THE GREAT ANCIENT EMPIREStreasures were the most precious on earth: treasures of nature, pearls,
diamonds, incense, the essence of roses, elephants, lions etc. and also the
treasures of wisdom. It has always been of great significance for universal
history by which route these treasures found their way to the West, the fate
of nations has been influenced by this.’^2
For India itself the trade with the West flourished most in ancient times.
But when India’s trade with Rome declined in the third and fourth century
AD, India, and especially South India, turned to Southeast Asia where
Indian influence became much more important than the vague impression
which India had made on the nations of the West.
Indian trade with the countries around the Mediterranean goes back far
into the pre-Christian era. But this early trade was probably conducted
mainly by isolated seafaring adventurers even though the Ptolemies of
Egypt had tried for some time to gain access to the trade in the Indian
Ocean. It was only under Emperor Augustus (30 BC to AD 14) that this
trade suddenly attained much greater dimensions. The Roman annexation
of Egypt opened up to the trade route through the Red Sea. Furthermore,
after a century of civil war, Rome experienced a period of greater
prosperity which increased demand for the luxury goods of the East, a
demand which could not be met by means of the old cumbersome method
of coastal shipping. Hippalus’ discovery early in the first century AD that
the monsoon could take a ship straight across the Arabian Sea shortened
the trade route and greatly eased access to the goods of the East. In
subsequent years there was a great spurt of trading activity which was
paralleled only many centuries later by the renewed European trade with
India after Vasco da Gama’s voyage of 1498.
A comparison of Strabo’s geography which was written at the time of
Augustus (edited and amended between AD 17 and 23) with the Periplus
of the Erythraean Sea which was written by an anonymous Greek
merchant in the second half of the first century AD shows a great increase
in Roman trade with India. Strabo was more interested in northern India
and in the ports between the mouth of the Indus and present Bombay and
he reported next to nothing about South India, Sri Lanka and the east
coast of India. The author of the Periplus, who probably visited India
personally, described in detail the ports of the Malabar coast. When
Ptolemy wrote his geography around AD 150 Roman knowledge of India
had increased even more. He wrote about the east coast of India and also
had a vague idea of Southeast Asia, especially about ‘Chryse’, the ‘Golden
Country’ (suvarnabhumi) as the countries of Southeast Asia had been
known to the Indians since the first centuries AD. However, recent research
has shown that this so-called Roman trade was integrated into an already
flourishing Asian network of coastal and maritime trade.
The most important port of the Malabar coast was Muziris
(Cranganore near Cochin) in the kingdom of Cerobothra (Cheraputra),