A Vienna Papyrus Totals One Ship's Cargo From Muziris on the Kerala Coast at 1,154 Talents of Silver, and Excavations at Pattanam Since 2007 Have Recovered Roman Pottery From a Site Proposed as the Port

A papyrus in the Austrian National Library in Vienna lists the cargo of a ship called the Hermapollon, loaded in southern India around the middle of the second century CE, and totals its six parcels at 1,154 talents and 2,852 drachmas of silver. The classicist Lionel Casson, who republished the text in 1990, called the document unique among those surviving from Roman Egypt, because both sides of the sheet concern a shipment from India, and the loan on one side is tied to a port on the Kerala coast named Muziris.

Nobody has yet shown for certain where that port stood. The best-studied candidate is Pattanam, a village about 25 kilometres north of Kochi, where the Kerala Council for Historical Research has dug since 2007. The other is Kodungallur, which lies roughly 8 kilometres away.

What the Vienna papyrus records

The recto is part of an agreement about moving goods from a Red Sea landing to Alexandria. Casson reads it as a contract made at the Red Sea port after the goods arrived from India. The party taking charge of the cargo promises to haul it overland to Koptos, a town on the Nile, and then downriver to a warehouse in Alexandria that collected the tetarte, a duty of one quarter. In Casson’s translation, one clause lets the creditor take the goods if a loan under “the loan agreements at Muziris” is not repaid on schedule. In another, the carrier agrees to weigh out 20 talents of goods for the lender’s cameleer, a load Casson judged to need three or four camels.

The verso carries the valuation. The surviving lines itemise three of the six parcels: 60 containers of nard from the Ganges, which the papyrus prices at 4,500 drachmas per container; elephant ivory; and 54 lengths of fabric. The closing line then totals all six parcels at 1,154 talents and 2,852 drachmas. The sums show that a talent of money was 6,000 drachmas, since 60 containers at 4,500 come to exactly 45 talents.

The other three parcels are lost, and scholars disagree about what filled them. Casson’s translation covers only the three that survive. Federico De Romanis argues that pepper and malabathrum, a spice leaf the Periplus lists beside pepper, made up most of the value, and that the surviving ivory was 167 tusks weighing 3,228.5 kilograms. A review of his book in the Bryn Mawr Classical Review reports his estimate of a ship of about 635 tonnes carrying about 552 tonnes of pepper. These are reconstructions of missing text.

The port as the Periplus and Pliny drew it

The Periplus of the Erythraean Sea, a first-century CE sailing guide by an unnamed merchant, names Muziris and Nelcynda as the leading markets of the Malabar coast, the land the author calls Limyrike (Damirica in Schoff’s 1912 translation). Muziris, it says, lay in the kingdom of Cerobothra, on a river, 500 stadia from Tyndis and 20 stadia up the river from the shore. A stadium is a Greek unit of distance. It describes the town as full of ships sent from Arabia and by Greeks. Nelcynda, in the Pandyan kingdom, was about 500 stadia from Muziris.

The guide lists what went in and what came out. Muziris and Nelcynda took coin, wine, copper, tin, lead, coral, glass and cloth. They sent out pepper, which the Periplus says came in quantity from one district near the markets, Cottonara, along with pearls, ivory, silk cloth, Ganges nard, malabathrum, diamonds, sapphires and tortoise-shell. It adds that the bulk of the pepper and malabathrum explained why large ships were sent, and that the Egyptian departure season fell around July.

Pliny the Elder, writing around 77 CE, timed the passage at forty days from the Arabian port of Ocelis to “the nearest mart of India, Muziris by name,” if the wind he calls Hippalus was blowing. His verdict on the port itself was cooler than the Periplus. He says pirates worked the coast nearby, that ships anchored far from the shore and loaded from boats, and that Barace, in the land of the Neacyndi, where a king Pandion reigned, was a better harbour. Pepper came down to Barace from Cottonara, he writes, in boats hollowed from a single tree. The wind that carried the ships is the subject of the science of the monsoon.

The Peutinger Table, a surviving Roman road map, also carries the name. Kiel University’s database of its place names reads the label as Cranganur, the old European name for Kodungallur, and lists Muziris in Ptolemy and in Pliny’s phrase for the first trading post of India.

The Tamil poems call it Muciri

The Sangam poets, who wrote in Tamil, knew the port as Muciri. According to Sahapedia, Nakkirar’s poem Purananuru 343 shows boats carrying fish and pepper there, and Akananuru 149 describes ships of the Yavanas, the Greeks and Romans, arriving. The Roman end of the pepper trade, and what came after it, is in Europe’s search for Indian spices. The poems themselves are covered in the Sangam literature article.

What Pattanam has yielded since 2007

Pattanam is a mound of about 111 hectares in the Periyar delta, now about 4 km from the sea, according to Sahapedia, and the Antiquity paper places it about 5 km south-east of the river mouth. A small dig in 2004 preceded systematic excavation by the Kerala Council for Historical Research from 2007. The Guardian and Outlook India count nine seasons to 2015, while Sahapedia counts eight.

The fifth-season report, written by the project director P. J. Cherian, shows the scale. Between February and May 2011 the team opened ten trenches covering about 250 square metres, and the antiquity register for that season alone has 4,697 entries. The finds include 5,758 glass beads, 2,779 sherds of Mediterranean amphorae, the clay jars that carried wine and other foodstuffs, and 1,986 sherds of West Asian torpedo jars. Across five seasons the team recovered 122 sherds of Italian terra sigillata, a glossy red tableware. The report calls this the largest quantity yet found at an Indian port site, set against 88 at Arikamedu on the Tamil Nadu coast.

Roberta Tomber of the British Museum, who studied the amphorae, wrote that they “reinforce the picture previously obtained, of a peak of Roman contact during the later first century BCE and first century CE.” Her dating matches the Periplus and Pliny. The same report records that of 22 copper coins, nine were early Chera coins stamped with an elephant and a bow and arrow, and it remarks on a “striking absence” of Roman coins. Earlier seasons turned up a wharf structure and a dug-out canoe about 2,000 years old. The report also records raw stone, chips and rough-outs that point to bead workshops, with beryl and carnelian the commonest stones.

Pattanam or Kodungallur

The identification is argued from both sides. The four authors of the Antiquity paper, Cherian among them, write that the evidence makes a strong case for equating Pattanam with Muziris, and say further excavation will test it. They also note that the imports found are a smaller range than at Red Sea ports such as Myos Hormos and Berenike, or at Arikamedu. Cherian’s own 2011 report says the dig found no building remains to match the quantity of finds.

The Kodungallur view has older roots. Historians had long assumed that Muziris was Kodungallur, and the Guardian reported in 2016 that excavations there had found nothing older than the thirteenth century. Sahapedia gives the same account of limited digging at Kodungallur and adds that some scholars still favour it. The Guardian reports that Rajan Gurukkal, who also thinks Pattanam is Muziris, sees it as a colony of Mediterranean merchants and local traders, possibly seasonal, because the site lacks permanent structures. Cherian, it says, sees an organised, planned settlement, a city of its time. Outlook India’s February 2025 timeline reports that the Archaeological Survey of India suspended the council’s excavation licence in 2015 and that officials have since declined to share information with the media.

The 1341 flood and the port’s end

The Guardian notes that Muziris was generally assumed to be Kodungallur, a port disabled by floods in 1341. Cherian told Onmanorama in 2018 there are no proofs the port disappeared in the flood. He said the Periyar had changed course over the millennia and that river-mouth ports seldom last more than five centuries without dredging. Onmanorama also cites a study covering 3,000 years, which it does not name, that reports soil layers with no sign of a flood.

The heritage zone today

Kerala Tourism describes the Muziris Heritage Project as a state and central programme to conserve a culture 3,000 years old or more, in a region between North Paravur in Ernakulam district and Kodungallur in Thrissur district. A June 2023 Onmanorama report counted 18 completed projects awaiting inauguration in July and August, among them the Cheraman Juma Masjid, a Pattanam information centre and the Kodungallur Temple Museum.