Rome and the East
Egypt. Whether or not a ‘‘Silk Road’’ also existed in the period, its existence
is not necessary to explain how Chinese silk reached the Mediterranean. Silk
was one of the commodities regularly carried by sea from India and one
which could also have been transported up the Persian Gulf to the Euphrates,
thence overland to the Mediterranean by way of Palmyra, where Chinese
silk has been found.^71
The existence of the seaborne trade in luxuries did not pass unnoticed in
Rome; for Pliny the Elder, writing in the s of the first century..,wor-
ries about the drain of currency required to pay for it, and mentions figures
of million or million Roman sesterces.^72 It is easy to treat such fig-
ures as ideological projections of the sort already discussed, or as moralising
exaggerations, as they are by Moses Finley in his oft-quoted work on the
ancient economy.^73 But caution is in order. We may not wish to believe the
report in Strabo’sGeographythat, at the end of the first century.., ships
made the voyage to India each year.^74 But even if the number is halved, or a
quartered, documentary evidence obliges us to re-examine Pliny’s figures. A
Greek papyrus from Egypt first published in contains a contract for the
transport of goods from the Red Sea coast of Egypt to Koptos on the Nile,
and then down-river to Alexandria.^75 Here is the western, land-based, con-
tinuation of the trade routes described in thePeriplus. But the papyrus also
provides a glimpse of trade in the eastern and southern section of the Indian
Ocean. The second half of the document concerns the repayment of loans for
which a written agreement had been drawn up earlier—‘‘in the agreements
concerning a loan [made] at Muziris.’’ Some of the cargo of theHermapol-
lon, the ship mentioned, must therefore have originated from Muziris, situ-
ated in the south of India, and the ‘‘agreements’’ (syngraphai) referred to will
have been drawn up there in Greek. Among the goods carried was ‘‘Gan-
getic nard,’’ which must have been shipped from Bengal round modern-day
Cape Comorin before being loaded at Muziris for the voyage to Egypt. The
most striking item in the document, however, is the figure given for the total
valueoftheHermapollon’s cargo: , talanta and , drachmae in silver,
. See A. Stauffer, ‘‘Textiles from Palmyra: Local Production and the Import and Imi-
tation of Chinese Silk Weavings,’’Annales Archéologiques Arabes Syriennes(): .
. Pliny,Nat. Hist. , ( million sesterces); , : ‘‘India, Seres (China?) and that
peninsula (Arabia) take from our empire each year million sesterces’’ (trans. Loeb,
vol. IV, ).
. M. Finley,The Ancient Economy^2 (), .
. Strabo,Geography, , , (Loeb ed., vol. I, ).
. See, e.g., L. Casson, ‘‘New Light on Maritime Loans: P.Vind. G ,’’Zeitschr. f.
Pap. u. Epig. (): .