In 1088 the Tamil Merchant Guild Called the Five Hundred of the Thousand Directions Cut a Fee Order for Ships at Barus, Sumatra, in Stone

The stone from Lobu Tua, a site beside the port town of Barus on the west coast of Sumatra, gives its date as the Saka year 1010, which Noboru Karashima and Y. Subbarayalu convert to 1088 CE. It is written in Tamil and it is a notice from a body of merchants. The Five Hundred of the Thousand Directions met at Barus, decided that ship captains and crews would pay a fee in gold before they could trade, and had the order cut in stone. In a 2011 chapter the archaeologist E. Edwards McKinnon wrote that the earliest evidence for medieval Tamil involvement in northern Sumatra currently comes from this site.

What the order says

Karashima and Subbarayalu published an edition and translation in 2009, based on Subbarayalu’s 1998 reading, and they bracket the doubtful words. Their translation opens with the date, the Saka year 1010 and the Tamil month of Masi. The guild, “we, the Five Hundred,” met at a place called Velapuram in Varosu, which is Barus. The town carries a second, longer Tamil name that the translators gloss as a trading town for the welfare of merchants blessed by Matankari, that is, Durga.

The rule itself is short. For each ship, the captain and crew pay a fee in gold, pegged to the price of kasturi, which is musk. Only then may they “step on the cloth spread,” in the translators’ gloss a way of saying that they may enter the settlement to trade. The guild calls itself known “in every direction in all the Eighteen Lands.” It says it had the stone inscribed and planted, and it closes with a line of advice: “Do not forget charity; charity alone will help you.”

The text is not complete. K. A. Nilakanta Sastri, whose 1932 paper discussed the stone in detail, calls it a fragment in his later book, and the translation carries a bracket and a question mark where the reading is uncertain. E. Hultzsch had given a preliminary notice in the Madras epigraphy report for 1891 to 1892, and Karashima and Subbarayalu say the stone is now in the National Museum in Jakarta.

Who the Five Hundred were

In The Colas (1955), Sastri calls this guild the most celebrated of the South Indian merchant guilds he surveys. Its long Tamil name can be read two ways, as the Five Hundred of the thousand directions in all countries or as fifteen hundred from all countries and directions. He prefers the first because the guild is also called simply the nanadesis or the ainnurruvar, the Five Hundred.

He found the guild’s record older than the great Chola emperors. Two short inscriptions from Munisandai in the Pudukkottai region, which he dates to about the time of Vijayalaya and Parantaka I, show a tank named after the guild and endowments to keep it repaired. About 1015 the village assembly of Nigarili-Sola-chaturvedimangalam assigned houses to its members, for use as residences or warehouses. In 1033 a gift of land for a service in a Shiva temple at Ambasamudram was made for the guild’s benefit.

Inscriptions from the Mysore region, Sastri writes, describe what its members traded: elephants, horses, precious stones, spices, perfumes and drugs, carried on asses and buffaloes and by land and water routes. In his reading of an inscription of the Chola king Rajadhiraja I, about 1050, regiments of foot-soldiers and swordsmen served the guild. Of the Sumatran stone he wrote that it is “clear proof of the active share of the guild in the extensive over-seas trade of the time.” Axelle Rougeulle, reviewing the excavation volumes, describes the Five Hundred as an association of Tamil merchants known in the region since the ninth century.

A Tamil stone of about the ninth century from the Takua Pa river in southern Thailand shows trading bodies at work there earlier. Karashima and Subbarayalu date it by letter forms and read it as the record of a man who dug a tank called Sri Avani Naranam and put it under the protection of bodies that include the Manikkiramam and the Senamukam, which they take to be merchant groups.

Why Barus

Barus appears in Arabic as Fansur, and McKinnon notes that Arab and Persian traders of the ninth century knew it as a source of camphor and benzoin, resins from the forested hills behind the coast. The profits drew many kinds of trader, McKinnon writes, citing the excavation director Claude Guillot, and they included Tamils and Javanese as well as others.

A joint French and Indonesian programme under Guillot dug at Lobu Tua from 1995 to 2000. Rougeulle describes a fortified rectangular enclosure on a cliff about a kilometre from the sea, east of the modern town, with about 2.5 hectares preserved. Treasure hunters and farmers had churned up the thin deposit, which reaches only 60 centimetres, so the dig found no layers to read in sequence. The Chinese ceramics still date the occupation from the middle of the ninth century to about 1100, Rougeulle writes. Perret and Surachman give the middle of the ninth century to the end of the eleventh. A stone dated 1088 therefore comes from the last decades of the town.

The finds came from three directions. Rougeulle reports a large share of Indian pottery, mostly plain jars, pots and cooking vessels with parallels in southern India and Sri Lanka, which the excavators read as supplies for an Indian community in the town and not as trade goods. There were Chinese stoneware and porcelain from southern kilns, and wares and glass from the Persian Gulf.

From the texts and the finds, the Guillot team drew a picture that Rougeulle summarises. Barus was founded around 850, they suggest, to be near the camphor forests and to escape Chinese middlemen and the control of Srivijaya. They describe it as a small independent trading republic run by a merchant oligarchy, mostly of Indian origin. A late royal chronicle of the Batak people credits southern Indians with founding Lobu Tua. The team found little sign of direct dealings with either Srivijaya or China. They suggest that an attack from the Aceh region may have destroyed the town around 1100, and a new town grew up about 5 kilometres east at Bukit Hasang. In Rougeulle’s account the Tamil stone also confirms that the Barus of the old sources is the area of the present town, at least by the late eleventh century.

Sixty years after the fleet

The stone was cut roughly six decades after the Chola fleet raided Srivijaya’s ports. Hermann Kulke dates Rajendra I’s expedition to about 1025, and Karashima and Subbarayalu to some time in 1026, since the earliest stone inscriptions mention it in his fourteenth year. Tuput’s piece on Rajendra Chola and the king of Kadaram covers the raid, the Leiden copper plates and the reasons scholars give for it.

Sastri took the Barus stone as another proof of friendly relations between the two kingdoms. He saw “little evidence of the political power of the Colas having extended to the islands of the Malay archipelago in this period,” and he concluded that trade and cultural contacts from an earlier age stayed active under Kulottunga I, who ruled when the stone was cut. The traffic ran in both directions. Three stones in the Karonasvamin temple at Nagapattinam, dated by their editors to about 1014, 1015 and 1019, record gifts from an agent of the king of Srivijaya, including jewels and Chinese gold, and around 1090 envoys from the king of Kadaram petitioned Kulottunga for the charter on the smaller Leiden plates. The earlier grant of a village to the Sumatran king’s monastery is told in the piece on the Anaimangalam copper plates.

Tamil stones from Thailand to China

Karashima and Subbarayalu list six Tamil inscriptions from Southeast Asia and China, and Barus is one of them. The earliest is a small goldsmith’s touchstone from Wat Khlong Thom in Thailand, which reads “the stone of the great Patan,” meaning a goldsmith, and which they date by letter forms to the third or fourth century. A thirteenth-century Tamil inscription from Pagan in Myanmar records a merchant from Kerala who built the front hall of a Vishnu temple there and gave it a lamp. The temple is called Nanadesi Vinnagar, a name that contains the word nanadesi, one of the names Sastri lists for the guild.

At Quanzhou in China, a stone found in 1956 in a private house is dated Saka 1203, about 1281. It records that a man named Sambandaperumal, acting under the written permission of the Mongol ruler, installed the god Shiva for the ruler’s welfare. Sastri notes Hindu sculptures of South Indian origin from a Chinese temple in the port, scenes such as Gajendra-moksha, which he places in the twelfth or thirteenth century. In 1990 a worn thirteenth-century Tamil stone was found in a mosque at Neusu Aceh, a suburb of Banda Aceh. The readable lines mention gold testers and a rubbing stone, and the translators suggest that a term on it is the usual name for a merchant guild’s agents.

Tuput has covered another guild that put its trade into stone, the silk weavers of Mandsaur. India’s present stone-restoration work in Indonesia is in the piece on the Prambanan project.

What is still open

The reading of the Barus stone depends on a broken text, and the translators themselves mark the uncertain words. The idea that one guild ran a chain of ports is a hypothesis. McKinnon proposed that Kota Cina, on Sumatra’s east coast and occupied from the end of the eleventh century to the first half of the fourteenth, belonged to a network from the Red Sea to Quanzhou controlled by a Tamil trade guild. Perret and his colleagues, in the 2011 to 2016 excavation report, record that Miksic favoured a settlement with a mostly local population, and they call any discussion of its place in the economic history of the Straits speculative until more contemporary sites are dug.

McKinnon also speculates about a lost Buddha image reported from Lobu Tua about a century before his chapter. It disappeared on its way to the museum in Batavia, no description survives, and he suggests it was a provincial Chola-style figure set up by Tamil traders. Subbarayalu’s 1998 reading, which opens the first volume of Guillot’s Histoire de Barus, is the basis of the 2009 edition by Karashima and Subbarayalu.