The Periplus of the Erythraean Sea, a Greek Merchant's Guide of the Mid-First Century CE, Gives Sections 38 to 64 to the Indian Coast and Names the Ports, Cargoes, Rulers and Sailing Distances From the Indus Delta to the Ganges

The Periplus of the Erythraean Sea is a Greek merchant’s handbook from about the middle of the first century CE, and its sections 38 to 64, 27 of the 66, follow the Indian coast from the mouth of the Indus to the Ganges. For each market the author gives a sailing direction or a distance, the ruler where he knows one, the goods that load and the goods that sell. The Erythraean Sea of the title takes in the Red Sea and the waters beyond it as far as India.

Two Indian ports and one Deccan pass already have their own pieces on tuput: Muziris, Arikamedu and Naneghat. This article reads the text itself, from the first sentence about India to the last, and leaves those three where they are.

The author, the manuscript and the translations

The author gives no name. Lance Jenott’s introduction to the digitised text describes him as a Greek-speaking Egyptian merchant and says the work is generally held to rest on his own travels to nearly all the lands he describes. He dates his sailing months in two calendars, Greek and Egyptian: ships bound for Barygaza leave Egypt “about the month of July, that is Epiphi,” in Schoff’s rendering of section 49. The Athens Periplus project calls the language undemanding everyday Greek.

One tenth-century manuscript, now in Heidelberg, is the base of the text, and the University of Athens page says a 14th or 15th century London copy descends from it and was first printed in 1533. The Heidelberg codex gives the work to Arrian, the historian who governed Cappadocia around 131 CE. Schoff, in 1912, called that a manifest mistake. In that manuscript the Periplus follows Arrian’s report of a voyage round the Black Sea, and Schoff took the name to have followed the position.

Three English translations matter here. McCrindle’s dates from 1879, Schoff’s from 1912 (the text on the Fordham University site), and Lionel Casson’s from 1989 (Princeton), which prints the Greek with a commentary. This article reads Schoff and McCrindle in full and takes Casson only where the digitised edition and an online Periplus gazetteer print his wording. The versions differ in places. McCrindle renders the leaf that comes in from the east as betel. Schoff has malabathrum and explains in a note that it was the leaf of a cinnamon or laurel tree, with Cinnamomum tamala from the Himalaya as the principal source. Casson’s spelling of the southern coast is Limyrike, where Schoff has Damirica and McCrindle Limuriké.

How the guide is dated

Nothing in the text carries a date, so scholars work from the rulers it names. Schoff laid out the clues in his introduction. Section 19 mentions Malichas, king of the Nabataeans, whose reign Schoff, citing Melchior de Vogüé, puts at about 40 to 70 CE. Schoff also notes that the text does not call Malichas a friend of the Emperor, as it does the Himyarite king Charibael in section 23, and reads that as a sign the book predates the Nabataean help to Titus in the siege of Jerusalem in 70 CE. He added the discovery of the open-sea route by Hippalus, which he took, following the commentator Vincent, to date from about 47 CE, the silence of the text on the burning of Rome in 64 CE, and the political picture of western India, and settled on about 60 CE. The Athens page gives his range as 59 to 62 CE.

Casson in 1989 gave 40 to 70 CE, and John Hill in 2009 gave 40 to 50 CE, according to the same Athens page, which adds that estimates have ranged from the first to the third century CE with the mid-first century now the most widely accepted. An older group of commentators, which Schoff lists in an appendix, put the book in the 70s or 80s CE by identifying the Axumite king Zoscales of section 5 with a king in the Ethiopian chronicles whose dates Henry Salt gave as 76 to 89 CE. Schoff thought the name match probable but not the dates, because the chronicles were written down centuries after the events. Another pull toward the 80s came from the Andhra ruler Sandares of section 52, whom some matched with a king whose reign Vincent Smith placed at 83 to 84 CE. Schoff argued the text describes a time before that.

Barygaza, the best described port in the book

Ten sections, 40 to 49, are given to the approach and the market of Barygaza, which Schoff identifies as modern Broach, the Gujarat city now called Bharuch, and whose Greek name he derives from the Prakrit Bharukachha. The author begins with the dangers. The Gulf of Baraca, short of the Gulf of Barygaza, wrecks ships that are drawn in. Sea snakes serve as signposts, black and large at Baraca, smaller and green running into gold around Barygaza.

At the mouth of the river, which the text calls the Nammadus and Schoff’s notes identify as the Narmada (Narbada), the sea runs over shoals and the entrance is hard to find because the shore is low. The text says native fishermen in the king’s service, stationed in large boats called tappaga and cotymba, go out as far as Syrastrene, which Schoff glosses as Kathiawar, and pilot visiting vessels in. They tow them to fixed stations on the flood tide and anchor through the ebb. The port lies about 300 stadia up the river. At the rate of ten stadia to the mile that the digitised edition gives, that is roughly 48 km.

The tide gets a whole section. The author says it rises and falls more violently at Barygaza than elsewhere in India, that the bottom shows suddenly and ships can be left on their sides, and that on the night flood at the new moon, if you enter while the water is still, the sea comes in with “a noise like the cries of an army heard from afar.” Britannica explains the geography behind it: the Gulf of Khambhat is trumpet-shaped, narrowing from about 190 km at its mouth to about 24 km, and has a tidal range of about 12 metres with fast incoming tides. Britannica calls Bharuch one of the oldest Indian ports.

The market itself is the longest list in the Indian sections. The text says Barygaza took in wine (Italian preferred), copper, tin and lead, coral, topaz, storax, glass, realgar and antimony, and gold and silver coin on which there was a profit when exchanged for local money. It sent out spikenard, costus, bdellium, ivory, agate and carnelian, lycium, cotton cloth of all kinds, silk cloth, mallow cloth, yarn and long pepper. Section 48 says the city of Ozene, which Schoff identifies as Ujjain, supplied agate, carnelian, muslins and ordinary cloth for the Barygaza trade. Section 47 adds that old drachmae with Greek lettering and the names of Apollodorus and Menander, rulers who reigned after Alexander, were still current at Barygaza.

The ruler and the road into the Deccan

The author names few Indian kings, and most of the names are hard to pin down. Section 41 calls the coast of Ariaca “the beginning of the Kingdom of Nambanus and of all India.” Schoff reported the view that Nambanus was the Saka satrap Nahapana, and added that the match still had to be shown. He read the “elder Saraganus” and Sandares of section 52 as kings of the Satavahana (Andhra) line, and he read the “very warlike” Bactrians of section 47 as the Kushans, whose conquest of the Indus and Ganges valleys he placed after the text was written. The Kushan story is told in Kanishka and the Kushan empire. The text itself says only that Minnagara, the Indus-side capital, was ruled by Parthian princes who kept driving each other out.

South of Barygaza the coast is called Dachinabades, which Schoff derives from the Sanskrit dakshinapatha, the road to the south. Section 51 names two inland markets, Paethana, 20 days south of Barygaza, and Tagara, a further ten days east. From Paethana came carnelian in great quantity and from Tagara common cloth and muslins, carried by wagon over country with no roads. Schoff’s notes identify Paethana as Paithan on the Godavari, and Tagara as Ter, following the archaeologist J. F. Fleet’s paper of 1901. He reckons the roads at about 240 miles from Broach to Paithan and 104 from Paithan to Ter, which fits days of about 12 miles. The coast towns after Barygaza, Suppara and Calliena, and the obstruction of Calliena under Sandares, are covered in the Naneghat article.

What each market sends out

The sections can be set side by side. This list gives the exports as the text states them, in Schoff’s translation.

McCrindle’s index reads the Seric skins of Barbaricum as Chinese hides or furs. Cloth recurs down the column, from cotton at the Indus to muslin at the Ganges. Section 56 says large ships were sent to Muziris and Nelcynda because of the quantity and bulk of the pepper and malabathrum, and that the pepper came from one district, Cottonara. The Muziris article takes up that stretch and the Pattanam digs.

The south and the east coast

Beyond Nelcynda the text lists Bacare at the river mouth, Balita, and Comari, with its cape and harbour. At Comari, it says, men and women come to bathe and live in celibacy for the rest of their lives, “for it is told that a goddess once dwelt here and bathed.” That is the author reporting what local people told him, and the digitised edition glosses the cape as Cape Comorin. Colchi, which Schoff gives as modern Kolkai, was a Pandian pearl fishery worked, the text says, by condemned criminals. Inland was Argaru, where the pearls of the coast were bought and the Argaritic muslins were made.

Section 60 names Camara, Poduca and Sopatma as the chief ports of the east coast and describes two kinds of Indian vessel. The sangara were very large boats of logs bound together, and the colandia, also very large, sailed to Chryse and the Ganges. Schoff called the identification of all three ports conjectural; the Arikamedu article covers the case for Poduke, the spelling in Casson’s translation as quoted by that gazetteer.

The last sections change voice. For the Ganges the author writes that gold mines are “said” to lie nearby, and he describes Thinae, the inland city from which silk came, as a place few men reach. The silk, he says, went by land through Bactria to Barygaza and down the Ganges to the southern coast. Section 65 describes the Besatae, a people who gather each year on the border of the land of This with packs of leaf, from which, the text says, the natives make malabathrum balls of three sizes.

Indian ships and Indian cargoes abroad

The text shows Indian merchants as sellers abroad, which the port lists alone would hide. Section 6 records Indian iron, steel and cotton cloth reaching the African markets around Adulis from Ariaca, which Schoff glosses as Cutch, Kathiawar and Gujarat. Section 14 says ships were fitted out at Ariaca and Barygaza for the “far-side” market-towns of the African coast, carrying wheat, rice, clarified butter, sesame oil, cotton cloth and cane honey. Section 30 puts Indians among the settlers on the island of Dioscorida, which Schoff identifies as Socotra, alongside Arabs and Greeks, and section 31 says ships from Damirica and Barygaza brought rice, wheat and Indian cloth there. Section 36 says large vessels were sent regularly from Barygaza to the Persian market-towns of Apologos and Ommana, loaded with copper, sandalwood and logs of teak, blackwood and ebony.

The wind, Pliny’s total and what the ground shows

Section 57 tells how the direct passage was found. Ships once crept around the coasts. Hippalus, a pilot, worked out the course across the open sea by watching the ports and the sea conditions. The wind that blows from the ocean onto India when the Etesian winds blow in the Mediterranean is the south-west wind, which is called Hippalus after him. Ships for Damirica steered well off the wind, and ships for Barygaza and Scythia hugged the shore for about three days and then stood straight out. The monsoon article describes the wind itself.

Pliny the Elder, whose Natural History Schoff says was dedicated in 77 CE, uses Hippalus in this passage only as the name of a westerly wind. He gives a figure the Periplus never attempts. In the Bostock and Riley translation he says India drained the Roman Empire of no less than 550 million sesterces a year and sold its goods at a hundred times their cost. The Periplus gives no totals, only the lists.

The ground has confirmed part of the lists. The Bryn Mawr Classical Review’s notice of René Cappers’s study of the plant remains from Berenike, the Red Sea port the Periplus names in section 1, reports more than 3,000 black peppercorns and a large jar holding 7.5 kg of them. It lists rice, coconut, mung bean, emblic and Job’s tears among the Indian foods found, and says mung bean and emblic occur only in first or second century contexts.