A section from the journey

Muziris, the First Emporium

Muziris was the great pepper-port of the Chera kings, on a river of the western coast. A Greek sailor's handbook and the Roman writer Pliny both describe it. Pliny called it the first emporium of India, and grumbled that the East was draining Rome of its gold. A surviving contract even names one ship and its costly cargo. The poems and the foreign writings agree.

Of all the harbours of the south, one shines brightest in the memory of faraway lands. Its name was . It stood on a river of the western coast, in the kingdom of the Chera kings, near where the town of Kodungallur stands today. It was, above all, a port of pepper.

How do we know it? Here is something wonderful. We do not only have the Tamil poems. We also have the words of strangers who saw it, or who wrote down what sailors told them. When the poems and the strangers agree, we can stand on firm ground.

The first witness is a small Greek book, a kind of handbook for sailors. We call it the of the Erythraean Sea — a guide to the ports of the eastern seas. A Greek-speaking trader in Egypt wrote it, scholars think, around the year 60 of the Common Era. He lists the markets of the Tamil coast one after another, the way a traveller lists the stops on a road.

Then come Naura and Tyndis, the first markets of Damirica [the Tamil land], and then Muziris and Nelcynda, which are now of leading importance. Tyndis is of the Kingdom of Cerobothra; it is a village in plain sight by the sea. Muziris, of the same Kingdom, abounds in ships sent there with cargoes from Arabia, and by the Greeks; it is located on a river... Nelcynda is distant from Muziris by river and sea about five hundred stadia, and is of another Kingdom, the Pandian.

Hear what the old sailor is telling us. Tyndis and Muziris belong to one kingdom — Cerobothra, which is his Greek way of saying the Chera. Nelcynda lies to the south, in another kingdom, the Pandya. The crowned kings of the Tamil poems are right here, in a foreign sailor's notebook, named as the lords of these ports. Two voices, near and far, telling one story.

The same handbook tells what flowed in and out of Muziris. Listen for the heart of it: gold comes in, and pepper goes out.

There is imported here, in the first place, a great quantity of coin; topaz... wine... copper, tin, lead... There is exported pepper, which is produced in quantity in only one region near these markets, a district called Cottonara. Besides this there are exported great quantities of fine pearls, ivory, silk cloth, spikenard from the Ganges, malabathrum... transparent stones of all kinds, diamonds and sapphires, and tortoise-shell.

The second witness is a Roman, and a famous one. His name was Pliny the Elder, a writer who tried to set down everything known in his world. Around the year 77 he wrote of this very port. He called Muziris the first of India — the chief market of the whole land. In his own tongue the phrase was primum emporium Indiae.

But Pliny was also worried. He grumbled that the lands of the East were draining Rome of its wealth. Every year, he said, a great river of Roman coin flowed away to India and beyond, paying for pepper and pearls and silk — and a large share went to India. To the Tamil south it was good fortune. To a careful Roman, it was a leak in the treasury that would not close.

And there is one more thing, almost too good to be true. A torn old business document has survived, written on papyrus. We call it the Muziris papyrus. It is a real contract for the cargo of a single ship — a ship that even has a name, the Hermapollon. The goods it carried from Muziris were worth a small fortune. Hold that in your mind: not a poem, not a story, but an actual invoice from this trade, kept by chance for two thousand years.

One honest note, as always. The years I have given — around 60, around 77 — are what scholars work out from the writings themselves, and they are debated. The exact dates are not fixed. But the busy harbour, the gold coming in, the pepper going out: on that, the poems and the strangers all agree.

It is one thing to read your own people's praise of a place. It is another to find a stranger from far away saying the same thing in his own words. Why do you think we trust a story more when two very different voices tell it?