Splendid Exchange, A

by Bernstein, William L

  After 1479 BC, Hatshepsut ruled as regent to the son of her deceased husband (and half-brother) by a commoner. She left a mortuary sanctuary at Deir el-Bahri (on the Nile, just across from Luxor), whose painted relief carvings and narrations depicted a commercial expedition to Punt.

  The story is told in four panels, the first showing several galleys, each perhaps eighty feet long and equipped with sails and teams of rowers. The second panel depicts the unloading of what are presumably bales of Egyptian grain and textiles in Punt; the third, large plants or trees being loaded; and the fourth, the vessels returning home. Above this frieze is the following inscription:

  The loading of the ships very heavily with marvels of the country of Punt: all goodly fragrant woods of God’s land, heaps of myrrh-resin, with fresh myrrh trees, with ebony, and pure ivory, with green gold of Emu, with cinnamon wood, khesyt wood, with ihmut-incense, sonter-incense, eye-cosmetic, with apes, monkeys, dogs, and with skins of the southern panther, with natives and their children. Never was brought the like of this for any king who had been since the beginning.27

  Figure 1-1. Expedition of Queen Hatshepsut. (Begin at the lower right and proceed clockwise. Second panel occupies only a small corner at lower left.)

  Following the decline of the Egyptian dynasties after Hatshepsut’s reign, the Phoenicians took over the Red Sea trade. Distant relations of the Canaanite sea-peoples, they settled in what is now Lebanon. With that land’s abundant timber and strategic location between Mesopotamia and Egypt, no ancient race was as well positioned to excel at trafficking goods by sea. Their supremacy in commerce in the eastern Mediterranean lasted over a thousand years. It is likely that the Phoenicians were the first people to engage in direct long-distance trade. The first book of Kings records:

  And King Solomon made a navy of ships in Eziongeber, which is beside Eloth, on the shore of the Red Sea, in the land of Edom. And Hiram sent in the navy his servants, shipmen that had knowledge of the sea, with the servants of Solomon. And they came to Ophir, and fetched from thence gold, four hundred and twenty talents, and brought it to King Solomon.28

  Translation: The long-distance trading of Solomon’s kingdom, near the beginning of the first millennium BC, was carried out by the Phoenicians (Hiram being the king of Tyre, the dominant Phoenician city-state). “Eziongeber” was most likely a port city at Tall al-Khulayfah, near Elat (“Eloth”), on the Gulf of Aqaba (the northeastern tip of the Red Sea). “Ophir” was probably India, as suggested by the goods imported from it: precious metals, peacocks, ivory, and apes.29 The 420 talents of gold mentioned weighed about thirteen tons and would be worth approximately $270 million in current value—real money, even by today’s standards.

  By 400 BC, most of the western European coastline, as well as the coasts of both eastern and western Africa, were familiar to the Phoenicians.30 This was, in the ancient world, an incredible trading range. Such was Phoenicia’s dominance in long-distance commerce that around 600 BC the Egyptian pharaoh Necho commissioned Phoenician mariners to circumnavigate Africa. Herodotus writes:

  The Phoenicians sailed from the Arabian Gulf into the southern ocean, and every autumn put in at some convenient spot on the [African] coast, sowed a patch of ground, and waited for the next year’s harvest. Then, having gotten their grain, they put to sea again, and after two full years rounded the Pillars of Hercules in the course of the third, and returned to Egypt. The men made a statement which I do not myself believe, though others may, to the effect that as they sailed on a westerly course round the southern end of [Africa], they had the sun to their right—to the northward of them.31

  What prompts doubt in Herodotus—that the sun could be seen on the right, that is, in the north, while one was traveling west—persuades the modern reader. That the ancient historian was probably unaware of how the sun moves in the southern hemisphere makes the story of intrepid Phoenicians rounding Africa’s southern cape, over two thousand years before Vasco da Gama, all the more convincing.32

  In the coming centuries, power shifted eastward into Persia, which had set its sights on the Aegean area. Seeking an alternative to the arduous overland route north through the Hellespont (the modern Dardanelles), Darius the Great completed a canal at Suez (originally contemplated by the pharaoh Necho), linking the Nile, and thus the Mediterranean, with the Red Sea.33 However, Persia’s Aegean ambitions were thwarted in the early fifth century BC at the battles of Marathon, Salamis, and Platea, allowing the Greeks to burst onto the Mediterranean political, trading, and military scene.

  Although the independent Greek and Phoenician city-states both traded and colonized widely in the Mediterranean Sea and the Black Sea (with the Phoenicians occasionally venturing well beyond the Mediterranean), their routine commerce spanned neither continents nor oceans. The Athenians’ imperial ambition would eventually trigger the Peloponnesian War, devastating the Greek world and paving the way for Alexander the Great’s spectacular conquest of all of Greece, Egypt, and west Asia in the late fourth century BC. It was this occupation that hellenized the Western world and greatly expanded the scope of ancient global commerce.

  Alexander’s most enduring legacy would be the founding of the cosmopolitan Alexandria, for centuries the base for the profitable commerce with Arabia, India, and China. The center did not hold long after his death in 323 BC, as his empire fragmented into warring successor states. One of them, Egypt, ruled by his general Ptolemy, inherited the sailing and trading traditions of the preceding dynasties, as well as Phoenician shipbuilding technology, which centered on hulls of cedar planks. This enabled the Egyptians to pioneer the Red Sea waterway into the Indian Ocean, and thence regular blue-water commerce to India itself. Their priority, however, was not trade, but the acquisition of elephants, the “tanks of the ancient world,” from Ethiopia for use against the rival post-Alexandrian Seleucid Greek empire in Persia.34 With this in mind, Ptolemy II attempted, with little success, to reopen Darius’s old canal, which had silted up.

  Because of Egypt’s strategic position between the Mediterranean Sea and the Indian Ocean, via the Red Sea, the canal would have been an ideal route for shipping Ptolemy’s elephants. The dream of a sea-level canal across the Suez beckoned to rulers as far back as Necho in 600 BC. Multiple difficulties plagued the project. The massive undertaking—a deepwater canal sixty to eighty miles long—would have strained even the wealthiest of states, ancient or modern. Herodotus records that Necho’s attempt resulted in the deaths of more than 120,000 conscripts. Worse, the Nile was used as the canal’s western terminus. When the river was at flood stage, it deposited sediment into the canal. Alternatively, when the Nile was low, its level would fall below that of the Red Sea, allowing seawater to flow into the river and poison the drinking and irrigation sources with salt. Additionally, there was the ever-present fear that enemies would use the canal to surround Egypt—the reason Necho never completed it.

  But the temptation was strong, and successive canals were attempted by the ancient Persians, Ptolemies, and Romans, and the early Muslim empires.35 All the canals, except the last, followed essentially the same route, from the easternmost arm (Pelusiac Branch) of the Nile delta via a dried riverbed, Wadi Tumilat, to the northern end of what is now the Great Bitter Lake, just north of the present-day Gulf of Suez. By the time of the caliphate, the Pelusiac Branch of the Nile had silted up, forcing Arab engineers to originate their canal on a more southerly arm of the delta. In biblical times, Great Bitter Lake was connected by a narrow channel at its southern end to the Gulf of Suez, and from there to the Red Sea. Later efforts to connect the Nile and Great Bitter Lake mainly involved dredging out and enlarging the silted remains of earlier canals.

  The channel between Great Bitter Lake and the Gulf of Suez was shallow and tenuous; a brisk east wind combined with a low tide often rendered it high and dry. (Such a circumstance could easily have afforded Moses and his followers their probably mythical crossing. Shortly thereafter the water could have swallowed up the pursuing E
gyptians. This channel between Great Bitter Lake and the Gulf of Suez finally closed off permanently around AD 1000, likely as the result of an earthquake.)

  Although apparently the Persian and Abbasid canals each operated for more than a century, it is not clear whether, or for how long, any of the others functioned. And even an operational canal merely served to expose mariners to the many drawbacks of the Red Sea route, where stiff headwinds in its northern half impeded northbound travel. Further, ships sailing in either direction faced murderous shoals. If the winds and reefs weren’t discouraging enough, pirates infested the entire route, especially its upper portion.

  Ancient Canals at Suez

  We can now return to the story of Ptolemy’s elephants. His minions marched them from their home in the African heartland east to Ethiopia, where the elephants were put on boats and shipped to the Egyptian port of Berenice, about two-thirds of the way north up the Red Sea. They then marched across the desert toward the start of the navigable portion of the Nile at Coptos or Caenopolis, and from there continued by boat about three hundred miles north to Alexandria.

  Alone among the world’s great rivers, the Nile flows north, and it is also fanned by a year-round northerly wind. These two circumstances allow ships to float north downstream and to sail south upstream. The route via the Nile, desert, and Red Sea to and from the Indian Ocean would remain one of the “grand trunk roads” of commerce until the advent of steam power, which not only freed sailors from the vagaries of the wind but also drove the construction of the modern canal, which avoided the silt-ridden Nile delta altogether.

  After 200 BC, Ptolemaic Greek merchants gradually extended their trading activities eastward toward India. A century later, an ambitious sea captain, Eudoxus of Cyzicus, traveled directly from Egypt to India via the long coastwise route out through Bab el Mandeb. He first hugged the southern and then the eastern Arabian shores to the Strait of Hormuz at the mouth of the Persian Gulf and finally navigated the coasts of what are now Iran and Pakistan to the southern Indian trading centers—a total distance of about five thousand miles. This feat led the way to the momentous “discovery” of the Indian Ocean monsoon.

  The huge Indian Ocean functions as a heat reservoir, remaining at approximately the same even temperature when the Asian landmass heats up in summer and cools down in winter. Since heat produces low pressure and cold produces high pressure, the prevailing winds tend to blow from the area of high pressure (cold) to the area of low pressure (hot)—that is, more or less from the south in summer (the southwest monsoon) and more or less from the north in winter (the northeast monsoon).

  It fell to the Egyptian Greek mariner Hippalus (who was quite possibly Eudoxus’s navigator) to harness these seasonal winds, which enabled Greek traders to cross the Arabian Sea directly from Bab el Mandeb to India in a matter of weeks. The result was a flourishing of large, ethnically diverse hubs such as Socotra and the Malabar ports—polyglot communities where trade diasporas of many nations and races mingled, managed cargoes, made fortunes, and satisfied an unquenchable Western (i.e., Roman) demand for such Oriental luxury goods as silk, cotton, spices, gems, and exotic animals.

  Winter Monsoon Winds and Summer Monsoon Winds

  Octavian’s accession to power prepared the ground for the two centuries of Pax Romana, the environment of stability in which ancient long-range trade blossomed. It would not be long before Indian ambassadors appeared in Rome bearing exotic gifts. These new luxuries—Chinese silk and Indian wildlife borne on the trade winds—electrified the empire’s affluent. Monkeys, tigers, cockatoos, and rhinoceroses were not uncommon sights in the capital; Latin-speaking parrots became all the rage; and Romans prized the tusks of both Indian and African elephants, using the ivory to adorn furniture, weaponry, chariots, jewelry, and musical instruments. The Stoic philosopher and playwright Seneca is said to have owned five hundred tripod tables with ivory legs—no small irony, since he was a vocal critic of the empire’s extravagances.

  Not all imported goods were luxuries. Oceangoing ships needed ballast, and so-called “ballast goods” such as wine, lumber, and even jugs of water were traded in great volume. Filling the holds of many a Greek ship, pepper arrived in bulk to flavor the otherwise bland wheat- and barley-based Mediterranean cuisine of rich and poor Romans. It proved so popular that when the Goth Alaric held Rome for ransom in AD 408, he demanded three thousand pounds of the black spice.

  The Western Ghats, a range of low mountains, rise up from southwestern India’s Malabar Coast and capture the moisture of the summer monsoon. The resultant abundant rainfall produces a lush, tropical climate ideal for growing the fruit of Piper nigrum and Piper longum—black pepper and the more potent, and thus more expensive, long pepper, respectively.

  Malabar peppers eventually would find their way into huge horrea, or warehouses, in Ostia, in Puteoli, and of course in Rome. Although the modern image of the imperial city is dominated by the ruins of the Coliseum and the Forum, the economic life of ancient Rome centered on side streets filled with apartments, shops, and horrea. Probably none was more important than the horrea piperataria, or spice warehouses, just off the Via Sacra, the capital’s main street, which today runs through the site of the Forum. As was typical in the premodern world, the trade in a given commodity tended to cluster in one area. From the horrea, pepper was distributed to smaller retail shops in the “spice district” of the Via Sacra neighborhood, where it was sold in small packets to wealthy and middle-class families. (By contrast, the more precious wares of India—pearls, ivory, fine hardwood furniture, and Chinese silk—were sold inside the Forum itself.) The one surviving cookbook from the era, apparently written by a Roman named Apicius, called for pepper in 349 of its 468 recipes; the Romans poured pepper not just into their main courses, but also into their sweets, wines, and medicines.36

  What investment banking is to the ambitious and acquisitive today, the pepper trade was to the Romans—the most direct route to great riches. In the early empire, a greedy person was commonly referred to as being “the first to take the fresh-bought pepper from the camel’s back.”37 The poet Persius wrote:

  The greedy merchants led by lucre, run

  To the parched Indies, and the rising sun;

  From thence hot Pepper, and rich Drugs they bear,

  Bart’ring for Spices, their Italian ware.38

  Pliny wrote: “To think that its only pleasing quality is its pungency and that we go all the way to India to get this! Both pepper and ginger grow wild in their own countries, and nevertheless they are bought by weight like gold or silver.”39 Pliny’s moral outrage, as well as that of Seneca and other critics of Roman decadence, mirrors what is commonly understood today: that the East-West trade contributed to the fall of the Roman Empire by draining it of its gold and silver to pay for fleeting luxuries. The most infamous of Roman emperors, Nero, certainly played his part in this ancient version of the current accounts deficit; according to Pliny, “Good authorities declare that Arabia does not produce so large a quantity of perfume in a year’s output as was burned by the Emperor Nero in a day at the obsequies of his consort Poppaea.”40 The English historian E. H. Warmington gave an entire chapter of his epic volume on the Indian-Roman trade to this “adverse balance”:41

  Not only did Italy consume more than she produced, not only was Rome a city and Latium a district poor in manufactures . . . but the Empire taken as one unit was often unable to offer to foreign regions in general and to oriental nations in particular sufficient products of its own to balance the articles imported from them in large quantities, and the result of this was the draining away from the Empire of precious metals in the form of coined money without any adequate return.42

  Yet the conventional wisdom that Rome went broke buying pepper and silk may not be correct. Nature blessed the empire with an abundance of both base and precious metals, and the Romans also exported prodigious quantities of bulk goods. To India went red Mediterranean coral and the world’s finest glass (
also popular in China). Lead from Spain and copper from Cyprus filled the ballast holds of many a Greek ship. Tin from Cornwall traveled directly from England to Alexandria for onward shipment, and Italian vessels bound for Egypt and India groaned with large cargoes of fine wine. Just as climate and natural resources gave China and India dominance in proffering high-value agricultural goods such as silk and pepper, advanced civil engineering techniques gave Rome large advantages in mining. Further, China and India strongly preferred silver to gold. While silver flowed east, gold from India moved west in impressive quantities. We know, for example, that in the late seventeenth century, an ounce of gold in China bought only five or six ounces of silver, whereas in Spain it bought twelve ounces.43 (Marco Polo reported that in Burma during the late thirteenth century, one weight of gold bought only five of silver.44) This disparity between East and West in the exchange rate for gold and silver had existed since at least Seneca’s day; thus it would have been insane for a Roman merchant to pay for Chinese goods in any other coin but silver. In the words of the economic historians Dennis Flynn and Arturo Giráldez, “There was no imbalance of trade—East-West, North-South, Europe-Asia, or otherwise—for which monetary resources had to flow in compensation. There was just trade.”45

  The end of the western Roman Empire slowed the expansion of world trade outward from its cradle in the Indian Ocean. But it didn’t stop it. A powerful new monotheistic religion—Islam—would arise and propel this renewed expansion of trade through the Indian Ocean, across the broad plains of Asia, and to the very extremities of the vast Eurasian landmass. The trade along the Han-Roman axis spanned huge distances, but it was still poorly integrated: between origin and destination, cargoes bounced among merchants of many races, religions, cultures, and most important, legal traditions.