the mediterranean and the indian ocean 465
power’s firm political–military control of Mediterranean connections with the
Indian Ocean and the trade goods that came from the region.
Commodities networksWhy would these imperial powers rooted in the Mediterranean endeavor to assert
political–military control over the conduits linking the Mediterranean with the Indian
Ocean? The most obvious answer is to control the trade in precious commodities that
Mediterranean markets so desired from the east: especially spices and gemstones from
India and silk that made its way into the Indian Ocean network from China. Models
of the classical Mediterranean economy are often based primarily on the transport of
bulk goods such as grain, wine, and olive oil, the idea being that these are subsistence
items necessary for daily life and hence the only goods that “matter” for understand-
ing the wider economy. Based on this limited assumption of what constituted the
Mediterranean economy, so-called “luxury goods” of the type that typified exchange
between the Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean—spices, gemstones, and silks (from
China)—are often omitted from Mediterranean economic models. Yet these “exotic”
goods, especially spices, became so central to the Mediterranean cultural economy, for
religious and medical purposes in particular, that it becomes impossible to imagine a
Mediterranean without them (Sidebotham, 2011: 249–251). Although his numbers
are likely exaggerated and his tone moralistic, Pliny the Elder complains in the late
first century ce that Roman trade with the east (India, China, and Arabia) exhausted
a minimum of 100 million sesterces a year (Natural History, 12.41.84) and that India
alone exhausted 50 million of the empire’s wealth (Natural History, 6.26.101).
Pliny’s complaints, coupled with contemporary Tamil literature that describes
Roman ships arriving with gold and leaving with pepper, are indicative of both the
Mediterranean desire for these goods and the possible trade imbalance that desire
created (Pollard, 2009: 331).
An essential component for understanding this angst-ridden commodities exchange
over time are the various entrepôts that developed along the routes linking the Indian
Ocean with the Mediterranean, beginning as early as the third millennium bce. Even
in the earliest phase of the exchange via the Syria–Mesopotamian–Persian Gulf corri-
dor, sheltered anchorage was available from the mouth of the Euphrates, to Bahrain,
and Hormuz, for the Persian Gulf portion of the trip. Anchors and a pier near Dwarka
and even an arguable dockyard at Lothal, both in the Gujarat region of north-west
India, furnish evidence for Harappan ports (Swamy, 2000: 24–26); and Harappan
ports at Makran (in Iran) may have developed to offer a haven from south-west mon-
soon winds (Ratnagar, 2004: 82–85). Many of these same sites continued to facilitate
Mediterranean exchange via the Syria–Mesopotamia–Persian Gulf corridor with the
Indian Ocean over millennia. In the Roman period, Alexandria in Egypt and the Red
Sea port of Roman Aila (modern Aqaba) were vital gateways for Indian Ocean goods
entering the Mediterranean world via the Nile–Red Sea corridor. Before reaching
these gateways, goods might have made their way toward the Mediterranean via any
one of the many ports cataloged in the first-century ce Periplus: the Nabatean port of
Leuke Kome, located in the Gulf of Aqaba; as well as Myos Hormos, Berenike, Adulis
and Avalites, along the west coast of the Red Sea; then on the east coast of Africa,
ports at Opone and Rhapta; in the Arabian Sea, the island of Socotra; and then on the