A History of the World in Twelve Shipwrecks (17 page)

The closest date for the wreck is provided by a Changsha bowl inscribed
baoli ernian qiyue shiluiri
, the sixteenth day of the seventh lunar month of the second year of the reign of the emperor Jingzong – 16 July 826. This provides a
terminus post quem
for the wreck, with the artefacts as a whole suggesting a date between then and 840. This allows us to identify key individuals alive at the time who were involved in the trade, not only merchants such as Suleyman but also the Tang emperor Jingzong (ruled 824–827) and his successor Wenzong (827–840) and the Abbasid caliphs al-Ma'mun (813–833) and al-Mu'ta
ş
im (833–842). Wider afield, this was the time of Louis the Pious, King of the Franks in succession to his father Charlemagne, and shortly before the birth of King Alfred the Great of the Anglo-Saxons. It was also a time of great natural phenomena: in 837 Halley's Comet came closer than it ever had done to Earth, an event recorded globally that provided a common experience to peoples still unknown to each other separated by vast tracts of land and sea as yet unexplored. In the world represented by the Belitung ship, from the Persian Gulf to the South China Sea – but culturally much wider than that, from the western reaches of Islam in Spain to the eastern limits of Tang China on the Yellow Sea – it was a time of great intellectual and artistic flowering, of the consolidation of two of the world's great religions and of dynamic and wide-reaching commercial endeavour that provides a rich backdrop to the story that can be told from the wreck.

The stories of Sinbad in
One Thousand and One Nights
are told to the fictional Persian King Shahryar by his wife Scheherazade, who leaves them on a cliff-hanger every night to prevent him from executing her – a previous wife had been unfaithful to him and every night for three years he had taken a new wife and had her executed in the morning in order to prevent her from doing the same, until he met Scheherazade. King Shahryar would have been one of the rulers of the Sasanian Empire, the kingdom stretching from present-day Iraq to Afghanistan that succeeded the Parthian Empire in the second century
AD
and was to last until defeat by the Muslim Arabs in
AD
637–42. Despite this setting some two hundred years before the Belitung wreck, it is clear that the stories were put together in the eighth to ninth century from references to historical people of the time including the Abbasid caliph Harun al-Rashid, who ruled from
AD
786–809. Arab rule did not eclipse Persian culture but assimilated it; the rich fusion seen in
One Thousand and One Nights
would also have been evident in the maritime world of the time, with ships and crews of mixed Persian and Arab origin.

Al-Rashid's predecessor al-Mansur moved the Abbasid capital from Damascus to Baghdad on the river Tigris, not far from the Sasanian capital of Ctesiphon and the site of Akkadian Babylon from the Bronze Age. Like ancient Babylon, Baghdad was a place of wonders – built in only four years from
AD
762, with massive circular walls enclosing the caliph's palace and a huge mosque. Within the city lay one of the great achievements of the early caliphs, Bayt al-Hikma, the ‘House of Wisdom', founded as a centre for the translation into Arabic of works of Greek philosophy, science and medicine. The early years of Muslim expansion in the seventh century
AD
had exposed Arab scholars to these works in Egypt and Syria, where libraries were kept by Christians. The impetus to translate them was driven by a number of factors – a desire for knowledge of ancient engineering and medicine, a political need by the Abbasids to show that they could absorb and make use of these texts just as well as their rival Byzantine Constantinople, and a recognition that the philosophical and scientific revelations of antiquity might help to strengthen Islam.

A key figure in this programme at the time of the Belitung ship was Al-Kind
Ä«
(
c.
AD
801–73), a philosopher and polymath in Baghdad whose greatest contribution was to oversee the translation of works by the fourth-century
BC
Greek philosopher Aristotle. The earliest known translation into Arabic of any Greek text is an eighth-century ‘paraphrase' of Aristotle's
Organon
attributed to a Persian scholar named Ebh al-Moqaffa‘. By the end of the ninth century, largely under Al-Kind
Ä«
's guidance, most of Aristotle's work had become available in Arabic. Al-Kind
Ä«
argued for the importance of Greek ideas and how they could be used to reinforce the message of Islam – for example, Aristotle's ‘first principle from which a thing could be known' could be equated with Allah in the Qur'
ā
n. Aristotle's classification of the natural sciences provided the basis for an encyclopaedia in Arabic that included translated work by Hippocrates, Galen, Euclid and Ptolemy, dealing with medicine, mathematics and geography, and underpinned by Aristotle's vision of science as a body of strictly demonstrated conclusions. Without this translation work in ninth-century Baghdad, the ‘rediscovery' of Aristotle in Europe in the twelfth to thirteenth century would not have taken place to anything like the same degree, and
the history of Western philosophical thought might have been very different as a result.

These intellectual developments may seem incidental to the story of a shipwreck in far-off Indonesia, but in fact they were closely connected. As the account of Sinbad shows, rich sea-captains could have the ear of kings and caliphs, or their wives. The ‘House of Wisdom' was funded not only by the caliphs but also by others among the elite of the city, men who were the basis for the fictional Sinbad and may have included the merchant responsible for the Belitung cargo. In the seventeenth century, as we shall see with the wreck of the
Santo Cristo di Castello
, merchant-captains who grew wealthy in another ‘Golden Age' – trading commodities that included paintings and books on philosophy and science – themselves became patrons of the arts and sponsors of cultural and intellectual achievement, something that happened in much the same way in ninth-century Baghdad.

Ships on the Indian Ocean ‘fastened together not with nails, but with cords' were noted by Procopius, the sixth-century historian who gives us such a vivid picture of the Byzantine world at the time of the Marzamemi Church Wreck. Half a millennium earlier they are mentioned in the
Periplus Maris Erythraei
, one of the most remarkable documents on seafaring and trade to survive from antiquity. A periplus was an itinerary – in this case, a merchant's guide – and the Erythraean Sea, literally the ‘Red' Sea, referred not only to the present-day Red Sea but also to the Indian Ocean and the seas beyond. My own research into this document, including a new translation of the earliest extant version, a tenth-century copy in Greek held in Heidelberg University Library, supports the view that it dates from the early first century
AD
– probably during the lifetime of Jesus of Nazareth – and was written by a Greek-speaking Egyptian merchant based on the Red Sea. In 1,200-odd words of pithy, matter-of-fact prose, he describes the sea-routes along the east coast of Africa as far as Zanzibar and across the ocean to southern India, noting that boats ‘sewed together after the fashion of the place' were brought from Oman to Arabia. He names the ports, lists the main products to be sought at each place and provides a wealth of detail – it is from the
Periplus
that we first hear of the fabled kingdom of Aksum in present-day Ethiopia, and in north-west India he notes that traces of Alexander the Great's expedition could still be seen, ‘ancient shrines, walls of forts and great wells', a
reminder of the role played by Alexander in opening up northern India and Afghanistan to Greek traders and influence.

The
Periplus
gives fascinating historical depth to the trade networks evidenced by the Belitung shipwreck some eight centuries later. Knowledge of the monsoon winds may have been acquired by Egyptian and Greek sailors soon after the time of Alexander the Great in the late fourth century
BC
. Ships sailed eastwards in summer on the south-west monsoon, ‘grasping the wind in a neck-lock, as it were' – a rare literary flourish in the
Periplus
– and then returned when the monsoon changed direction from October onwards. The voyages were risky and long, involving weeks of sailing across the open ocean and a turn-around time of a year, but the rewards could be great. The main inducement, just as for the European East India companies' merchants centuries later, was spices – especially pepper, acquired from the Malabar Coast in south-west India.

Gold coins used to pay for the trade resulted in a bullion drain that was lamented by no less than the Roman emperor Tiberius. The discovery of many Roman gold coins in southern India in the nineteenth century gave clear evidence of this trade, but the find that really put it on the map was the site of Arikamedu near Pondicherry. Excavated in 1945 by Mortimer Wheeler, Director-General of the Archaeological Survey of India, it produced Roman amphora sherds, Italian red-slip ‘Arretine' pottery and other Mediterranean artefacts, leading Wheeler to conclude that it had been a Roman trading post identifiable as one of the ports in the
Periplus
. As such, it was the furthest known outpost of the Roman world, over 7,000 kilometres from the city of Rome and an entire ocean away from the frontier of the Empire in Egypt and Arabia, and it opened a window on Rome in the east that has led to the excavation of more sites representing this trade in southern India as well as along the Red Sea coast of Egypt.

By the time of the Belitung wreck, the advance of Islam had brought a whole new trade impetus to the Erythraean Sea region, with Cairo, Damascus and Baghdad replacing Rome and Constantinople as the main consumers of exotic goods, and ports such as Basra on the Shatt al-Arab and Siraf on the Persian Gulf eclipsing the Red Sea ports in terms of the volume of trade. Nevertheless, the impact of that earlier trade would still have been discernible, with the descendants of Graeco-Roman merchants, sailors and adventurers forming part of the rich cultural and ethnic makeup of the region. One legacy was
the presence of Christianity – Giovanni da Montecorvino, the future Bishop of Peking whose observations on sewn boats we saw above, preached in 1291 in the ‘Country of St Thomas' around Madras, among Christians who may have been descendants of an early community – possibly including the Apostle Thomas – dating from the time of the
Periplus
in the first century
AD
. The most significant legacy in terms of trade may have been the establishment of emporia, with the great entrepôts of the ninth century such as Siraf, Shrivijaya and Guangzhou having their basis in the organisation of trade that had developed at Roman outposts such as Arikamedu almost a millennium earlier.

The story of the Belitung wreck is not just about Abbasid Persia and Tang China, but also about a kingdom that grew enormously rich as an intermediary – the fabled ‘Island of Gold', Srivijaya. From the time of the
Periplus
, in which the land beyond India was called Chrysê, meaning ‘Golden' in Greek, the idea became fixed that there was a place of unimaginable wealth somewhere beyond common knowledge in the direction of the South China Sea. The idea was rooted in reality – in the abundant alluvial gold of the rivers Musi and Batang Hari in southern Sumatra. It was here that a kingdom sprang up in the seventh century
AD
that was to control the Malacca Strait, the conduit between east and west through which all ships had to pass. The location of the Belitung wreck off the estuary of the river Musi suggests that it may have been heading for a stopover at the Srivijaya capital, which has long been identified with the city of Palembang 100 kilometres upriver – the source of the gold and Srivijaya's other prized product, camphor wood, said by Marco Polo in the thirteenth century to be the ‘best which can be found anywhere in the world'.

Descriptions of Srivijaya by Arab writers have an air of unreality about them, almost like the Greek philosopher Plato's account of Atlantis, as if they cannot quite believe what they are writing – even though they know it to be true. In
The Meadows of Gold
, completed about
AD
947, the renowned Baghdad historian and traveller Al-Masudi describes:

… the empire of the Maharaja, King of the Isles, who commands an empire without limit and has innumerable troops … The lands of this prince produce all sorts of spices and aromatics and no
sovereign in the world draws so much profit from his land. They export camphor, aloeswood, cloves, sandalwood, mace, nutmeg, cardamom, cubeb … These islands touch a sea which is beyond the sea of China, the limits and the extent of which are unknown.

Ibn al-Faqih in
AD
903 wrote of ‘parrots, white, red and yellow, which can be taught to speak Arabic, Persian, Greek and Hindi; and there are also green and speckled peacocks; white falcons with a red crest; and a large monkey with the tail of an ox'. Ibn Khordadbeh half a century earlier wrote that ‘incoming ships shuddered at the sight of a perpetual fire spouting out of the mountains, continuous flames, red by day and blackish by night, rising into the clouds, accompanied by claps of terrible thunder, and often by a strange and frightful voice', a description of Sumatra that would have given the place an unworldly and frightening aspect to readers unfamiliar with the volcanic landscape of western Indonesia.

Part of the mystique surrounding Srivijaya arises from the dearth of archaeological evidence in Palembang that can be dated before the thirteenth century
AD
, but that has changed spectacularly in recent years. Along the riverbank, local fishermen and treasure-hunters, often breathing from dangerous surface-supplied ‘hookah' gear, have dug into the mud and uncovered thousands of artefacts dating to the time of the Belitung wreck – including gold and bronze Buddhist figures, gold rings, bronze monk's bells and coins of gold, silver and bronze. These may represent votive offerings to the river; the king of Srivijaya was said to have communicated with the ‘spirits of the waters of the sea', and as late as the eighteenth century a traveller recorded that ‘The inland people of the country are said to pay a kind of adoration to the sea, and make to it an offering … deprecating its power of doing them mischief.' Whatever the explanation for these finds, the amount of gold found in the river must reflect the wealth of the place described in the written sources. The absence of structural remains of the period in Palembang may also have an explanation – a tenth-century account notes that ‘some houses are built on land, but most float on the water', suggesting that Srivijaya was a true water-world, wealthy but also ephemeral, with little of the city likely to have survived its decline after the Chola kingdom of southern India eclipsed Srivijaya as the main broker of trade between east and west in the thirteenth century
AD
.