TRADE AND CULTURE: INDIAN OCEAN INTERACTION ON THE COAST OF MALABAR IN MEDIEVAL PERIOD

Journal of Early Modern History, 2020

L T Kurian, 2026

From at least the early centuries CE, the Malabar coast (roughly present-day Kerala) sat inside a dense Indian Ocean trade system linking South India to Arabia, the Red Sea and, via Egypt and the Levant, to the Mediterranean world. Arab merchants were already the principal carriers of trade between India and the Arab lands well before Islam, using routes along the Arabian coast and through the Red Sea that then connected to Mediterranean markets Within this system, Muziris (often identified with Pattanam/Kodungallur) was a key early port. Archaeology and classical sources show that it exported pepper, gems, and other high-value goods to the Graeco-Roman world via Egypt, while also receiving goods from Arabia and the wider Semitic world.The same routes that carried pepper and ivory also carried ideas, religious communities, and eventually texts that tied Kerala to the Jewish and Christian communities of the eastern Mediterranean-i.e., historic Palestine-long before anyone spoke

Polish Archaeology in the Mediterranean

This essay evaluates the relative importance of the maritime trade between the Roman Empire and India along two routes that were in use: one started and ended on the Egyptian shore of the Red Sea, the other at the head of the Gulf. Both continued on land along caravan tracks to the Nile valley or through the Syrian desert to Palmyra. The latter land route, longer and presumably more cost-consuming, was used only during the 1st to 3rd centuries AD. The land link with the Far East, the so-called Silk Road, does not seem to have been regularly used. A document from Palmyra allows to estimate the value of the trade along the Syrian route as much smaller than that of the Red Sea traffic. It could have been mainly of local, Syrian importance, and lasted only as long as political circumstances allowed.

HAL (Le Centre pour la Communication Scientifique Directe), 2018

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Journal of Global History

With the rise of post-colonialism during the latter part of the twentieth century, more focus has been given to non-western perspectives (the so-called nativist turn). In the case of Indian Ocean trade during the early first millennium CE, the view that ‘Roman’ merchants and sailors were the near-exclusive movers of goods, who were also (indirectly) responsible for commercial developments within South Asia, has largely fallen into abeyance. Rightly, the agency of those in South Asia has been acknowledged. The present article goes beyond this basic premise and considers how we can assess evidence demonstrating the role played by sailors and merchants from South Asia. In particular, it is suggested these merchants and sailors played an important role in connecting the Arabian Sea and Bay of Bengal regions.

Muziris, which had attracted traders from the Mediterranean world for a very long span of time as the biggest supplier of spices, has now become one of the major historical sites that the archaeologists and historians of South Asia have been trying to geographically locate and identify. With the archaeological excavations at Pattanam, which brought to limelight particularly the material culture related to intense Roman commerce, there were frequent attempts to identify it with Muziris. However there are some historians, including M.G.S. Narayanan, who think that though the material objects from Pattanam are indicative of its strong trade relations with Rome, they are not sufficient enough to prove categorically that Pattanam was the actual site of Muziris. The recent scholarship on Muziris and the scholarly debates around it make maritime historians look at Muziris in the age of 'early global trade' by highlighting larger connections and locating its position in the trajectories of commodity movements within the Indian Ocean and outside, besides its physiological position in Kerala's geography. This paper tries to look into the nuanced and changing character that Muziris acquired over the years by its participation in the larger network of commodity movements.

The Portuguese attempts for monopoly trade in the Indian Ocean received a major set back because of the parallel circulatory processes between India and the Mediterranean in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in differing quantities and degrees. This parallel trade circuit was made possible, on the one hand, because of the flow of considerable cargo through the Aden-Cairo-Alexandria route fed initially by the al-Karimis as well as the Jews and later by the Marakkars of Malabar and the banians of Gujarat. On the other hand there were the circulatory processes oriented towards the ports of Persian Gulf region through which commodities were made to flow to the eastern Mediterranean. These were channels not only for 'clandestine' commodity movements alone, but also for legitimately procuring bullions needed for the fast expanding Shia kingdoms of Deccan and the gunpowder empire of the Mughals in north India. The Indian trade with the eastern Mediterranean had two different operational lines, viz., the Red Sea ports and the doors of Persian Gulf. Till 1540s the ports of Red Sea formed the main channel through which Indian goods entered eastern Mediterranean. However with the occupation of Basra in 1538 by the Ottomans and the consequent introduction of Pax Turcana in the entire land-space between Persian Gulf and eastern Mediterranean, there got ushered in security and safety needed for the movement of high value-intense commodities like bullions, precious stones , textiles etc, which made the route through Persian Gulf take precedence over the land route through Red Sea in the later period. 2 The central purpose of this chapter is to examine the exigencies by which the parallel circulatory processes of commodities between Indian Ocean and the Mediterranean were allowed to evolve and made to become supplementary layers for the changing structures of the Portuguese economy in the Indian Ocean. It also examines the multiple channels

2013

This thesis examines the Early Roman ‘India trade’ in the Indian Ocean during the Late Pre-Islamic period through a holistic overview of excavated trading sites with an emphasis on ceramic studies. It attempts to look at the economic relations between the southeast Arabian seaboard and India, and enquires into the development and nature of the trade. This has been executed through the documentation of forms and detailed fabric analysis and quantification of Indian pottery assemblages from three sites in the UAE (Mleiha, Ed-Dur and Kush) and three sites from South Arabia and Oman (Khor Rori, Qana and Suhar). This research seeks to develop a more reliable definition of the types of wares based on an evaluation of morphology and fabric. The results are compared with select parallels of Indian pottery from a number of trading settlements particularly in western and southern India, combining both coastal and hinterland sites. The thesis also includes a technical sourcing investigation into the origin of the Indian wares occurring in the Arabian and Indian contexts using XRF analysis. Finally this thesis attempts a desk-based assessment of published data concerning ceramics from excavated sites from the Red Sea region, African ports and Arabia, particularly the sites with archaeological and historical evidence indicating trade with Peninsular India. The thesis thus constitutes a wider regional case study of Indian ceramic data as a reliable indicator of Indian Ocean trade in the Late Pre-Islamic period.