The Indian Ocean - Michael Pearson [40]
Another sector of the Indian Ocean where we know that early trade flourished was from Egypt down the Red Sea, but possibly going no further. There is evidence of trade down the Red Sea as far as the main centre of Punt, on the African side, as early as 5000 BCE. However, from around the beginning of the first millennium BCE it seems that long distance trade in the areas we have just described declined. One explanation for this may be that several large states, which generated a demand for the luxuries which were the only items worth trading over long distances, declined around this time. Coastal trade continued, but longer distance trade seems to have revived only in the last three centuries before the beginning of the Common Era.20
Some older accounts tried to show that a revival of long-distance trade later in the first millennium BCE was due to the arrival of external traders, first Greeks and then Romans. (We must note in passing that neither of these descriptors are very precise. Very many people of very diverse ethnic backgrounds were included in these two broad categories.) Indeed, even the 'discovery' of the monsoon winds, a knowledge of which was so vital for making possible extended direct sailings, used to be attributed to a Greek sailor, Hippalus. To the contrary, it is now obvious that the essentials of the system we outlined in the previous chapter were known to sailors from at least the middle of the Bronze Age (3000–1000 BCE).21 Even if we lack hard evidence of their use so early, certainly the direct passage from the Red Sea mouth to India was being sailed in the second half of the second century, or even in the third century BCE, by Indian and Arab sailors.22
As to the influence of Greek and Roman sailors and traders, we know much more about them because of the records, albeit fragmentary, that they have left. Archaeological work can flesh out these literary accounts, and they show that neither Greeks nor Romans innovated; rather they participated in existing complex trade networks in the Indian Ocean. As one example of this sort of supplementation, the famous handbook, the Periplus, of the mid first century CE, says nothing about trade in the Gulf, but archaeology shows it was well integrated in Indian Ocean trade by this time, continuing or reviving connections dating back three millennia.23
The older, very Eurocentric, view was that 'the moving force from first to last came from the West, the little-changing people of the East allowed the West to find them out.'24 Romans dominated the trade of the western Indian Ocean, there were Roman colonies in India, notably at Arikamedu in Coromandel. The last claim is based on discoveries of many Roman coins there by Sir Mortimer Wheeler, who failed to consider how the coins actually got there. Not for the first or last time, we need to know how Roman, or for that matter Chinese, goods got to where they have been found by archaeologists. Most of the time the Chinese, or the Romans, were responsible only for the first part of the travels of these goods. This is the well-known phenomenon of relay trade, where goods exchange hands many times before they stop travelling, and centuries later are dug up. Even some particular products have been misassigned. It once was thought that Red Polished Ware was Roman, so when we found it in India it showed contact with Rome. But Red Polished Ware was produced in Gujarat also.25
This is not to deny that there was extensive trade contact with the eastern Mediterranean. The first Greek captain in the Arabian Sea was Scylax of Caryanda, around 510 BCE, who on the orders of Darius I (521–466 BCE) sailed from the mouth of the Indus to the Gulf of Suez. Later Alexander sent off Nearchus of Crete (326–325 BCE) to sail from the Indus to the Gulf, where he provided an early account of