The Sea and Civilization: A Maritime History of the World (32 page)

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.

Although their presence in Sri Lanka was never seriously threatened, Persian merchants were not without rivals, among them traders from the Byzantine Mediterranean. Cosmas relates a possibly apocryphal story about a Sri Lankan king curious to know whether the Persian or Byzantine emperor was “
the greater and the more powerful.” The Greek merchant
Sopatrus settled the matter by producing a gold Greek coin, which the king deemed superior to the Persian’s silver one. The Greeks did mint gold
coins and the Persians did not, but this fact of sixth-century numismatic life had little bearing on the Persians’ superior position in the trade of the western Indian Ocean. Within a few years of Sopatrus’s demonstration, the
Byzantines and Sasanians fought their last campaign of note in the region, over the territory of Yemen. Anxious to undercut Sasanian dominance in eastern trade with the east, the Byzantine emperor
Justin appealed to the
negus
(king) of
Aksum, in what is now
Eritrea. Sea traders had introduced Christianity to Aksum in the fourth century and the religious bonds between Aksumites and the Byzantine Empire were so strong that the former were known as “
black Byzantines.” The persecution of Aksumite Christian traders at the ports of
Mocha and Zafar gave the
negus
his own reasons to intervene in Yemen. Supported by a
Byzantine fleet from
Clysma, around 525 the Aksumites overthrew the ruling dynasty and installed a puppet government that ruled Yemen for half a century.

This modest territorial gain was not enough to break the Sasanian hold on trade, and Justin’s successor, Justinian, demanded that the kings of Aksum and Yemen, in the name of their shared faith, undermine the Sasanian middlemen by purchasing silk in Sri Lanka and selling it directly to Byzantine traders. The Aksumites lacked the wherewithal to do this because the Sasanian merchants “
always locate themselves at the very harbours where the Indian ships first put in (since they inhabit the adjoining country), and are accustomed to buy the whole cargoes.” Justinian’s plans unraveled completely when Yemeni discontent with Aksumite rule coupled with Persian interest in installing an ally led the Sasanian king
Khusrau I to support an invasion by sea. With minimal effort—Khusrau sent eight hundred men in eight ships, two of which sank—the Aksumite rulers of Yemen were overthrown, and a pro-Sasanian ruler ascended the throne. By the start of the seventh century, Persian merchants dominated traffic between the Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean via both the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf.

Though contemporaries could not have anticipated it, the story of
Sopatrus and the
coins and the campaigns for Yemen are episodes from an age on the threshold of oblivion, between the degraded end of classical antiquity and a period of religious, cultural, and imperial renewal under the banner of Islam. Within barely a century of the events described by Cosmas, Muslim armies had captured Egypt, severed the Byzantine Empire’s connection with the Indian Ocean and Christian
Ethiopia, and absorbed the Sasanian Empire. By the end of the seventh century, the caliph
Abd al-Malik ibn Marwan had broken the Byzantine monopoly on gold coinage and introduced a trimetallic currency standard of gold, silver, and copper into the
Dar al-Islam,
or House of Islam—a trading sphere that by the 700s encompassed a region from Spain to Central Asia, Pakistan, and East Africa. Seafaring merchants were animated by new faiths, bound by new loyalties, and channeled to new ports. Despite the revolutionary changes that swept through these regions, however, the trade routes described by Cosmas not only endured but entered a new phase of unparalleled growth.

The ships that carried goods and people to Indian shores are the aspect of ancient Indian Ocean seafaring about which we are least informed. Textual
and pictorial depictions are few, and virtually no remains of ancient ships have been recovered from anywhere between the Red Sea and the Strait of Malacca. Regardless of their provenance, ancient writings refer to
ships of the Indian Ocean only in the most cursory way. The
Rig Veda’s account of the rescue of
Bhujyu claims that he was returned to his father “
in a hundred-oared ship.” The descriptions of the vessels in the
Jatakas
are vague or highly stylized, but a few points stand out.
Samkha tells
Manimekalai that he wants “
a boat with strong planks through which water cannot pass and which the wind carries,” and she fashions a ship with oars and three masts, albeit made of sapphire with gold rigging and sails of silver. The “Mahajana Jataka” says only that the ship carried seven hundred passengers.

Whether this figure should be taken literally is debatable, but such a complement is not completely implausible, especially given what is known about crowding people aboard ship on the Indian Ocean in more recent periods. In 1938–39, the master mariner veteran of commercial sail
Alan Villiers joined a crew of 30 aboard a
boom
(a type of dhow) of about 150 tons on a passage from Aden to
Zanzibar by way of
Shihr where “
we embarked 200 passengers, a feat I would have believed impossible if I had not seen it done.” There was only one deck, and to ensure that they would not interfere with the handling of the ship, the passengers were obliged to stay out of the way. According to Villiers, “if they could not all fit inboard, they could hang on along the rails. This many of them did, and they hung their gear outboard because there was not room enough for it inside the bulwarks.” Such accommodations were probably no different in the mid-twentieth century than they were twenty-three hundred years before. Regardless of the specifics, however, these few details teased from ancient sources leave us with the impression of large, seagoing merchant ships powered by a combination of sails
and oars, vessels whose capacity is comparable to those found in the better documented Mediterranean of the same period.

Unlike shipwrights in either the Mediterranean or East Asia, who employed mortise-and-tenon joinery, wooden treenails, or metal fasteners, those in the Indian Ocean seem to have favored sewn fastenings and bound their hull planking with rope made from coir (
coconut husks), palm fibers, or grasses. Apart from this apparent similarity, shipbuilders otherwise took many approaches to the design of their craft, and there were local and regional differences in the building of sewn boats. In the western Indian Ocean, shipwrights stitched along the seam between the planks with rope that passed through holes bored into the planks so that the stitching was visible from within and outside of the hull. This gave ships a ramshackle appearance that led western observers to take a dim view of them. In the fourth century
BCE
, Alexander’s helmsman
remarked on “
the wretched quality of their sails and the peculiarity of their construction.” This was a view shared by
Pliny the Elder nearly four centuries later, although the Roman admiral had never actually seen the ships he criticized. This lack of direct observation leads him to give a garbled description of an East
African vessel that may have been fitted with an outrigger, not unlike those found in Oceania. Indeed, it seems likely that the
outriggers of the
Indian Ocean and the Pacific share a
common ancestor in the Indonesian archipelago. A somewhat more detailed description comes from the
Periplus of the Erythraean Sea,
which mentions “
sangara,
that are very big dugout canoes held together by a yoke” and which have been identified with a
double canoe known in Tamil as a
sangadam
. Regardless of their appearance, the ships engaged in long-distance trade on the Indian Ocean and its marginal seas were robust freighters capable of carrying large and diverse payloads from merchants and bulk goods to horses and elephants.

A lead coin of the Satavahana Dynasty (first and second century) decorated with a two-masted ship with a single side steering oar. The first Indian state to strike coins, the Satavahanas lay at a crossroads between the Indo-Gangetic plain in the north and the Dravidian kingdoms of the south, and their merchants were active in the trade of the Bay of Bengal.

References to ships and other
watercraft in the
Periplus
run from general formulations (cargo ships, small and large boats) and generic types (sewn boats, “rafts of a local type made of leathern bags,” dugout canoes) to native names for different kinds of vessels. The anonymous author also mentions “long ships … called
trappaga
and
kotymba
” and “the very big
kolandiophonta
that sail across to Chryse [Southeast Asia] and the Ganga region.” The former two are probably the same as the
tappaka
and
kottimba
mentioned in a Jain work of the early first millennium
CE
but about which nothing else is known. A third-century sealing from the ancient port of Chandraketugarh, near modern Kolkata, includes the image of a ship and a horse, with an inscription that identifies the former as a
trapyaka
.
Kolandiophonta
were larger vessels used for the voyage between India and Southeast Asia, where they may have originated, and they may be the same type of ship that Chinese sources call a
kunlun bo.

The earliest written description of an Indian Ocean ship from an Asian
perspective comes from the account of a third-century Chinese envoy named
Kang Dai. Although he seems to have traveled no farther than the northern Malay Peninsula, Kang Dai heard about seafaring of the western
Indian Ocean and relates that from an area possibly near the Indus delta, “
one boards a great merchant ship. Seven sails are unfurled. With the seasonal wind [that is, the monsoon] one enters
Da Qin [the Roman Empire] in a month and some days.” This corresponds to the amount of time required to sail between Aden and southern India, and Indian Ocean traders may have identified Aden with the beginning of the Roman world. So far as is known, the rig of seven sails mentioned by Kang Dai is unique in antiquity. Images of ships are even rarer than written descriptions. Among the oldest are those found on coins issued by the Satavahana (or Andhra) Dynasty, which arose in the western
Deccan and whose rule eventually encompassed
Bharuch in the west and much of the east coast of India. Dating from the second century ce, many of these coins show a hull with a high bow and stern and carrying two bipod masts and two
quarter rudders.