A section from the journey

The Sea Trade and the Periplus

The roads ran on land, but the greatest road of all was the sea. Sailors learned to ride the monsoon winds across the open ocean to and from the west. A trade grew up between India and the Roman world. We know it well, because a Greek sailor wrote a plain handbook of these voyages, called the Periplus of the Erythraean Sea. He lists the ports, the goods, and even the Roman coin that poured in for India's pepper and pearls.

We have walked the dusty roads of the land. Now let us go down to the shore, for the greatest road of all was never made of earth. It was the open sea.

The secret of that sea-road was the wind. You already know it, for it has shaped this land's whole story. The . For half the year the great wind blows one way, and for the other half it turns and blows back. Long ago, sailors learned its rhythm by heart.

And once you trust the wind, the open ocean opens to you. With the monsoon at his back, a sailor could leave the coast of Arabia or of Egypt, let go of the safe shoreline, and drive straight across the deep water to India's western ports in a matter of weeks. Then he waited for the wind to turn, and it carried him home. The sea became a highway.

On this wind, a great trade grew up between India and the Roman world far to the west. Now, here is something wonderful, the kind of solid witness this era keeps giving us. Around the first century of the common era, a Greek merchant who had actually sailed these waters sat down and wrote a plain handbook of the voyage.

We call his little book the . The name simply means a sailing-around of the Red Sea and the ocean beyond. It is not a poem or a grand history. It is a working guide, port by port, telling a trader where to stop, what to sell, and what to buy. And his India is wonderfully real.

He names India's great trading towns. In the northwest lay , a busy port on the western coast. Far down in the south lay , on the pepper coast. To these ports, he says, traders sent large ships, for the goods there were worth the long and dangerous journey.

Listen to how he describes the southern trade, in his own plain words.

"They send large ships to these market-towns on account of the great quantity and bulk of pepper and malabathrum. There are imported here, in the first place, a great quantity of coin…"

A great quantity of coin. Hold that phrase. It means Roman gold and silver money, poured into India to pay for her goods. And what were those goods? He tells us that too, in a single rich line.

"There is exported pepper… Besides this there are exported great quantities of fine pearls, ivory, silk cloth, spikenard from the Ganges, malabathrum from the places in the interior, transparent stones of all kinds, diamonds and sapphires, and tortoise-shell."

Pepper above all, the black gold the Roman kitchens craved. Then pearls and ivory, fine cotton and silk cloth, sweet-smelling spikenard, and bright gems. India sent out her treasures, and the wealth of Rome flowed back to pay for them.

And we need not take the sailor's word alone. Deep in the soil of the south, again and again, people have dug up hoards of Roman coins, gold and silver, struck with the faces of Roman emperors. The earth itself confirms the handbook. The trade was real, and it was rich, so rich that some in Rome grumbled their gold was draining away to the East.

Think what this means for our journey. For age upon age the wider world met this land only in myth and dim memory. Now, in this era, India and Rome meet in the clear daylight of plain record, a sailor's notebook and a buried purse of coins. The ocean had become a bridge, and India stood at its eastern end, sending her gifts out into the world.

A jar of pepper from a southern village might end its journey in a kitchen thousands of miles away, in a city its grower would never see. Think of something small in your own home that travelled a long way to reach you. How does it feel to know your life is quietly tied to far-off hands you will never meet?