Never will I forget arriving in Cochin at the Old Harbour Hotel at dusk on a warm tropical day. The hotel was once the Portuguese viceroy’s palace. It has been superbly converted; the bedrooms have the original teak floors, with planks over 10 metres (33 feet) long and 1 metre (3 feet) wide.
Our bedroom overlooks the old harbour, which is framed by Chinese fishing nets perched along the length of the coast. These resemble great spiders whose front legs lean forward into the sand when the net (beneath the spider’s belly) is lowered into the sea. There it rests for some five minutes before a counter-weight is lowered between the spider’s rear legs. This raises the front legs and the net – now full of fish. We rush down and buy a big pomfret and a fresh snapper, which the hotel cook grills for our supper.
We eat in the central courtyard, which is centred around a large pool on which float purple water lilies. The air is redolent with frangipani. A sitar and an Indian flute play in the background. The courtyard is shaded by a huge rain tree from which enormous bats flit across the sky. A mango tree sprouts pink orchids; bamboos sway in the sea breeze; jasmine, jack fruit, spider lilies and heliconia surround us as we drink our chota pegs. Later the honk of ships passing downriver to distant lands lulls us to sleep – life could not come better than this; we are so incredibly lucky to experience such a day.
On our second night we ask to move temporarily next door to experience life in the Koder House. It was built by the Koders, prominent Jews, whose forebears traded in Kerala long ago. Our bedroom is 20 metres (65 feet) long, with the same enormous teak floorboards as in the Old Harbour Hotel. The family patriarch, Samuel Koder, built the house on top of a former Portuguese palace. His house hosted various presidents, prime ministers, viceroys and ambassadors. Sam Koder’s ‘open house’ every Friday was a focal point of the Raj establishment weekly social round. Kay Hyde, an 81-year-old from that era, describes Friday Open House:
I met so many bigwigs there. Because of the Koders I met Benjamin Britten the famous composer; Peter Pears the singer; Princess Margaret of Hesse, sister of the Duke of Edinburgh; and Maharani Gayatri Devi. In those days Jew town at Cochin was full of Jews – almost all emigrated with the creation of Israel of 1948.
Lord Curzon, the British Viceroy of India, wrote an open letter of greeting to the Jewish community:
Cochin and its people owe much to you. The memory of your early association with this country has always been pleasant. It is recorded by historians that your people began to visit this coast as early as the days of King Solomon [10th century BC] and they formed one of the earliest links binding East and West, fast with each other.
What I had picked up was an intriguing detail, in the form of the Jewish name for their home town. The Jews called their old settlement ‘Shingly’, an echo of the ancient name for Muziris. The fame of this settlement, ruled by a Jewish king, spread far and wide. To quote Rabbi Nissim, a 14th-century poet:
I travelled from Spain,
I had heard of The City of Shingly
I longed to see an Israel King
Him, I saw with my own eyes
Shingly became a haven for the Jews; their attachment was so strong that until relatively recently the Jewish custom worldwide was to put a handful of Shingly sand into any coffin, together with a handful of earth from the Holy Land.
THE BACKWATERS
By now Marcella and I have a reasonable feel for Cochin. Before our journey into the interior to find the fabled spices of the foothills of the Western Ghats, we decide to investigate the backwaters around the estuary of the Periyar River. This is the area where Muziris and other prehistoric ports emerged. We take a punt arranged by the Cochin Tourist Board. Our first impression is one of monotony – in whichever direction one looks there are coconut palms of the same shape and height for mile after mile. A navigator approaching the coast on the monsoon winds would find identifying the port area a very difficult task – he would have to know the precise latitude of the place or risk missing it altogether.
The excited foreign mariner arriving off the Periyar estuary would find a string of sandbanks sheltering lagoons from the sea on which to anchor, fresh water from the streams emptying into the backwaters, fish and fruit of every description as well as wild ducks, pheasants and quail.
JOURNEY INTO THE INTERIOR
We shall travel to the foothills of the Western Ghats up the Periyar River. These days it has channels which enter the Indian Ocean at Cochin and Pattanam (Muziris). Over the centuries the river has changed direction at its estuary, on account of the silt continuously brought downriver by the monsoon rains. Today the big estuary is at Cochin, 2,000 years ago it was at Pattanam. As the river changes course so do the ports where sea meets river. Up until Alwaye the river is as wide as the Thames at London or the Hudson at New York. Pattanam/Muziris is at the northern end of Vypin Island, which can easily be reached from Cochin by the ferry opposite the Old Harbour Hotel – cost three rupees (approximately four cents). Above Alwaye the river runs in a remarkably straight course, fringed by palm trees – just like the river in the frescoes of Thera (described in chapter 2).
For the first two hours we travel beside the river. There are still wild elephants in the forests here as well as tigers and leopards in the Periyar Nature Reserve. The land is rich in fruit – mangoes, bananas, papayas, pomegranates, tree tomatoes, passion fruit and chikoos. The river, according to Roman accounts, is rich in pearls. The woods were famous for jungle fowl, francolins (a type of partridge), peafowl and wild deer – once again plenty of food for seafarers travelling upriver.
We have come at the tail end of the monsoon in mid-October to the festival of lights – Diwali. By the time we reach the foothills of the Western Ghats it is raining, or rather there is a thick wet mist dripping off the trees and shrubs. Josey, our splendid driver, suddenly stops and we get out. He shows us a tree surrounded by a climbing vine, with bunches of small green berries – pepper! Within a 5-square-yard (4 square metres) stretch of forest are wild coffee, cocoa, pepper and cardamom bushes or trees. It is the first time I had seen cardamom growing in the wild – cardamom grows on little stalks at the base of the shrub whose shape resembles a bamboo but with thicker leaves. Josey tells us that these foothills of the Western Ghats have perfect conditions for pepper and cardamom: just the right amount of shade and moisture, the right altitude – 600 to 1,500 metres (2,000 to 5,000 feet) – ideal soil conditions and a suitable all-year-round temperature.
The Rough Guide to Kerala has a very good summary that illustrates the lure Kerala would have had for any enterprising foreign trader:
Aromatic spices have been used to flavour food, as medicines, and in religious rituals for many thousands of years in Kerala. Traders from Sumeria first sailed across the Arabian Sea in the 3rd millennium BC in search of cinnamon and cardamom – centuries before the Romans mastered the monsoon winds and used them to reach the Malabar pepper, the ‘black gold’ prized in Europe as a taste enhancer and preservative . . . few aspects of life in Kerala have not been shaped by spices in some way. Eaten by every Kerallen every day, they’re still a source of export dollars and a defining feature of the interior hills, where they are grown in sprawling plantations.
The mariner approaching Kerala 4,000 years ago would have arrived at a coast rich in fish, fruit, game, water and building materials. Sailing up the Periyar River would have brought him into contact with elephants, falcons, leopards and pearls. Travelling further on foot he had the world’s richest spices at his feet – pepper and cardamom, literally worth their weight in gold. All he had to do was to pick them or buy them dirt cheap. They were easy to ship and could be sold in the spice bazaars of Cairo or Mesopotamia for fifty times what he had paid in Kerala. Prodigious wealth was there for the taking. No wonder mariners have crossed the Indian Ocean for millennia with the trade winds to reach fabled Muziris and her black gold.
Arriving at the clubhouse of the High Range Club, a hill station above Munnar Town, is like entering
a 1920s time warp. The walls of the formerly ‘Men Only’ bar are covered with photographs of man-eating tigers shot by members and of members who have played ‘a hole in one’ on the golf course. Marcella and I unwind over a chota peg while playing billiards. The golf course is flooded, so we opt for squash. We are the only visitors, spoilt by being surrounded by old-fashioned retainers in the livery of clubs of long ago. Tiffin has to be ordered an hour in advance and we are given strict instructions about dress – ties and dinner jackets on Saturday night. Drivers are not allowed to park on the gravel. All ayas have to leave by six p.m. and are not allowed in guest bedrooms before ten a.m. The setting is superb; we are surrounded by mountains covered in tea bushes, all clipped so even that the slopes resemble a vast sloping billiard table. By nightfall the temperature drops to near freezing and we fall asleep to the sound of distant macaques.
MINOANS IN KERALA?
The Uluburun wreck contained a number of items which could have come from India, including cowrie shells that the ‘Beyond Babylon’ exhibition had identified as from the Indian ocean. The elephant tusks in the Uluburun wreck could also be from Africa rather than India, but some animals shown in the frescoes at the Minoan home base of Thera are of certain Indian origin.
Admittedly, the leopards seen on the Thera frescoes could have been from Africa as well as India. The straight, palm-fringed river on the miniature fresco could be the Nile just as well as the Periyar. However prehistoric tusks found beneath Middle Minoan II tombs in Crete have been positively identified as being from Indian elephants.
Certain botanical specimens found in Mesopotamia and the Mediterranean in the 2nd millennium BC are uniquely Indian and can only have been carried from India to the Middle East by ship. Foremost among these is teak. As we have seen in our journey up the Periyar River into the interior, Kerala’s cool rainforest on the foothills of the Ghats provides ideal conditions for both teak and sandalwood trees. The trade in teak between Kerala and the Middle East is proven by finds at both the prehistoric Egyptian port of Berenice and in excavations at the Mesopotamian city of Ur.
Archaeologists from UCLA (University of California, Los Angeles) and the University of Delaware excavating at Berenice have found extensive evidence of sea trade between the Far East, India and Egypt. They reported:
Among the buried ruins of buildings that date to Roman rule, the team discovered vast quantities of teak, a wood indigenous to India and today’s Myanmar but not capable of growing in Egypt, Africa or Europe.
. . . The largest amount of wood we found at Berenice was teak . . .
The archaeologists uncovered the largest amount of Indian goods ever found along the Red Sea, including the largest cache of black pepper from antiquity: 7 kilos (16 pounds).
Peppercorns of the same vintage have been excavated as far away as Germany. The team also found Indian coconuts and batik cloth, sapphires and glass beads which appear to have come from Sri Lanka and beads which appear to have originated in Java, Vietnam or Thailand. Even more curious, the remains of cereals and animals indigenous to sub-Saharan Africa were found, pointing to a three-way Indian Ocean trade – southern Africa to India, India to Egypt, Egypt to southern Africa. Roman texts that address the costs of different shipping methods describe land transport as being at least twenty times more expensive than sea trade.
This international trade evidenced at Berenice is mirrored by that of Muziris/Pattanam, where the earliest dating (charcoal fragments trench II) is 1693 BC to 509 BC. This trade between the Mediterranean and the Indian port of Muziris in described in Tamil Sangam poems:
. . . Where the splendid ships of the Yavanas bring gold and return with pepper beating the foam on the Periyar . . .
Ptolemy in The Periplus of the Erythrean Sea, and the Greek historian Strabo, have written numerous descriptions of trade between the Malabar coast and the Western world.
Professor Cherian and colleagues state:29
The excavation findings suggest that Pattanam had a key role in the early historic Indian Ocean trade. The archaeological evidence vouches for its cultural linkages with the Mediterranean, Red Sea, west Asia, Ganga Delta, Coromandel Coast and South East Asian regions . . .
. . . An interesting possibility emerging out of the present study could be the possibility of tracing back the antiquity of external contacts to the pre-Roman period. The presence of non-European especially Nabatean (?) and West Asian variety of pottery could be another indication for maritime activities at Pattanam in the pre-Roman era.
Professor Cherian’s work is corroborated by Emeritus Professor John Sorenson and Emeritus Professor Carl Johannessen’s painstaking putting-together of the evidence for extensive maritime activity between India and Egypt, India and America (trading cotton) and America and India (trading corn) dating back four millennia. Their research shows that sea trade – pioneered by the Minoans and later adopted by the Phoenicians and Romans – between America and India was commonplace a full 3,000 years before Columbus.
By now I was convinced of the Minoan presence in Kerala during the Middle Bronze Age. I looked about for their ‘signatures’ – beyond those of the bronze weapons I already knew were found buried in the area of the Junma catchment of the Ganges. Could I find any ‘signature’ Kamares pottery, distinctive or amber jewellery, frescoes, or particularly unusual customs, such as the practice of bull-leaping?
The pottery excavated so far comes in shards and to my unpractised eye does not conclusively ‘shout’ Kamares ware. There was some interesting evidence of bull-leaping in the annual celebrations of ‘Jellikata’, a ceremony during which youths lead the bull to ‘encearos’ then attempt to somersault on to its back. I was struck by the Spanish-sounding terminology, but I am no linguist and certainly not when it comes to Indian dialects. This strange custom is still practised and young people get gored, just as they do in Spain today (as described later). However, though bull-leaping appears an odd and unlikely custom, this in itself could be a coincidence. It seems less so when you consider that this is a Hindu society, where cattle are considered holy, objects of veneration. This custom has clear similarities to those ancient Crete.
I felt confident that Minoans used to travel upstream on the Periyar River for pepper, cardamom, teak and perhaps occasionally exotica such as leopards and monkeys. It was hard, though, to keep tabs on information from India, so once we’d returned to England I retained an agency to search English-speaking Hindi and Malay-alam newspapers for relevant leads.
We did not have long to wait although the lead, when it came, was from a totally unexpected direction. On 10 June 2009 The Hindu, India’s national newspaper, ran this headline in its online edition: ‘Prehistoric Cemetery discovered in Kerala.’
Triruvananthapuram: Archaeologists have discovered a pre-historic necropolis (cemetery) with megalithic cairn circles dating back 2,500 years . . . a woodhenge-like ritual monument and a site of primitive astronomical intelligence at Anakkara, near Kuttippuram in Malappuram District [about 93 miles (150 kilometres) north of the Periyar River estuary].
According to the press report, interred objects suggested that the find was around 2,500 years old.
We could also trace some broken pieces of an unidentified copper object. These artefacts could be indicative of the earliest trade contacts of the region . . .
It continued:
. . . Similar posthole finds at certain necropolis sites of Anatolia, Syria, Greece, London and so on have been reported in connection with the Neolithic as well as Bronze Age cultures of secondary burial practices. Nevertheless, our traces of erecting posts in their holes using insights of experimental archaeology, have turned out to be quite interesting and revealing. The posthole alignment looks exactly like that at Woodhenge, in England. The holes of uneven sizes, big and small interspersed, in a strikingly wide open site ideal for star watching probably indicate patterns of heavenly bodies and are suggestive of primitive astronomical intelligence.
This was totally unnervi
ng. The dates seemed to match, closely following the time that the Minoans would have been at their most active. How strange that a European-style prehistoric ceremonial circle should have been found in Kerala and that it should be so close to the river that I was sure the Minoans had traversed.
The newspaper’s assertion that the Keralan wooden circle was for star-watching is what held my particular attention. Wherever they were, the Minoans would have needed to navigate their way back. And, like Homer’s hero Odysseus, they would have had to do that via the stars. Perhaps they had relied on observatories. Perhaps the Minoans had even built those observatories.
CHAPTER 18
THE TRUTH IS IN THE TRADE . . .
I have long been convinced that world travel has had a much more complex history than historians allow. And as I was researching the products and produce that the Minoans brought through Egypt and into India – and back again – I was uncovering so much unexpected information I hardly knew where to begin to unravel all the leads.
In India, I’d discovered that beautiful rock art carvings and paintings of American bison have been found on the borders of Kerala and Tamil Nadu, near the point where the Periyar River rises. They were dated to the 2nd millennium BC. I had to ask myself how Keralan artists of 4,000 years ago had any knowledge of American bison.
The answer seemed to be that the connecting tissue between all these strong, growth- and wealth-hungry cultures was the enterprising and dauntless Minoans. To take this any further, I needed to find whatever proof I could that there had been transatlantic contact millennia ago. Back at my desk, I struck gold when I turned once again to Emeritus Professors John Sorenson and Carl Johannessen. Both academics have documented a considerable amount of intercontinental trade before Columbus, as has Dr Gunnar Thompson. Researching their carefully documented material over painstaking decades, they have produced a huge amount of detailed information on the 2nd millennium BC, which has been contested by those who seem unable to ditch the paralysing historical convention that only Christopher Columbus could have discovered America.
The Lost Empire of Atlantis Page 16
