Chapter 9
Following the Periplus
Roman maritime trade with the Indian Ocean began at Alexandria, which
served as the Mediterranean’s main distribution point for goods coming by
sea from Asia and Africa. From Alexandria merchandise was sent up the Nile
in riverboats to the port of Koptos located on a bend where the river came
closest to the Red Sea. There, goods were offloaded onto camels for the trip
across the desert. Roads were usually little more than tracks, but the most
important were paved. Strabo notes the great improvement in crossing this
leg of the trip:“In earlier times the camel-merchants traveled only by night,
looking to the stars for guidance, and, like the mariners, also carried water
with them when they traveled; but now they have constructed watering-
places, having dug down to a great depth, and, although rain-water is scarce,
still they have made cisterns for it.”
On the Red Sea coast were a number of ports, the most important being at
Myos Hormos (“Mussel Harbor”) and Berenice Troglodytica. Berenice had no
harbor but was located on an isthmus that provided a number of convenient
landing places. Myos Hormos, located farther north, was home to a naval
station. In navigating the Red Sea, sailors attempted to shoot straight down
the middle. The African coast was mostly barren, the land of the
Ichthyophagi (“Fish-Eaters”), self-sufficient communities strung along the
shore. According to Agatharchides, some of them lived in huts made from
seaweed packed over the rib bones of washed up whales. The Chelonophagi
(“Turtle-Eaters”), who inhabited islands south of the Bab el-Mandeb, lived in
even stranger dwellings,“under cover of turtle-shells, which are so large that
they are used as boats.”
The only place that received much traffic before reaching the Bab el-
Mandeb was Adulis (Massawa), once a trading post for Arab merchants, later
an elephant hunting station for the Ptolemies. ThePeriplus Maris Erythraei
calls it“a fair sized village,”but it became an important port-of-call as the
window on the sea for the inland kingdom of Axum (Ethiopia), high on the
Abyssinian plateau, which reached its height of power between the fourth
and seventh centuriesCE.The kings of Axum took advantage of the country’s
strategic position between the African interior and the Red Sea to develop a