by Marcus Minucius Audens » Fri Sep 23, 2016 4:30 pm
“The beautiful vessels, the masterpieces of the Yavanas, stir white foam on the Periyar River . . . arriving with gold and departing with pepper.”
So wrote an Indian poet sometime in the second century A. D. On the river stood Muziris, the port on the southwestern coast of India that was the major exporter of the region’s cash crop, pepper. The “Yavanas” were strictly speaking, men from any part of the West, but in a context such as this it meant the Westerners who, sailing out of the Red Sea ports of Roman Egypt, carried on a trade with India. Their ships lined the quays of Muziris and other Indian ports, and their sailors haunted the waterfront dives. In the residential districts behind, their agents established little foreign colonies, anticipating by a millennium and a half the employees of the British East India Company.
Many an official embassy made its way from the East to the West India sent several during the reign of Augustus, one from Ceylon visited the Emperor Claudius, and they kept coming as late as the reign of Constantine the Great. Chinese records contain long and flattering accounts of how people lived in Rome’s eastern provinces based in part on the report of an ambassador who had gotten as far as Mesopotamia in A. D. 97.
(It has the surprising observation that the people, “ . . .are honest in their transactions and there are no double prices,” something not often said about the Near Eastern tradesmen.)
One group of Westerners made their way almost to the borders of China, for the same account notes that in,
“ . . .the ninth year of the Yen-hsi period during the emperor Huan-ti’s reign [A.D. 166] . . .the king of Ta-ts’in An-tun, sent an embassy who, from the frontier of Jih-nan [Annam] offered ivory, rhinoceros's horns, and tortoise shell. From that time dates the [direct] intercourse with this country.”
Ta-ts’in is the Chinese name for the Roman Empire, and An-tun is Antonius the family name of Marcus Aurelius. The account goes on to comment on the very ordinary quality of what was offered; tere were for example, no jewels. Most likely it wasn’t an official Body at all but a group of traders who, to get one jump ahead of their competitors, were trying to buy their silk directly from China instead of going through the usual middlemen.
Reference:
>> Lionel Casson, “Travel In the Ancient World” (Johns Hoplins Univ. Press, Baltimore and London, 1974)
Respectfully Submitted;
Marcus Audens