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By Root 657 0

the island was uninhabited when they arrived. African people arrived later to produce the complex mixture which is today's Malagasy society. Second, there is the matter of how they got to Madagascar. Some argue that they sailed direct from insular southeast Asia, taking advantage of the westward drift of the South Equatorial Current, and prevailing southeast trades in these latitudes. Others point to technological barriers to such long voyages, and claim rather that they proceeded westward piecemeal, going from port to port and island to island until they reached Madagascar. The latter scenario implicitly belittles their achievement, and has been discarded by those who stress southeast Asia autonomy. Third, was this a round trip? Did they go back and forth across the southern Indian Ocean? Many claim that they did, pointing to the xylophone as an example.55 Manguin claims that there was continuing reciprocal contact between the two areas up to the early centuries of Islamisation in Sumatra, that is up to the thirteenth or fourteenth centuries.56 If this be so, it is then a matter of how this was done. The only possible route to take would be in the far south, taking advantage of the strong westerlies in latitudes 40 and 50° S, but we have no evidence of their doing this. The case for continuing contact is not proven, and indeed seems improbable.

We can close this chapter with two final and somewhat negative cautions. We have spent and will spend considerable space on trade and economic connections, yet even today these are not really central in the total economies of the surrounding countries. At least in this earlier period the vast bulk of the populations in countries around the Indian Ocean were peasants, most of them more or less subsistence, or at least exchanging goods locally, and by land. Economic exchanges by sea, even coastal ones, were not very important, except possibly for coastal people, but even they were amphibious, drawing on both land and sea. The relative lack of importance of sea trade can and will be demonstrated more clearly as our data improves in later chapters, but it is clear also in this early period. For example, it seems that trade between the Indus Valley Civilisation and Mesopotamia is of more interest to modern scholars than it was important in the economies of either area. Trade within these two civilisations, and their surrounding land areas, was far more significant. If sea trade is of minor importance, then arguably it is religion and culture that is important when we look at exchanges by sea, most obviously the spread of Buddhist and Hindu ideas which we sketched earlier in this chapter. We will look at the Islamisation of the littoral in the next chapter.

Finally, we have implicitly been striving to find connections and unity across the ocean in this early period. Mark Horton, reviewing three new books on the maritime archaeology of the Indian Ocean, provides an important caveat to this attempt. While welcoming a new interest in maritime, as opposed to the traditional land-based, archaeology, he is dubious of the claims of widespread maritime connections before the beginning of the Common Era:

The idea that the sea unites, not divides, cultures is one that archaeologists have borrowed from Fernand Braudel: it has proved useful in the Mediterranean, perhaps it could be equally applied to the Indian Ocean? It has been in the Islamic period, but we need more indications that the communities along the rim of the Indian Ocean maintained maritime connections over sustained periods of time, to extend this to the prehistoric period. Certainly the evidence is not there yet....57

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Chapter 4

Muslims in the Indian Ocean

The rise of Islam in the Hijaz in the early seventh century affected the Indian Ocean in several important ways. Describing these changes will be the main concern of this chapter, which uses material from the period up to the end of the fifteenth century. In this period there was both continuity and change. It would certainly be incorrect to write of an Islamic