, Mediterranean and Chinese worlds – Friar Odoric of Pordenone who reached Quilon in 1322 en route for China; Friar Jordanus of Severic who came to Quilon in 1324; the papal legate John de Marignolli of Florence who lived in Quilon for a year; and Nicolò da Conti (1420s– 30s) with his description of the ginger, pepper and cinnamon trade of Quilon and the jack fruit and mango trees along the coast. The Persian ambassador Abdul al-Razzak (1442) testifies to the rich Malabar trade with the Arab world, as does the Russian Athanasius Nikitin in 1468–74.

  In short, accounts from many sources stretching back thousands of years testify to the fact that the Malabar coast of Kerala and her ports of Calicut, Cochin, Quilon and Muziris traded valuable spices with the Arab world, the Mediterranean, Africa and China.

  LOCATING MUZIRIS

  The port whose name crops up time and again is Muziris. Muziris was an important spice port long before Roman times. We therefore intended to locate Muziris and, having done so, to see whether there is evidence that Minoan ships traded there.

  Muziris is likely to have been a natural harbour near where the most valuable spices, that is pepper and cardamom, grew. We can narrow our search by locating the best growing areas for pepper and cardamom.

  Southern India has a peculiar geography. It is near the equator and therefore will have an equatorial climate, but this is modified by a range of mountains called the Western Ghats, which run north– south, parallel to the coast for some 995 miles (1,600 kilometres). Their average height is 900 metres (2,950 feet). The Ghats are punctuated by a number of wide valleys which allow monsoon winds to funnel through. The result is that there are three seasons: summer, rainy season and winter. The coast is hot and wet but it is cool and pleasant in the hills with light sea breezes in the foothills. Pre-monsoon rains called ‘mango showers’ are beneficial to coffee and mangoes. The southwest monsoon arrives at the end of May with 2 to 4 metres (6.5 to 13 feet) of rain all along the coast. This high rainfall, high humidity and a long wet season has given rise to dense, evergreen luxuriant vegetation ideal for palm trees – Kerala means kera (palm) and la (land). The cool, moist hill slopes of the Ghats provide ideal conditions for tea, coffee and spices. Kerala is the world’s largest producer of cardamom, the most valuable spice, today costing four times as much as black pepper. The coast of Kerala, from Calicut in the north to Quilon in the south, is char-acterised by a number of lagoons called backwaters, providing a series of internal waterways – canals protected from the sea by sandbanks, resulting in wonderful natural harbours. Moreover, into those protected harbours flow no less than forty-four rivers, which rise in the Western Ghats. In short, along this stretch of coast, named ‘The Malabar Coast’ by the British Raj, are endless fine protected harbours. Rivers lead explorers quickly to the foothills of the Western Ghats, where pepper and cardamom flourish. The elusive Muziris, confusingly known by a number of ancient names including Shinkli, is therefore likely to have been situated along this 620 mile (1,000 kilometres) stretch of coast (see map). This preliminary conclusion appears to be borne out by a huge hoard of Roman coins found inland near Palghat in central Kerala.

  THE LOCATION OF MUZIRIS

  In 2006 the Kerala Council for Historical Research (KCHR) found a prehistoric Bronze Age site at Pattanam, 25 miles (40 kilometres) north of Kochi (Cochin), near the estuary of Kerala’s largest river, the Periyar. The research team, headed by its director, Dr P.J. Cherian, started excavations near to the position of previous finds of Roman amphorae. An earlier team had found Roman coins, a bead chain and Roman artefacts nearby. To quote extracts from KCHR:

  . . . The third season (2009) archaeological excavations at Pattanam reiterates the assumptions that Pattanam might be the oldest port site with extensive evidence for Roman contacts on the Indian Ocean rim or beyond . . .

  . . . The initial inference from the field is that the majority of the samples [of pottery] are of the campanian type of south Italian origin with volcanic elements. Greek sources such Kos and Rhodes and Egyptian and Mesopotamian amphora sherds were also found.

  . . . This time small finds abound and include a variety of non-local (foreign) ceramics, a large number of semi-precious stones and glass beads (over 3,000), copper coins, most of them in a corroded condition, iron, copper, gold and tin artefacts, cameo blanks, spindle whorls, terracotta lamps and so on.

  Pattanam, located 5.5 miles (9 km) south of Kodungallur, is said to have been first occupied around 1000 BC and continued till the 10th century AD.

  . . . The evidence points to the possibility that the site
had the benefit of the services of a large number of artisans and technicians but not necessarily residents on the site. The plethora of artefacts and structures indicate that this site could not have been provisioned without a skilled workforce.

  . . . The workforce comprised blacksmiths (large quantity of iron objects such as nails, tools etc.), coppersmiths (copper objects), goldsmiths (gold ornaments), potters (huge quantity of domestic vessels, lamps, oven and other terracotta objects), brick makers, roofers (large quantity of bricks and triple grooved roof tiles), stone bead makers, lapidaries (as indicated by a variety of semi-precious stone beads, cameo blanks and stone debitage) and weavers (signified by spindle whorls).

  So here we have a site dating back to 1000 BC – well before the heydays of classical Greece and Rome – which contains central Mediterranean artefacts. Moreover some of these items, such as the gold ornaments, terracotta objects and lamps and stone beads, appear to be remarkably similar to those found in the Uluburun wreck; this will be considered in more detail later.

  As the Vice-Chancellor of Tamil University, Mr M. Rajendran, said in a KCHR press release:

  I am personally surprised to see the huge quantity of glass and semi-precious stone beads at Pattanam which goes well with those at the Kodumanal site, excavated by the Tamil University. The evidence unearthed at Pattanam definitely points to connections of the region with the Mediterranean world, South-East Asia and Sri Lanka.

  I should add at this point that teak provisionally dated to the 2nd millennium BC and originating in Kerala has been found in the foundations of the Mesopotamian city of Ur.

  VISIT TO COCHIN (KOCHI)

  We selected Cochin as our base for a research expedition as it is on the backwaters of central Kerala, at the mouth of an estuary of the Periyar River. It is also near Pattanam, which is thought to be the site of ancient Muziris. From here we could explore both the coast and the interior by travelling up the Periyar.