192 NOTES TO PAGES 26-28
Winand Callewaert and Rupert Snell (Wiesbaden: Harrossowitz Verlag,
1994), pp. 99-129.- Martin W. Lewis, "Dividing the Ocean Sea," Geographical Review 89 1 no. 2
(April 1999): 96. i
3.^11 Rome^11 can mean anything from Hellenic Egypt to Byzantine Constanti-
nople. There is also confusion in sources as to whether^11 India^11 refers to the
subcontinent or to East Africa, Ceylon, or even China-notwithstanding
the occasional references to coastal towns of Malabar and Sindou (Sind).
See Philip Mayerson,^11 A Confusion of Indias: Asian India and African India
in the Byzantine Sources," Journal of the American Oriental Society (^1131)
no. 2 (April-June 1993), pp. 169-174. Conspicuously, neither the China/
Western India or China/Malay, nor the Arabia/India or Arabia/East Africa
arcs have garnered much scholarly attention. Moreover, the scholarship has
overwhelming situated the trade within a Rome/East or West/East frame-
work. It was not until K. N. Chaudhuri's Trade and Civilisation in the In-
dian Ocean: An Economic History from the Rise of Islam to nso (Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985) and Janet Abu-Lughod's Before
European Hegemony: The World System A.D. r250-r350 (New York: Ox-
ford University Press, 1989) that a corrective was offered to the Rome-centered
scholarship. Scholars such as the late Ashin Das Gupta, Andre Wink, and
Ranabir Chakravarti have since moved the conversation forward. More prom-
isingly, the scope of inquiry is advancing from the movements and networks
of trade and goods to ideas, peoples, and communities in the work of Li Guo,
Tansen Sen, Gwyn Campbell, and Denys Lombard. For an excellent example
of the cultural seascape of the Indian Ocean, see Engseng Ho, The Graves of
Tarim: Genealogy and Mobility across the Indian Ocean (Berkeley: Univer-
sity of California Press, 2006).
- Nile Green, "Re-Thinking the 'Middle East' after the Oceanic Turn,^11 Com-
parative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 34, 3 (2014). - The pattern of yearly monsoon winds, tides, and currents in the Indian Ocean
provides a ready framework for understanding the movement of goods and
people through the millennia. During the summer months (June to No-
vember) the monsoon winds and the tide go down the eastern shore of the
Red Sea, hugging the coastline of the Gulf across to western India, around
the tip of the subcontinent into the Bay of Bengal, and from the Andaman
Islands into the South China Sea. During the winter months (December to
May), the winds retrace their path back. - See Elisabeth C. L. During Caspers, "Sumer, Coastal Arabia and the Indus
Valley in Protoliterate and Early Dynastic Eras: Supporting Evidence for a
Cultural Linkage,^11 Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient
22, no. 2 (May 1979), pp. 121-135. - Lionel Casson,^11 South Arabia's Maritime Trade in the First Century A.D. 111
L'Arabie Preislamique et son Environnement Historique et Culture]
(Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1989), p. 187. - Steven E. Sidebotham, "Ports of the Red Sea and the Arabia-India Trade," in
Rome and India: The Ancient Sea Trade (Madison: The University of Wis-
consin Press, 1991), pp. 12-35.