The Romans and China

How did Roman silver travel from Egypt to China across monsoon seas, pirate waters, and bustling ports? Tristan Hughes is joined by legendary archaeologist Sir Barry Cunliffe for a dramatic journey through the Indian Ocean, where Roman glass, pepper, and silk linked two ancient superpowers. From Sri Lanka to the Malacca Strait, they reveal a dazzling world of traders, middlemen and maritime adventure. More Origins of the Silk Road Listen on Apple https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/origins-of-the-silk-road/id1520403988?i=1000654450640 Listen on Spotify https://open.spotify.com/episode/5GBcXUsq6V54S2ywICDbM9 The Great Wall of China Listen on Apple https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/great-wall-of-china/id1520403988?i=1000649739112 Listen on Spotify https://open.spotify.com/episode/35HS18UVWfguktHgj6Q1Af Presented by Tristan Hughes. Audio editor is Aidan Lonergan, the producer is Joseph Knight. The senior producer is Anne-Marie Luff. All music courtesy of Epidemic Sounds The Ancients is a History Hit podcast. Sign up to History Hit for hundreds to hear an exclusive chat between Tristan and Sir Barry Cunliffe, as well as see hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Tristan Hughes?

  Ever wondered why the Romans were defeated in the Teutoburg Forest? What secrets lie buried in prehistoric Ireland? Or what made Alexander truly great? With a subscription to History Hit, you can explore our ancient past alongside the world's leading historians and archaeologists. You'll also unlock hundreds of hours of original documentaries with a brand new release every single week, covering everything from the ancient world to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com/subscribe. Hello, I hope you're doing well. I am recording this from my car because I've just finished doing an interview with an absolute legend, a legend in the field of archaeology and, quite frankly, a British treasure today.

• 0:45Tristan Hughes?

  He's none other than Barry Cunliffe, Sir Barry Cunliffe. He's been involved in archaeological excavations since the 1950s. He's in his 80s now, but he's still going strong. He's still as lovely as ever and as brilliant as ever. I've been up at his house doing this interview all about his new book, which explores the maritime connections, the maritime trading world of ancient history in the Indian Ocean and beyond, the ships carried by the monsoons. We recreate in this episode a theoretical journey of Roman goods from Roman Egypt and the Red Sea all the way to China. This was so much fun. Barry is as brilliant as ever. Send love to Barry in the comments, okay?

• 1:30Tristan Hughes?

  Because, as mentioned, he is an absolute treasure and I really do hope you enjoy this episode. Let's go.

• 1:48Tristan Hughes?

  It's 2,000 years ago and Sri Lanka, this beautiful island in the Indian Ocean, is one of the great pivots of the world. Here, the Indian Ocean does not divide the world. It tethers it through bustling ports that can be found scattered along this island's coastline.

• 2:10Tristan Hughes?

  To the Roman merchants who have survived the grueling journey here from the Red Sea, this is Tapprabane, the renowned trading land near the edge of their known world. To the sailors arriving from the Han Empire in the east, this is a land renowned for its precious stones, its gems. But for those who live on these docks, it is simply the point where the world meets. The waters are thick with the multi-masted ships of Indian mariners. They are the master navigators of the monsoon, the men whose sturdy vessels and deep knowledge

• 2:52Tristan Hughes?

  of the currents turn a treacherous ocean into a viable highway. Without their expertise and their fleets, this ancient link between the Mediterranean and the South China Sea would simply cease to exist. On these keys, Roman silver denarii are traded for bundles of raw silk. The black pepper of the Malabar coast is weighed against the cinnamon stripped from these very hills. Traders going back east to China are loading up their ships with Roman glass. For centuries, this island will stand at the centre of a great maritime highway, a

• 3:33Tristan Hughes?

  vital link in the chain that bound the Roman Red Sea to the gates of Han China. Two empires, thousands of miles apart, fascinated by each other and their goods, connected via sea, by the great ports and sailors of the Indian Ocean, of Sri Lanka and beyond. It is a journey and a world we are going to explore today with our special guest, Dr. Barry Cunliffe.

• 4:02Tristan Hughes?

  Barry, it is such a pleasure to be back here and have you back on the podcast.

• 4:07Speaker 01

  It's a great pleasure for me as well. There's nothing I like more than talking about the subjects I've been writing about.

• 4:12Tristan Hughes?

  I have nothing I like more than having you on as well to do it. And we've been doing this for a few years now, haven't we?

• 4:17Speaker 01

  We have, we have.

• 4:18Tristan Hughes?

  We've done Brittany, the Sahara, and now we're covering this amazing story of these extensive sea and ocean trade routes that there were 2000 years ago that did link the Mediterranean to China.

• 4:32Speaker 01

  Yes, the world has always been connected. And it's connected either by people going across deserts like the Sahara, or going along the steppe, that wonderful east-west route from China to Europe along the steppe, or this sort of what I call the underbelly of Eurasia route, through the oceans, through the Indian Ocean and the China Seas. But always the world has been linked, and humans have been mobile and have always wanted to explore. This idea of acquiring things is so important, I think, to humans. They need to acquire things, like useless yellow metal that they put around their hands and hang around their necks.

• 5:16Tristan Hughes?

  Gold, thank you.

• 5:16Speaker 01

  Gold, yes. Or coloured stones, glittery stones. They want to acquire things that show off, but they also want to acquire knowledge. And I think what we're talking about today is both the acquiring of commodities, but it's also of people wanting to share knowledge and find out about distant places and bring that home and show off their travel experiences and so on.

• 5:42Tristan Hughes?

  Well, this feels like an important point to address straight away, question to address. So did the Romans, say Imperial Rome, so the early centuries AD, and Imperial China at the same time, did they know of each other?

• 5:55Speaker 01

  Oh, they certainly knew of each other. And they knew of each other, first of all, through the Silk routes, the roads that joined China and the West, north of the Himalaya Mountains, the these roads we call the Silk Roads. But all sorts of commodities passed along them.

• 6:14Tristan Hughes?

  And these are through the stans today.

• 6:15Speaker 01

  That's right, starting from western China, going through the Taklamaka, or around Taklamakan Desert, and into Uzbekistan, and then further and further and further, until hitting Europe. And commodities passed.

• 6:30Speaker 01

  Silk was moving from China into Europe, even even before the Romans. So the Romans will have had some idea of what was out there. And and similarly, the Chinese were very interested in in what was happening in the Far West. And there was one chap called Gan Yang, obviously a Chinese, in ninety seven A D.

• 6:56Tristan Hughes?

  Right.

• 6:56Speaker 01

  The Chinese were the Han Dynasty now, occupied the whole of China. And they had moved into the Tlavian Desert area. And they were looking west and they they got Gan Yang and they told him to go and find out about the West. And he went, as far as we can see, he went through the Silk Roads and then down the Indus Valley to the mouth of the Indus, then caught a boat from there and went up the Arabian Gulf to the Khahé, now in southern Iraq. So that would be in the Parthian Empire, as it then was. And he was collecting information for the Han Emperor.

• 7:42Speaker 01

  And the Han Emperor wanted to know all about the the West. And when he got to, well, the mouth of the Tigris and Euphrates, he met a load of sailors. And they said, oh, you don't want to go there. You know, it's, oh, don't go there. Take your three years, you know, you'll be scared to death and everything. So he decided to stay where he was and collect information. And he got a file of information about the West and went back home. So here was the the Chinese were deliberately attempting to find out about the West.

• 8:14Tristan Hughes?

  That that's the famous stories until we hear once in a while about how, you know, the Chinese, they look west. And then they get to the Parthians and the Parthians kind of push them off going any further. That's that idea, which is so interesting.

• 8:23Speaker 01

  That that's right. Well, the Parthians, if if we're talking about the the Roman Empire and the Han Empire in China, the Parthians sat in between, covering Persia, essentially, the whole of Persia. It was they who commanded the Silk routes. And they commanded the price of silk, and the Romans wanted silk desperately. And silk was passing, but they didn't want the Chinese to find another way around to the Romans to cut them out. We've got that wonderful quote of of Vamplyne about silk, talking about the huge amount of Roman money that's being spent. And he says, I've got the words here.

• 9:04Speaker 01

  India, China and the Arabian Peninsula take one hundred million sesterces from our empire every year at a conservative estimate. That's what our luxuries and our women cost. And then and he goes on to say, you know, getting the silk, it comes from very laborious to make, and it comes from very far away. So distant region of the globe drawn upon to enable the Roman matron to flaunt transparent raiments in public. So he's a grumpy old man saying, you know, the silk is costing us a huge amount and it's really not very, not very good for the morale of the Romans.

• 9:43Tristan Hughes?

  So in that regard, we know that these Chinese goods are reaching the Roman Empire. But if they're not all coming overland via the Parthians, is it then the case, I remember talking to William Dalrymple about this, that like Chinese silk and so much more is coming through the ports of places like India. It's been ferried from China to India and then Roman traders take it on from there into their empire.

• 10:06Speaker 01

  Yes, I think I think that that's right. The main silk route is is that that northern step route or the Silk Roads route. But there was also this southern route by sea. And and silk was getting down to various places, going down the Ganges, in fact, and it was going down the Indus and being picked up at various places along the the ocean routes as well.

• 10:29Tristan Hughes?

  So we also, you mentioned Pliny there, but also this Chinese writer as well. So for learning more about their trade routes and maybe where they intertwined, where East intertwined with West in regards to these maritime traders, can we reconstruct a potential voyage through sources from, well, from both cultures?

• 10:50Speaker 01

  We can, but we've got to be very careful, I think, because, you know, from our, our sort of western oriented point of view and Roman centered point of view, which a lot of people hold, they see the Romans as being the entrepreneurs, getting on their boats and going across and trying to get to China and so on. You've got to remember, there were a lot of very, very well-trained sailors with thousands of years of experience in the Bay of Bengal, in the Arabian Sea, in India itself, making these journeys daily. And so there was a whole network of maritime connection. And what Rome did was, was to check into it and make

• 11:33Speaker 01

  use of it and, and sometimes wander along the routes themselves. And we get a wonderful description in Han history. It's called the Han Hanzhu, the history of the later Han period. So Chinese document, it says in, in a particular year, the Yangxi year in the reign of Yuan. So you can work out that's one hundred and sixty-six A D. And then they say the Da Jin, which is the Roman emperor, and they name him Andong. And we know that is must be Marcus Aurelius.

• 12:07Tristan Hughes?

  Yes, of course.

• 12:08Speaker 01

  Sent envoys to China.

• 12:10Tristan Hughes?

  Ha.

• 12:11Speaker 01

  So sent envoys to China. They end up bringing gifts of ivory and rhino horn and turtle shell. But then the source says, but nothing of a precious nature. So they're saying, these are tatty old gifts.

• 12:25Tristan Hughes?

  They don't seem that pleased with them. They don't seem pleased with, they don't seem pleased with the gifts they've received.

• 12:29Speaker 01

  That, that's right. The gifts are not the sort of thing an ambassador would bring to the Chinese emperor. You've got to remember that the Chinese emperors thought themselves to be absolutely at the center of the world and all the rest of the world was subservient to them. And what they wanted to do was to show all these different people in the world were bringing gifts and, and bowing down in front of the emperor. And the more people you could get to do that, ambassadors to come in, the more your own people. Saw you as a as a really important emperor. So the Chinese were keen to get these these ambassadors coming in. I'm fascinated by this reference to what they were bringing.

• 13:11Speaker 01

  Because what they were bringing is rhino horn ivory turtle shell. They could have picked up in a market on East Africa. And just sailed across with it, you know, any old tat in a local market. And what I wonder is whether they passed themselves off as ambassadors. But that really they were just Roman traders trying to open up a market. And they didn't bring the right gifts for the emperor. So that that is the only actual case where we've got a text saying the Romans actually came to China.

• 13:42Tristan Hughes?

  Which is very interesting because we're going to delve into the various porcelain routes where we know that Romans were. And then when the evidence gets fuzzy from the Roman side and you go the other way and you you start figuring out. Who are the people, who are the sailors who are reaching finally, you know, past the Malay. The Malacca Strait and the Malay Peninsula and up into China. But it seems that although maybe the case of actual Romans reaching China is is more dubious. There is evidence of Roman goods ultimately reaching, you know, Far East Asia.

• 14:11Speaker 01

  Oh, absolutely. One of the um products that they really loved in the east was Roman glass.

• 14:18Tristan Hughes?

  Glass.

• 14:19Speaker 01

  Glass made, um, well, Syria was probably the the most important centre of glass making. Uh, in the Roman period. And um we get Roman glass ending up in Korea and in Japan.

• 14:32Tristan Hughes?

  Wow, so Japan, there's Roman stuff in Japan.

• 14:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, but how that glass got there and who were the carriers is another thing. We mustn't think of a load of Romans loaded up with, you know, rucksacks full of glass getting there. Around our houses, we've got a load of stuff made in China. But it it's not a, there's not a Chi- um, a Chinese trader who who brings it here. It comes through through middlemen, middlemen, middlemen. And I think that's how much of the Roman material got to the east, but it certainly did. There's there's a lot of Roman glass, particularly in the burials in in Korea. Um, the fourth, fifth century A D. Um, that that's the the high period of it. But one suspects that most of that went via the Silk Roads, overland.

• 15:20Tristan Hughes?

  So overland, but but also there probably was some that did go via that maritime route as well.

• 15:23Speaker 01

  Oh, yes, yes, um, um, there there is indeed. Um, and there are Roman items uh one finds all the way along that maritime route.

• 15:31Tristan Hughes?

  Well, let's start tracing that now, Barry, and I think we're going to take ourselves to the early third century A D. So a time when the Roman Empire, let's say before the third century crisis, so Septimius Severus likes the Roman Empire's at its height. And also in China, you have the final years of the Han Dynasty as well. So before these crises periods, so they're both at their height. We're going to imagine that we're a trader, you know, sailing with, or let's say, items like Roman glass from the West, from what is today Egypt and the Red Sea, and get all the way uh to China. First and foremost, those waterways at that time, Barry. First millennium A D, from the Red Sea, past Arabia, past the Indian subcontinent, Southeast Asia to China.

• 16:16Tristan Hughes?

  Just how busy were they at that time?

• 16:19Speaker 01

  I think they were extremely busy, not just with Roman trade, but they were so interlinked by generations after generation after generation of of maritime connection. That those seas were alive with people. And when we get little hints of what was going on in the ports from various texts, uh they were really busy places and they were visited by sailors from all over the place. And that that's the interesting thing. Most, many of the ports are along the way. Your Roman would have met up with people from Arabia, people from India, people from the Malay region.

• 17:00Speaker 01

  Um, the these ports were really cosmopolitan. It really starts, I think, with with the Ptolemies. Um, we've just got to go back a little bit before our our um preferred date. The Ptolemies, um, death, death of um Alexander the Great, three to three, break up with Alexander's empire. Um, Egypt comes under one of one of the old commanders.

• 17:23Tristan Hughes?

  One of his generals, Ptolemy.

• 17:24Speaker 01

  General Ptolemy, yep. And the Ptolemies begin, but what what Alexander does is to create Alexandria, the port, the Mediterranean port of Egypt.

• 17:36Speaker 01

  And the Ptolemies then have the Mediterranean port in in their their country. They also have the Red Sea ports in their country. So they are sitting on this interface between the Roman world, as it were, the Mediterranean world, what becomes the Roman world, Mediterranean, and the Red Sea, which provides the link into these great seaways, shipping lanes to China. And we find the Ptolemies sort of developing these, this down the Red Sea, and building ports on the Red Sea, on the African coast of the Red Sea, so that their ships can get down.

• 18:14Speaker 01

  By one hundred and eighteen B.C., they are trading down to the southern end of the Red Sea. And then there's a guy called Eudoxus, a sailor, an entrepreneur, an explorer. And the, one of the Ptolemies hires him to take an Indian who has been shipwrecked in the Red Sea. So that tells us there were Indian sailors coming into the Red Sea at that stage. So Eudoxus takes this Indian and and says, you know, show me the way to India. And he makes a trip across to India. And that is the first information we've got about opening up

• 18:56Speaker 01

  that route to India from what is to become the Roman world. And then then we get this this amazing document, the Pericles, the Erythrian Sea.

• 19:07Tristan Hughes?

  Yes.

• 19:07Speaker 01

  Which is a most fascinating account. It's really a text for sailors who are making sea journeys from the Red Sea across to India. And it's written in very basic Greek, so anyone can read it, you know. And it gives all the details any sailor would want about all the ports that you visit, how to get there, what the hazards are, what goods are on sale. It's a textbook for a trader.

• 19:36Tristan Hughes?

  Information, yes, exactly. What to expect, yeah.

• 19:39Speaker 01

  Just text, just information. And it was put together sometime in the middle of the first century B C, so after Eudoxus. One of the things it says, it mentions a man called Hippolytus. There's also a wind called Hippolytus as well, so there's a problem here. But he was the first person, we're told in the Periples, to sail on the monsoon winds. This is a very important development because getting from the mouth of the Red Sea, you'd come through the straits into the Gulf of Aden.

• 20:16Tristan Hughes?

  Yep.

• 20:17Speaker 01

  And the two metered about right angles, and the Gulf of Aden gives out into the northern part of the Indian Ocean. Before, if you wanted to go to India, you would have to sail up the coast and around the northern end of the, what is called the Arabian Sea, but the northern end of the Indian Ocean, down to the coast of India. Now, what Hippolytus does is to show how you can sail on the monsoon winds. He develops these different routes that you can take. One along the coast, one cutting across to northern India, and one using the monsoon properly to go right across straight from west to east and hit Southern India.

• 20:57Tristan Hughes?

  So open ocean, you're crossing the open ocean. What is there in between? There are a few small islands in between, but apart from that, not much.

• 21:04Speaker 01

  Nothing much at all. Pliny, who writes about this later, says that going from one of the Red Sea ports across to Southern India, Muziris in Southern India, would take you 40 days. And he says, but remember to take archers on board because when you get to the Indian coast, there are a load of pirates.

• 21:23Tristan Hughes?

  Pirates.

• 21:24Speaker 01

  You've got to fight them off.

• 21:25Tristan Hughes?

  Yep.

• 21:32Speaker 02

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• 22:16Speaker 02

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• 22:34Tristan Hughes?

  So if we now go to the time of the Romans in Egypt, so post-Augustus, Antony and Cleopatra, they're long gone. Egypt is part of the Roman Empire. They've taken advantage of these ports already created by the Ptolemies and then they take it to the next level with this trade. But let's say then we are a trader in the Roman Empire. Well, let's say we start at Alexandria. We've got our glass, beautiful glass from Alexandria and we're going to take it east. Of course, also wanting to get some goods back from India. But how do we go from Alexandria to these ports on the Red Sea where we begin our naval voyage?

• 23:08Speaker 01

  Alexandria is beautifully sighted, of course, on the sea and on one of the branches of the Nile. So offload at Alexandria, go across the peninsula, reload on a river barge, go right down the river to Coptis, which is way down past the delta. And at Coptis, unload again onto a caravan. Now, you've got to get across the eastern desert.

• 23:33Tristan Hughes?

  And a caravan by then, let's just clarify, so this is like camels and horses and they're like camels, yeah.

• 23:38Speaker 01

  And horses, as I say, but we've got to go across a desert. It's about 200 kilometres of desert to get from the river at Coptis on the river to get to the Red Sea. And you can take a whole number of routes, we know they're all there. The direct one east-west goes to Iospormus, which is a Red Sea port. That's the shortest route, but it's not necessarily the best. You could take a longer route instead of going from the river direct east to hit the sea. You could go southeast and hit the sea much further down the Red Sea, as it were, Bereniki.

• 24:18Tristan Hughes?

  Bereniki, okay, yeah.

• 24:19Speaker 01

  That's the other port. Now, again, you've got robbers and highwaymen and all sorts of horrors to face. And what the Romans, by the time we're talking about the third century, the whole area, all the road networks were beautifully protected. Along the roads at certain intervals, a day's journey intervals, there were rest places, fortified rest places with water for the animals and the people and garrisons to protect them and so on. So it was safe to travel. And one of the advantages of going down to Bereniki was that you miss the really dodgy winds at the northern end of the Red Sea.

• 25:02Speaker 01

  So if you went across to Iospormus, you would be in a fairly rough area weather-wise. So you cut out the bad weather and the currents and so on and spend more time on the desert and you get to Bereniki. And then you get on a boat there and then sail south. Now, where you go then depends a lot on what you want to do. You might only want to go to the southern end of the Red Sea to trade with people there who are bringing stuff across the Indian Ocean. But you might want to go right out. And one of the places, favorite places to go to was Adulis.

• 25:39Tristan Hughes?

  Adulis, yes.

• 25:40Speaker 01

  Which is in Aksim.

• 25:42Tristan Hughes?

  Aksim, the kingdom of Aksim, yes, in Ethiopia.

• 25:44Speaker 01

  Adulis in, yeah. Adulis is actually in Eritrea.

• 25:49Tristan Hughes?

  Oh, my.

• 25:49Speaker 01

  But Adulis is one of the ports of the kingdom of Aksim, which is a very big kingdom that develops by the time we're talking about the third century. It's well underway, it develops in the third, fourth, fifth centuries. Sitting there on the side of the Red Sea by Eritrea, Ethiopia now. And to the north of it is Nubia, to the north of that is Egypt. So it's got direct routes through Nubia to Egypt. It's got direct routes right down to the east of Africa, where you get slaves, you get gold. You get rhino horns and all the rest of it. And it's got a direct route to the Sahel, to the west, at the zone south of the Sahara Desert.

• 26:34Speaker 01

  So Axum sits in a very preferred place for trade and to acquire commodities. So if you went to Adulis, you could pick up there commodities from all over the place, including India, because some of the ships from India. Offloaded there. So you might not want to go any further. You might be able to get everything you want there.

• 26:55Tristan Hughes?

  We want to go.

• 26:56Speaker 01

  We want to go further. We want to go further. Okay. So what you might do then is to sail to one of the ports on the Arabian side of the Red Sea. Down at the southern end of the Red Sea, where the Red Sea gets very narrow. There is a little narrow strait where you go from the Red Sea into a much wider Gulf of Aden.

• 27:18Tristan Hughes?

  Right. So this feels like we're approaching the first big, it's a kind of geographic choke point, as it were.

• 27:23Speaker 01

  It is exactly that, a choke point.

• 27:25Tristan Hughes?

  Because we've gone from the Nile across the desert to Berenike or Myas Hormuz, those two big rum ports. Down south through the Red Sea, past the biggest Axum trading port of Adulis. And now we've reached this choke point. Barry, take it away.

• 27:40Speaker 01

  If you visualize the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden at more or less right angles. Within that right angle is the coast of Arabia.

• 27:51Tristan Hughes?

  Yes.

• 27:52Speaker 01

  On the east side of the Red Sea, on the north side of the Gulf of Aden. And around that little corner, there are a whole range of ports. They're not in the Roman Empire at all. They are free ports run by their own kings and so on. And you've got Musa, Ocalis, then around the corner into the Gulf of Aden. You've got your Daimon, which is Aden now, and then Kana, which is further along the Arabian coast. And all those ports were used at this time, and they were absolutely thriving.

• 28:31Speaker 01

  One of the reasons they were thriving was overseas trade, obviously, but the other reason that they sit right in the middle of the area of incense.

• 28:39Tristan Hughes?

  Incense.

• 28:40Speaker 01

  So these ports for a thousand years being incense ports, providing incense for the Mediterranean world and India. So they are very well linked in, and they've attracted sailors from all over the place for at least a thousand years. And then described as really thriving with sailors rubbing shoulders, Indians rubbing shoulders with Arabs and so on. And from there, from that little cluster of ports, it's very, very important. You can sail up the Arabian coast to the Gulf of, to the Arabian Gulf and around to India.

• 29:19Speaker 01

  Or you can sail down the African coast, and they were doing this, so sailing down the African coast to as far south as Zanzibar.

• 29:26Tristan Hughes?

  Zanzibar.

• 29:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, and there were ports down the coast where they were picking up slaves, they were picking up ivory, rhino horn again, and turtle shells and so on. And we've also got these boats, Indians, coming across from India, bringing gear from India. So it really was the heart of the ancient world, the commercial heart of the ancient world.

• 29:50Tristan Hughes?

  I'd love to do an episode in the future about Roman trade with places like Zanzibar and Sub-Saharan Africa along the East African coast, but that's one for another day. So incense, Nabateans as well, so it's not just overland trade, you know, they're using the sea routes to get incense back to the Red Sea. But let's say we're in the Gulf of Aden, but actually rather than going up the Arabian coast, we've gone along the African coast of what is today Somalia, so we've gone down that way. And then we plan to go across the Indian Ocean to West India. What's this island that you meet first of all, which also seems really fascinating in the story?

• 30:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, if you imagine the Horn of Africa, which is the most eastern part of Africa sticking out, it's Somalia.

• 30:38Tristan Hughes?

  Yes.

• 30:39Speaker 01

  Off the Horn of Africa, somewhere about two hundred and fifty kilometres off the Horn of Africa, is this island of Sokotra.

• 30:47Tristan Hughes?

  Sokotra.

• 30:47Speaker 01

  It belongs to Yemen now, I think. It's absolutely perfectly sighted as a port of trade. Because people, sailors of all, in the past have always liked to use islands as ports of trade, where they can exchange goods. And Sokotra, we know, for example, that it was a base for Indian sailors. Because they were inscribing their names on on rock surfaces and so on. From all through the period that we're talking about, there were there Indians present there, trading. So you have not only the the ports on the Arabian coast, but the ports on Sokotra itself.

• 31:28Speaker 01

  And I I would guess that Sokotra was became more and more and more important. As the conditions on land became politically slightly unstable, Sokotra became more of a centre because it was safer. And and again, we are told that sailors were rubbing shoulders there the whole time. They and people were learning about each other there, learning each other's ways. And picking up information about where to go, where the best deals could be done and so on. So you you can just imagine what life in the ports would have been like there. So our Roman sailors perhaps have decided to stop at Sokotra. My guess is that those who wanted to go to India wouldn't have.

• 32:12Tristan Hughes?

  Oh, okay.

• 32:13Speaker 01

  They probably would have started at somewhere like Ochelis, which is where Pliny says those going to India start off from. So we're still on the Arabian coast, you take on your last water on the Arabian coast. No doubt, take on a load of incense and so on because you could. Flog that in Indian ports, along with whatever you're bringing from.

• 32:36Tristan Hughes?

  Your glass.

• 32:37Speaker 01

  The Mediterranean world. And from there, you could, but in the third century, the Romans wouldn't. Sail up the Arabian coast and across the Gulf of Oman and then down the Indian coast. They wouldn't do that because the Sassanians were now occupying. What is Persia, in fact, and they were controlling the Arabian Gulf. So it was a bit dangerous for a Roman to go up there. So what you could do is sail partway up the Arabian coast and then out to sea, across to India, using one of the routes of. That would be available during the monsoon winds and you would hit the coast of India, Barbaricum.

• 33:22Tristan Hughes?

  Barbaricum. So is this the first port that you would see?

• 33:24Speaker 01

  That that would be probably, yes, you could go direct to Barbaricum, you could go to another port, Asagara. Or you could go to a third port, Musiris, all the way down the coast. So the northernmost of the ports would be Barbaricum. That was a popular port to go to. But the sailing routes, you could take which one you wanted to go wherever you wanted. Because those were the three routes that were used time and time and time again. And those were the ones that were recommended by the Periples.

• 34:00Tristan Hughes?

  Barbaricum's an interesting name for a port, isn't it? So it sounds like that barbarian. So does that give a hint that, you know, there are all these foreigners here, I guess?

• 34:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, yes, I suppose so, because there were some Scythians had settled down in that area as well. It was a real mixing pot for people. We should say where it is. It's actually at the mouth of the Indus.

• 34:20Tristan Hughes?

  I was going to say, it feels like it'd be the Indus River Valley. So somewhere that actually Alexander the Great had been before, it's like Patala and that that area.

• 34:26Speaker 01

  That's right, that's right. It was a site that, yes, Alexander had gone when he'd gone through the whole of the Persian Empire. He ended up there and then he actually set up, set a couple of ships off from there to explore. The seaways. So it was a port, you know, an important port in at that time. Its importance is the link that it gives north through the Indus Valley. Commodities that were coming from the north was silk from the Silk Roads. Commodities like turquoise, azurite and rare stones like that. Coming down from Iran and Afghanistan.

• 35:09Speaker 01

  So you're getting commodities coming down from the north and also commodities coming from all over India. So it was a very good place to go for a trader. Then Lasagira, further south, was another good port, this was on the Indian coast again. Because it latched into a very productive area for all kinds of commodities like rice and wheat and things like that. It was very prolific. But also all kinds of oils and.

• 35:41Tristan Hughes?

  So rice, the Romans, the Romans imported rice from Barigaza or Bazar.

• 35:45Speaker 01

  Well, you could, it was one of the things listed as an export.

• 35:50Tristan Hughes?

  Interesting. I wouldn't have thought about the Romans and rice. I didn't know that rice would have made it back, but evidently, yeah.

• 35:55Speaker 01

  Well, it's what the the periples mentions. Rice is one of the commodities. So that was a, that gave you a different set of commodities. If you had a sort of shopping list, you'd choose your port and choose which of the monsoon winds to catch to get to your port. But the really exciting one, I think, is this one directly across from Achilles to Mazyris.

• 36:19Tristan Hughes?

  Mazyris, okay. So this is the furthest south of the three that we've talked about.

• 36:22Speaker 01

  That's right. And it's on the Malabar coast now. So it's where India is coming to a point, a southern point, it's quite close. It's the western side of India before you get to the tip of the Indian peninsula.

• 36:36Tristan Hughes?

  Kerala. Is it Kerala, Ray? Kerala?

• 36:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. We know quite a lot about Mazyris. I mean, it's the one that Pliny talks about. I should have said that the Periples written in the mid first century B C gives a lot of information. But Pliny, who writes natural histories, is about the seventies of the first century.

• 36:58Tristan Hughes?

  First century, yeah.

• 36:59Speaker 01

  He gives a huge amount more information. So so during that time, the whole Indian Ocean trade has opened up. And he's got access to vast amounts of information. Muziris, for example, we are told that there are areas where the foreigners live. So there are foreigners, it might be Romans, it might be Roman traders. You know, they could be Arab traders, but there's a foreigner's quarter there. There's even a temple to Augustus.

• 37:29Tristan Hughes?

  That's interesting.

• 37:30Speaker 01

  So it does suggest that they that the Romans were present in large numbers. Reading Pliny, it clearly is the favoured route. It's the route that they went to. Now, the beauty of Muziris is that down the west west coast of India is a sort of mountain range. Cuts the coast off from much of the rest of the peninsula. But at Muziris, there are routes through the mountain range. So that commodities landing at that port could go inland and across the peninsula. And that clearly is what happens. And commodities could come from the peninsula through the mountains to Muziris. It's almost certainly the place that is now called Patana.

• 38:15Speaker 01

  An excavation went on, well, has been going on there for some years. And it has produced evidence of maritime trade. It's produced Roman coins, Roman things, Arabian material. It's produced harbour works. There's a beautiful piece of excavation they did a few years ago. Showing the harbour side with brickwork all the way down it to protect protect it. And in the mud at the bottom, a boat six metres long was preserved. And in the mud of the harbour, they had the most amazing array of stuff. Seeds of just about everything I found suddenly.

• 38:54Speaker 01

  And rice and wheat and watermelon and grapes and all sorts of exotic things. So you can imagine all these commodities coming in and not just the hardware we talk about, you know, the glass and pottery and things like that, but all the foods that were being moved around as well. So there's some archaeological evidence for Moosiris as well. It's a wonderful opportunity to excavate a major building.

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• 40:42Speaker 02

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• 41:01Tristan Hughes?

  So do we very much get a sense from our Roman sources that Muziris was the furthest that Roman traders seemed to have gone if they were looking for precious commodities from India to bring back? You know, you mentioned that Temple of Augustus, which I think is also shown in an ancient map, which is really interesting, because they built a temple there to make the Romans feel at home. But does this feel like a natural end point for many Roman sailors, that they wouldn't go further than this usually, Roman traders?

• 41:31Speaker 01

  To start with, yes. The Periples, remember, first century BC, Pliny, first century AD, their information runs out there. They've got some hints of what's around the corner, as it were, in the Bay of Bengal. But that's, you know, it's hearsay, it's stuff picked up in the harbour like Muziris, for example. It's harbour talk. Their hard knowledge runs out there. But when we get to a little bit later, middle of the second century, about 140, we've got Ptolemy's geography. Now, Ptolemy was an Alexandrian who wrote this geography of the world.

• 42:10Tristan Hughes?

  Yeah, and to avoid confusion, this is a like, intellectual Ptolemy and not the Ptolemies we're mentioning earlier. This is a Ptolemy writing under the time of the Romans.

• 42:19Speaker 01

  That's right, Claudius, Claudius Ptolemy, yes. Just a plain old author, not a king. He gathers together all the information he can about the world. And now, he's got a lot more, well, not a lot more, but he's got more information. And what he does is talk about Sri Lanka, for example. He knows a lot about it. Pliny knows that it exists. Indeed, and there is a Greek, another Alexandrian, Greek called Herasthenes, in 200 BC, he knew about Sri Lanka. It's known that that island existed,

• 42:56Speaker 01

  but so little is said about it until Ptolemy. So by the second century, Sri Lanka is now part of the system. You're getting Romans going there. Oh, well, you're getting ships coming from the West, going to Sri Lanka. It's Kapurban, it's called. Pliny actually talks about a customs officer from the Red Sea. Somehow gets blown off course and he lands up on Sri Lanka. So this must be first century A D. He stays in the court of the king of Sri Lanka and tells him all about the wonders of the Roman world. And the king is so excited that he sends an ambassador to Rome, to the emperor.

• 43:41Speaker 01

  So you can see these links beginning to grow. And, and clearly, if, if, you know, anyone looking at the map would see how important Sri Lanka was to east-west trade. Again, we know from archaeology that there were two major ports there. There's one on the north side and that's the port called Mantai. It would be the port used by ships that were rounding southern end of India and beginning to go up the east coast of India. And Mantai would be, they'd go up this straight between the Indian mainland and Sri Lanka and Mantai would be a port there. So that was an important port for those going north. And then for those wanting to go across the Bay of Bengal,

• 44:26Speaker 01

  which is the next stage, there was a port called Godavaya on the southern end of the island. That was excavated. It has a whole range of material. It's got Roman coins, for example, are found there and pottery from Han China. So now we've got the Chinese or people carrying Chinese goods are at least going to Sri Lanka.

• 44:53Tristan Hughes?

  This is like a maritime east meets west kind of thing, isn't it?

• 44:56Speaker 01

  It's where the two come together.

• 44:57Tristan Hughes?

  This is like the Begram hoard as well on the mainland. This is the area. It's like an equivalent, isn't it? The central area where now, and also, quite frankly, I love the fact you mentioned that I had no idea that ambassadors from a Sri Lankan king went to the Roman world. That's also really cool. But going back to this, maybe we could even imagine maybe a Roman ship or an Indian ship with Roman goods reaching Sri Lanka, coming from the west. But in the same port, there are actually being Chinese ships that came from, you know, Southeast Asia.

• 45:25Speaker 01

  It's a distinct possibility, although at this stage the Han weren't terribly interested in navigating the sea worlds. So I think it's. On balance of evidence, it's more likely that these were Chinese goods brought across by ships, Malay ships or Indian ships bringing things back, I think. But we can't prove it.

• 45:47Tristan Hughes?

  But it's still, well, it's funny.

• 45:49Speaker 01

  It's still an open, it's still an open question.

• 45:51Tristan Hughes?

  Well, let's go on from there, Barry. You mentioned the next stage, which is crossing the Bay of Bengal. So how would we get from Sri Lanka to Southeast Asia to get across the Bay of Bengal?

• 46:05Speaker 01

  First of all, what, what do we know that the Romans knew? And again, we've got to rely on Ptolemy here. Ptolemy gets a bit vague from this point. He knows Sri Lanka very well. If you look at any map that is drawn up based on what Ptolemy, information Ptolemy gives, Sri Lanka is very large. India is small. Sri Lanka is very large. So it's important to him and India isn't terribly important. So it's the important place. Now, beyond that, what Ptolemy talks about is Golden Casaneth Chersonessos, which is almost certainly the Thai Malay Peninsula down to Sumatra and Java, that sort of area.

• 46:50Speaker 01

  Beyond that, the Great Gulf, which would be the Gulf of Thailand and the South China Sea. And beyond that, he talks about China and he uses two words for China and this I find absolutely fascinating. One is Sine, which is rather like China, you know, it's that sort of word.

• 47:10Tristan Hughes?

  Yeah, Sino, yeah, like Sino, yeah, okay, yeah.

• 47:12Speaker 01

  Then the other word he uses is Serica, which is silk. And he's using these two words and he possibly doesn't realise that the China that he is seeing from the sea is the same China that is producing the silk. He divides them into two, as it were. So he's got this sort of vague idea of China as being beyond the Great Gulf. So that's what a Roman of the second, third century would have in their mind, you know. Going back to your question, how did they get there? You could sail all the way up the east coast of India. To the Ganges and and and down. And and there's evidence of massive trade up and down the east coast.

• 47:57Speaker 01

  For example, there are pots, Roman pots are found on certain east coast ports. Roman pots of the first century B C, first century A D. And I should have said that huge numbers of Roman coins are found in India as well. So you could do that round the Bay of Bengal trip, as it were, or you could just go straight across. Ships did go straight across, so there's no reason why a Roman would need go all the way around the land. A Roman catching a lift on a local ship or talking to local sailors and saying, show me the way across.

• 48:30Tristan Hughes?

  So you think specialised Indian ships by this time, you know, the the, given how great seafarers they would have been. If there were Romans going that far, all of Roman goods, they wouldn't be in their Roman cargo vessels anymore. They probably would be on a specialised Indian ship.

• 48:42Speaker 01

  Almost certainly, the Indian ships were, they were specially built and they were very good for that kind of sea. They might well have changed ships at a number of ports, you know, they would, don't have to think of a Roman galley doing this journey right across. The probability is they changed ships at a number of ports. Then they would hit the Thai Malay Peninsula, just hit it in the middle. That is something of a barrier. Now, if you wanted to get across into the South China Sea, you could do it by going between the Thai Malay Peninsula and Sumatra and down the Straits of Malacca.

• 49:21Tristan Hughes?

  The Malacca Strait, oh, okay.

• 49:22Speaker 01

  And and then right round the end of the Malay Peninsula and into the sea. So you could do it direct by sea if you knew the route. And there's no reason why you shouldn't do it. But what the archaeology suggests is that one of the favoured routes was going across to where the peninsula was at its narrowest, at the Kra Peninsula, it's called Kra. It's only about seventy kilometres wide there. And you would offload your stuff on the west shore. And it would be taken by portage across to ports on east shore. And then you would load it up on another boat and take it through the South China Sea.

• 50:01Speaker 01

  And that's, we know from the archaeology of ports along that crucial little narrow bit, that there were large numbers of people, traders from the Arab world, from India, Roman goods coming in and Chinese goods coming in. So it was a real interface again between the South China Sea system and the Indian Ocean system. Some of the material from one of the ports on the east side of the peninsula suggests that Indian craftsmen were there at work because they were working metals in the same way that the Indians worked metals. So you probably got these very cosmopolitan ports with foreigners everywhere

• 50:46Speaker 01

  and all with their different skills, adding to the economy in some way and taking from the economy. But real ports of trade in the sense of the word that this is where everything happened. Are Roman traders then, if they were still attached to their goods and they hadn't broken all the glass, they would get off on the west side of the peninsula, across the peninsula, pick up another ship. Now that would presumably be a ship used to the Gulf of Thailand and the South China Sea. One of the first places that it would almost certainly stop at would be

• 51:26Speaker 01

  in what is now the Mekong Delta, which is Cambodia, Vietnam, that peninsula, Cambodia and Vietnam. And it was a place that the Chinese called Funan.

• 51:37Tristan Hughes?

  Funan.

• 51:38Speaker 01

  And a place which Ptolemy refers to as well as Catigara, Catigara. And those two places are almost certainly the same. Catigara is Funan.

• 51:51Tristan Hughes?

  So Ptolemy, is this like the furthest that he mentions? He mentions this area Funan or Catigara, as you say, which is like Cambodia and South Vietnam today. Yep.

• 52:02Speaker 01

  He will have heard of that, and I don't know where the name actually comes from, but his description fits and the measurements he gives fits. So here is a place known to the Romans, which is absolutely central in the South China Sea system, a settlement there called Ok Eo. Ok Eo is now in Vietnam, a very large settlement, and it's joined by canals to other settlements. So it's a real centre of activity, and there's Indian material there, there's Roman material there, there's Chinese material there. And again, it's one of these ports where all the ships met.

• 52:44Speaker 01

  And then from there, if you wanted to get to China, you would sail up the coast of Vietnam, Champa, it was called in that time, where there are a number of little states, or maritime states, and you would end more or less at Hanu, which is where the Red River comes down. And that was Gulf of Tokyo, and it's a very important Chinese port. It's now in Han China. It was, at the time we're talking about, was in Han China.

• 53:14Tristan Hughes?

  And we can presume as well, I mean, Phu Nang, which also seems to be this, you know, big trading place, that also had strong ties with Han China as well. As soon as we get into the Gulf of Thailand and further east, are we very much in, I dare say, like, client kingdom territory of the Han, where they're the dominant power and they have close connections with all these peoples?

• 53:32Speaker 01

  Yes, the Han Chinese were moving down the coast south, and they'd got to the Red River area by this stage, so they occupied that. And the Champa region were these little free states down the coast of Vietnam, but they were in different sorts of relationships with the Chinese. So they were almost ready to be taken over by the Chinese, they weren't, but they were almost. So we're getting closer and closer and closer to China, but then, but landing, if you landed in the, you know, the Red River, you would be in Chinese territory. And then it would just be a matter of going around to Panyu, which is the port in South

• 54:12Speaker 01

  China, the main port in South China, was founded by the, well, just before the Han Dynasty, in about 214, I think it was. That is Gan Zhou now, the big maritime port of Gan Zhou. That's where you'd stop. And if you were an ambassador with your torture shells and your boring old

• 54:33Tristan Hughes?

  And your broken glass from Alexandria that didn't didn't survive the journey.

• 54:37Speaker 01

  Then you would have to go by road up to wherever the emperor was.

• 54:40Tristan Hughes?

  So Ganju, so those are the final destination ports. They're the Chinese equivalent to somewhere like Mios Formos or Berenike, or I guess Alexandria in the west.

• 54:50Speaker 01

  They're the sort of the Alexandrius.

• 54:52Tristan Hughes?

  Yes, the Alexandria equivalents. So that is quite the journey, isn't it? And to be able to, you know, use it with the Chinese sources, with the archaeology and the Roman sources as well, to piece it together, this theoretical idea of how Roman goods could have got from the Roman Empire to Han China via these maritime routes to all of these cosmopolitan ports, you know, almost 2000 years ago. It's an amazing story to retell.

• 55:19Speaker 01

  It is, but what what it reflects is going back to this idea of how mobile humans are and how they have this acquisitive desire. Now, as an archaeologist, I keep coming back to this. It's a driving force, this acquisition. And humans, the most mobile of all animals, after all, this acquisitive desire, building networks very, very early on. And then what we can see archaeologically is how these networks come into existence and die down and new networks grow. But always there is movement and contact and trade and exchange. And I think this, the Rome-China story is probably the most exciting of them all.

• 56:04Tristan Hughes?

  This is a theoretical question and something from me who doesn't know anything about this. But if the Han Dynasty didn't collapse in the third century AD, do you think there would have been a growing interest from them of maritime trade going westwards? Do you think we would have had more literary evidence from the Han court? You know, or an equivalent of the Periples or something like that, detailing a bit more about, you know, Chinese ships going west and maybe reaching somewhere like Sri Lanka, interacting with Roman goods, you know, coming from further west and then us getting that perspective. Because we've used like Ptolemy and Pliny and the Periples in the chat. We've mentioned a few Chinese sources, but do you think

• 56:47Tristan Hughes?

  if the Han Dynasty hadn't collapsed, we'd have had more and then they would have more focus on that sea travel?

• 56:52Speaker 01

  China's always been interesting, I think, and still is. Because unlike the West, which is unconstrained geographically, China is very constrained geographically. If you think of the rivers of China being the heart of China, it's constrained by the mountains of Himalayas, it's constrained by the Gobi Desert in the north, it's constrained by the forests in the south. And it's just got a small seafront. And for a long period of time, China was never really interested in the sea. I think there's something about the geography that makes China, in terms of its routes, more interested in the land routes than the sea routes.

• 57:35Speaker 01

  And then it's not until you get to the Ming period, you know, 14th, 15th century now, when suddenly they get terribly excited by the sea and they get their admiral Zheng He to go right across to Africa. He goes up to Mecca, for example, with a great fleet of trading ships. Then suddenly, the Ming emperor says, "No, finish, don't worry." And it all packs up and Ming sort of pulls in on itself and closes itself and stays closed until the 20th century.

• 58:11Tristan Hughes?

  Barry, this has been absolutely fascinating. We've completed our voyage from the Roman Empire to these Chinese ports. But as you also said earlier, almost an extra step here, evidence of Roman goods has been found in Japan and the Korean peninsula as well. So I guess, could we go a step further and say, maybe they went on another ship and that, you know, Roman goods went via the sea, further north and then across to Japan?

• 58:36Speaker 01

  It's possible. My guess is the Korean material and the stuff in Japan actually went in through local systems. But I might be wrong. That's the beauty of archaeology.

• 58:48Tristan Hughes?

  Last but certainly not least, you have written a book which covers all of this, these incredible maritime trade routes from the time of Roman and Dynasty China and so much more. The book is called and it is about?

• 59:01Speaker 01

  It's called Driven by the Monsoons and it's literally about what I've called the underbelly of Eurasia, the sea that links the West to the East. And I start with the Upper Paleolithic, well, no, I start with the Paleolithic, with Homo sapiens moving out of Africa and we end with the formation of the British East India Company in 1600.

• 59:29Tristan Hughes?

  Wow, it's a beautiful book. The amount of detail you've been able to go into just for this episode, Barry, is brilliant. And I must say, lastly, I hope you don't mind me asking, Barry, you are now in your mid 80s, if I'm not mistaken.

• 59:41Speaker 01

  Nudging 86.

• 59:42Tristan Hughes?

  Nudging 86. And you are still so eloquent and such an amazing speaker and you are still hammering out books. You are a legend in the field and there's so much more still to come.

• 59:54Speaker 01

  I hope so. I've got another book in preparation and thinking about the next.

• 59:59Tristan Hughes?

  No, always such a pleasure. And it just goes to me to say thank you so much for taking the time to come back on the show today.

• 1:00:04Speaker 01

  It's a pleasure for me too. Thank you.

• 1:00:09Tristan Hughes?

  Well, there you go. There was the one and only Barry Conley reimagining a journey of Roman goods from the Red Sea in Egypt, all the way via the Indian Ocean and places like Sri Lanka, the Malacca Straits and so on, all the way to the ports of Han China some 2000 years ago. I hope you enjoyed the episode. Now, if you'd like to hear more from Barry, a bit of an insight into his incredible life story, well, we did record an extra bonus episode with him where we shined the spotlight on Barry on his career. We released it a few weeks ago to our ancient subscribers. So if you'd like to hear about

• 1:00:52Tristan Hughes?

  Barry and his story, well, if you sign up, you can listen to that special bonus episode. Thank you for listening to this episode of The Ancients. Don't forget, you can also sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries with a new release every week. Sign up at historyhit.com/subscribe.

• 1:01:13Tristan Hughes?

  That is all from me. I'll see you in the next episode.

• 1:01:19Tristan Hughes?

  [Music]