The Sea and Civilization: A Maritime History of the World

by Paine, Lincoln

  Although their presence in Sri Lanka was never seriously threatened, Persian merchants were not without rivals, among them traders from the Byzantine Mediterranean. Cosmas relates a possibly apocryphal story about a Sri Lankan king curious to know whether the Persian or Byzantine emperor was “the greater and the more powerful.” The Greek merchant Sopatrus settled the matter by producing a gold Greek coin, which the king deemed superior to the Persian’s silver one. The Greeks did mint gold coins and the Persians did not, but this fact of sixth-century numismatic life had little bearing on the Persians’ superior position in the trade of the western Indian Ocean. Within a few years of Sopatrus’s demonstration, the Byzantines and Sasanians fought their last campaign of note in the region, over the territory of Yemen. Anxious to undercut Sasanian dominance in eastern trade with the east, the Byzantine emperor Justin appealed to the negus (king) of Aksum, in what is now Eritrea. Sea traders had introduced Christianity to Aksum in the fourth century and the religious bonds between Aksumites and the Byzantine Empire were so strong that the former were known as “black Byzantines.” The persecution of Aksumite Christian traders at the ports of Mocha and Zafar gave the negus his own reasons to intervene in Yemen. Supported by a Byzantine fleet from Clysma, around 525 the Aksumites overthrew the ruling dynasty and installed a puppet government that ruled Yemen for half a century.

  This modest territorial gain was not enough to break the Sasanian hold on trade, and Justin’s successor, Justinian, demanded that the kings of Aksum and Yemen, in the name of their shared faith, undermine the Sasanian middlemen by purchasing silk in Sri Lanka and selling it directly to Byzantine traders. The Aksumites lacked the wherewithal to do this because the Sasanian merchants “always locate themselves at the very harbours where the Indian ships first put in (since they inhabit the adjoining country), and are accustomed to buy the whole cargoes.” Justinian’s plans unraveled completely when Yemeni discontent with Aksumite rule coupled with Persian interest in installing an ally led the Sasanian king Khusrau I to support an invasion by sea. With minimal effort—Khusrau sent eight hundred men in eight ships, two of which sank—the Aksumite rulers of Yemen were overthrown, and a pro-Sasanian ruler ascended the throne. By the start of the seventh century, Persian merchants dominated traffic between the Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean via both the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf.

  Though contemporaries could not have anticipated it, the story of Sopatrus and the coins and the campaigns for Yemen are episodes from an age on the threshold of oblivion, between the degraded end of classical antiquity and a period of religious, cultural, and imperial renewal under the banner of Islam. Within barely a century of the events described by Cosmas, Muslim armies had captured Egypt, severed the Byzantine Empire’s connection with the Indian Ocean and Christian Ethiopia, and absorbed the Sasanian Empire. By the end of the seventh century, the caliph Abd al-Malik ibn Marwan had broken the Byzantine monopoly on gold coinage and introduced a trimetallic currency standard of gold, silver, and copper into the Dar al-Islam, or House of Islam—a trading sphere that by the 700s encompassed a region from Spain to Central Asia, Pakistan, and East Africa. Seafaring merchants were animated by new faiths, bound by new loyalties, and channeled to new ports. Despite the revolutionary changes that swept through these regions, however, the trade routes described by Cosmas not only endured but entered a new phase of unparalleled growth.

  Ships of the Indian Ocean

  The ships that carried goods and people to Indian shores are the aspect of ancient Indian Ocean seafaring about which we are least informed. Textual and pictorial depictions are few, and virtually no remains of ancient ships have been recovered from anywhere between the Red Sea and the Strait of Malacca. Regardless of their provenance, ancient writings refer to ships of the Indian Ocean only in the most cursory way. The Rig Veda’s account of the rescue of Bhujyu claims that he was returned to his father “in a hundred-oared ship.” The descriptions of the vessels in the Jatakas are vague or highly stylized, but a few points stand out. Samkha tells Manimekalai that he wants “a boat with strong planks through which water cannot pass and which the wind carries,” and she fashions a ship with oars and three masts, albeit made of sapphire with gold rigging and sails of silver. The “Mahajana Jataka” says only that the ship carried seven hundred passengers.

  Whether this figure should be taken literally is debatable, but such a complement is not completely implausible, especially given what is known about crowding people aboard ship on the Indian Ocean in more recent periods. In 1938–39, the master mariner veteran of commercial sail Alan Villiers joined a crew of 30 aboard a boom (a type of dhow) of about 150 tons on a passage from Aden to Zanzibar by way of Shihr where “we embarked 200 passengers, a feat I would have believed impossible if I had not seen it done.” There was only one deck, and to ensure that they would not interfere with the handling of the ship, the passengers were obliged to stay out of the way. According to Villiers, “if they could not all fit inboard, they could hang on along the rails. This many of them did, and they hung their gear outboard because there was not room enough for it inside the bulwarks.” Such accommodations were probably no different in the mid-twentieth century than they were twenty-three hundred years before. Regardless of the specifics, however, these few details teased from ancient sources leave us with the impression of large, seagoing merchant ships powered by a combination of sails and oars, vessels whose capacity is comparable to those found in the better documented Mediterranean of the same period.

  Unlike shipwrights in either the Mediterranean or East Asia, who employed mortise-and-tenon joinery, wooden treenails, or metal fasteners, those in the Indian Ocean seem to have favored sewn fastenings and bound their hull planking with rope made from coir (coconut husks), palm fibers, or grasses. Apart from this apparent similarity, shipbuilders otherwise took many approaches to the design of their craft, and there were local and regional differences in the building of sewn boats. In the western Indian Ocean, shipwrights stitched along the seam between the planks with rope that passed through holes bored into the planks so that the stitching was visible from within and outside of the hull. This gave ships a ramshackle appearance that led western observers to take a dim view of them. In the fourth century BCE, Alexander’s helmsman remarked on “the wretched quality of their sails and the peculiarity of their construction.” This was a view shared by Pliny the Elder nearly four centuries later, although the Roman admiral had never actually seen the ships he criticized. This lack of direct observation leads him to give a garbled description of an East African vessel that may have been fitted with an outrigger, not unlike those found in Oceania. Indeed, it seems likely that the outriggers of the Indian Ocean and the Pacific share a common ancestor in the Indonesian archipelago. A somewhat more detailed description comes from the Periplus of the Erythraean Sea, which mentions “sangara, that are very big dugout canoes held together by a yoke” and which have been identified with a double canoe known in Tamil as a sangadam. Regardless of their appearance, the ships engaged in long-distance trade on the Indian Ocean and its marginal seas were robust freighters capable of carrying large and diverse payloads from merchants and bulk goods to horses and elephants.

  A lead coin of the Satavahana Dynasty (first and second century) decorated with a two-masted ship with a single side steering oar. The first Indian state to strike coins, the Satavahanas lay at a crossroads between the Indo-Gangetic plain in the north and the Dravidian kingdoms of the south, and their merchants were active in the trade of the Bay of Bengal.

  References to ships and other watercraft in the Periplus run from general formulations (cargo ships, small and large boats) and generic types (sewn boats, “rafts of a local type made of leathern bags,” dugout canoes) to native names for different kinds of vessels. The anonymous author also mentions “long ships … called trappaga and kotymba” and “the very big kolandiophonta that sail across to Chryse [Southeast Asia] and the Ganga region.” The former two are probably the
same as the tappaka and kottimba mentioned in a Jain work of the early first millennium CE but about which nothing else is known. A third-century sealing from the ancient port of Chandraketugarh, near modern Kolkata, includes the image of a ship and a horse, with an inscription that identifies the former as a trapyaka. Kolandiophonta were larger vessels used for the voyage between India and Southeast Asia, where they may have originated, and they may be the same type of ship that Chinese sources call a kunlun bo.

  The earliest written description of an Indian Ocean ship from an Asian perspective comes from the account of a third-century Chinese envoy named Kang Dai. Although he seems to have traveled no farther than the northern Malay Peninsula, Kang Dai heard about seafaring of the western Indian Ocean and relates that from an area possibly near the Indus delta, “one boards a great merchant ship. Seven sails are unfurled. With the seasonal wind [that is, the monsoon] one enters Da Qin [the Roman Empire] in a month and some days.” This corresponds to the amount of time required to sail between Aden and southern India, and Indian Ocean traders may have identified Aden with the beginning of the Roman world. So far as is known, the rig of seven sails mentioned by Kang Dai is unique in antiquity. Images of ships are even rarer than written descriptions. Among the oldest are those found on coins issued by the Satavahana (or Andhra) Dynasty, which arose in the western Deccan and whose rule eventually encompassed Bharuch in the west and much of the east coast of India. Dating from the second century ce, many of these coins show a hull with a high bow and stern and carrying two bipod masts and two quarter rudders.

  The most compelling pictorial representation of an Indian Ocean ship is a seventh-century wall painting at Ajanta, about 350 kilometers northeast of Mumbai (Bombay). The Ajanta ship seems to correspond broadly to the vessels described in the Jatakas, with details not revealed in the stories. The principal sails, one on each of three masts, are oriented like square sails, but they are considerably taller than they are wide, and there is a single headsail set out over the bowsprit. (The “Suparaga Jataka” describes the Bodhisattva’s ship running before a following wind with “Her white sails outspread like beautiful wings,” which seems to describe square sails that are wider than they are tall.) The bow of the Ajanta ship incorporates an oculus, an eye intended to help a vessel see approaching dangers and an ancestor of the more elaborate figurehead. A helmsman works a quarter rudder and there is a structure aft with wide-mouthed jars stowed beneath it. The hull appears relatively deep, but the sheer of the gunwale is flatter than that on the ships shown in the Satavahana coins of the second century.

  The lack of discernible Mediterranean influence on Indian Ocean ship design is a helpful reminder that while most written testimony about the commerce and naval history of the period comes from Greek and Roman sources, and people of the eastern Mediterranean were actively engaged in trade on the Red Sea and Indian Ocean as shipowners, charterers, crew, and carpenters, their overall influence on maritime trade and technology was slight. Strabo writes that Aelius Gallus built 80 triremes and other Mediterranean types to carry his ten thousand men to Yemen, but he does not mention the origin of the 120 ships (or their crews) he says sailed between Egypt and India in his day, and today no trace of design elements characteristic of Mediterranean ships can be found in the traditionally built vessels of the Indian Ocean. Of demonstrably far greater and longer-lasting influence were elements of ship design introduced by mariners from island Southeast Asia.

  Indian trade and traders had reached Indonesia by at least the early first millennium and first-and second-century finds from northwest Java and northern Bali are identical to those recovered at Arikamedu. Indian goods in Southeast Asia are not limited to Java and Bali, but these have the only concentrations of material that suggest the presence of South Asian traders rather than just their goods. While there is no evidence of Indian penetration farther east, it is likely that the chain of trade extended from the Spice Islands (Maluku and the Bandas) of eastern Indonesia to the Indian Ocean and the Mediterranean. In the coming centuries, the urge to tap the flow of these spices at their source would become a primary driver of state formation, navigational ambition, and even international law across Eurasia. These contacts were not exclusively from west to east, however, and vessel types found throughout the Indian Ocean, including outrigger and double-hulled vessels, probably reflect Indonesian origin or influence. On the coast of India, single outriggers sailed along the coast on alternate monsoons. Double outriggers with floats set equidistant from the hull from either side of the hull are also found in Indonesia and as far west as Madagascar, where they were introduced by Indonesian navigators.

  Although Madagascar is only 250 miles from southern Africa, analysis of the Malagasy language indicates that the world’s fourth largest island was first settled by natives of Borneo, four thousand miles to the east. When exactly these Austronesian-speaking navigators reached Madagascar, or why they came, is unknown, but it is unlikely to have been earlier than the late first millennium BCE, and probably somewhat later. One theory favors a first migration between the second and fourth centuries ce, followed by the arrival of Bantu-speaking people from Africa, and a later wave of Indonesian settlers in the tenth century. It is likely that Austronesians reached Africa, too, although there is neither archaeological nor linguistic evidence that they did so. The absence of material finds has been attributed to changes in the geomorphology of the coast and the prevalence of perishable goods such as spices, fabrics, or slaves, rather than pottery and iron, which entered the mix in the Islamic era. Had Austronesians reached the coast, their numbers would have been too small to resist absorption by the larger African population, which would account for the lack of linguistic evidence comparable to that found in Madagascar.

  If durable goods and language left few traces, studies in ethnobotany, ethnomusicology, and genetics demonstrate the indelible impact of Austronesian migration to Africa. Taro, banana, and the water yam were introduced from Southeast Asia about two thousand years ago and all three are staple foods in sub-Saharan Africa as far west as the Atlantic coast of Senegambia. Austronesian sailors also seem to have introduced to Africa a variety of musical instruments, including the leaf-funnel clarinet and the stick zither. Affinities between Indonesian and continental African zithers are so strong that some believe that stick zithers may have been introduced first to East Africa and from there to Madagascar. On the other hand, Africans sailing to Southeast Asia, whether voluntarily or as slaves, may have brought the xylophone with them as early as the sixth century.

  Southeast Asian navigators also introduced a number of boat construction techniques to East Africa. The ngalawa, a type of outrigger canoe found between the Lamu archipelago and Mozambique and on Madagascar and the Comoro Islands well into the twentieth century, resembles prototypes from Java in significant details. The mtepe, a nimble sewn boat used in coastal trade along the Swahili coast, is considered “a relic of an Indonesian type bereft of its outriggers,” and “the lineal descendant of the large sailing vessels used by Indonesians in their ancient traffic” on the coast of East Africa. The most obvious clue to the mtepe’s Indonesian origins is the design of circle-and-dot (rather than naturally rendered) oculi. Indonesian craft traditionally have oculi painted not only on the bows but at the stern, as does the mtepe. A further parallel is the use of woven matting rather than cloth for sails. “The only cargo-carrying vessel on the Swahili coast that is not obviously of Persian or Arab origin,” mtepes with a capacity of twenty tons were recorded in the nineteenth century. The similarity of East African and Indonesian vessels points to a channel of cultural transmission across the Indian Ocean free of influence from mainland Asia. In the second half of the first millennium, this divided into shorter segments oriented to the rejuvenated trading centers of Southwest Asia and the Indian subcontinent.

  After a long period of decline following the fall of the Indus Valley civilization and the withdrawal of Mesopotamian merchants from trade beyond the Persian Gu
lf, navigation on the Indian Ocean revived in the first millennium BCE and quickly came to encompass some of the longest uninterrupted sea routes in the world, across the Arabian Sea and the Bay of Bengal, with southern India and Sri Lanka lying at the crossroads of east–west exchange. While Mediterranean sailors tended to think in terms of new frontiers lying to the west, in the Indian Ocean the east was more alluring. Greco-Roman sailors from the Ptolemaic period to the Roman Empire were attracted to the point of decadence by the exotica and spices of India and beyond, while Indian merchants in story and in fact were lured east by the land and islands of gold—Suvarnabhumi and Suvarnadvipa—in Southeast Asia, to which they incidentally transplanted their religions, language, and other cultural phenomena, as well as new goods and crafts. In so doing they laid the foundation for the prosperous trade that followed the rise of Islam and the consequent prosperity of the Near East in the seventh century and after. They also had a demonstrable impact on the political landscape of Southeast Asia and to a lesser extent, chiefly through the reinforcement of Buddhist ties, on China, Korea, and Japan.