180. Gold & God: Connecting India & Ancient Rome

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0:28In March 2022, a team of archaeologists were excavating a newly discovered temple of the Egyptian goddess Isis at Berenike on the shores of the Red Sea when they unearthed a series of remarkable finds. Berenike is today a bleak and desolate spot. Here, under pale blue skies, the flat, treeless, red-dust waddies of the eastern desert give way to the windy shores of the Red Sea. There is little to see, and though the site contains the foundations of some once impressive structures, a couple of temples, a Roman aromatics distillery and a fine bathhouse, the broken walls today rarely rise far above the level of the encroaching sand dunes.

1:24Nevertheless, these unprepossessing ruins, easily missed as you drive up the Red Sea coast, were the landing point for generations of Indian merchants travelling to the Roman Empire and were once a place where unimaginable fortunes could be made. The finds which emerged from the storeroom of the Isis Temple included the head and torso of a magnificent Buddha, the first ever found to the west of Afghanistan. A reading from our special guest today, his book, The Golden Road. It is William Dalrymport, And we continue in this series talking about what has been dubbed the Indosphere, which is the reach and the influence of ancient India in the rest of the world in some rather surprising ways.

2:15And in the last episode, we talked about Angkor Wat, Cambodia, Vietnam, Thailand, Laos, and the way in which these sort of monsoon tides take ships out from India, laden, yes, with goods for trade, but also with a culture that then spreads remarkably far and wide in Asia. But now we're going to look at when that Indosphere crosses over with the Roman Empire. Because, I mean, William Dower and Paul, we talk about the Roman Empire a lot, an awful lot, because it's so interesting. We do, Eddie Tannen. It's so interesting, William Dower and Paul. It is a very interesting subject. It dominated Europe, parts of Asia, North Africa, again, from an enormous period of time.

3:01It is always deemed to be the peak of, well, I wouldn't even say Western society and culture, just culture is how people talk about the Roman Empire. In the West, yeah. Yeah. So just tell us about what you have found and what drew you in to that overlap between the two. Well, this has been one of the most fascinating chapters of this whole book. when I was researching this. I didn't know it at the time, but I was arriving on the back of a whole range of new discoveries, of which visually the most dramatic was that Berenike Buddha, this extraordinary image of the Buddha found in classical white marble, but very familiar head of the Buddha that we know from a million Buddhist statues.

3:47And that is a perfect symbol of a whole variety of different ways that archaeologists, numismatists, and economic historians have been realizing that, in a sense, they've got it wrong before. We associate the Roman world very much closely with the Mediterranean. When we think of it trading with anyone, there's this image of the Silk Road overland stretching from the Roman world through Persia and Central Asia to China. But what archaeologists are realizing now, and there's been a whole re-evaluation of this, which is, you know, I was very lucky in that this was happening just before I was writing this book, and really hasn't made it out to a popular audience yet, is the fact that people are beginning to realize now that Rome's largest trading partner was not China.

4:36In fact, there was almost no recognition of the existence of China at this period, but was India. And there's a whole lot of different kinds of evidence that shows us how important India, Sri Lanka and the Red Sea trade routes were to the Roman Empire. Okay. So first of all, questions. That statue, when was it built? Just tell me what period we're talking about when this statue appears in the world. So that statue is the third century CE. But this trade has been going ever since the time of anti-Cleopatra. And you may remember from your Shakespeare that at the very end of that tragic play, Anthony and Cleopatra both commit suicide.

5:19And Octavius, who will become the emperor Augustus, absorbs Egypt into the Roman Empire after the Battle of Actaeum. And that means that from whatever it is, 50 BC, Rome has a frontier with the Red Sea, and there is a direct trade route to India. And what you see, particularly in the next century, massive imports from India coming up the Red Sea. Ivory, which appears all over the Roman Empire, but there are wonderful, for example, carved Indian ivories found in Pompeii. Wild beasts for the circus. We're all going to be watching Gladiator 2 soon with all those sort of elephants and rhinos and all these extraordinary beasts appearing in the Colosseum and other Roman amphitheaters, a lot of those were coming from India.

6:09Pepper, and most of all, silk, which some of it was Indian silk, some of it was Chinese silk brought through Gujarat. So you have these extraordinary Roman trading manuals dating from around this period, first, second century. And they're like kind of lonely planets. They have an intimate knowledge of every Indian seaport. They tell you what you can sell in Gujarat, what they want in Kerala, the different things that they might need in go are on the halfway up. Some lot, for example, like slave girls, some like slave boys, some like Indian wine. There's a huge appetite for Indian wine, but particularly where you can buy goods.

6:47And it is mainly an import trade and these rich, rich imports coming in. And as if you needed sort of to underscore the point that that Berenike statue that you're talking about, the second 200 AD roundabout, They're also the bones of some Indian creatures that can only have come from India. Indian monkeys, all sorts of Indian pepper, fragments of meals where clearly Indian sailors had arrived in Egypt, decided they didn't want Egyptian food and were busy cooking things with coriander and pepper and dal. And so exactly what you'd expect Indians arriving in Egypt today to be doing is happening in the first century AD.

7:30But there is one document in particular which has caused huge excitements among economic historians, and it's rewritten our understanding of Roman economics. There is a manuscript now in Vienna called the Mosieris Papyrus, and this manuscript is a shipping invoice, exactly as if you were importing something from India today and were buying a crate of whatever you want to buy from India, clothes or cotton goods or Indian motor parts or whatever it is. You'd have a list of all the things, their value, and the customs tariff that would be applicable to them. And this random document found in a rubbish dump in Egypt gives the vast sums of money that Romans were paying for Indian luxuries.

8:19Go on, tell us like what? I mean, the money won't mean much in terms of sesterci, because these are obviously not a currency we're familiar with. But one successful consignment, one crate of these goods was so valuable that it could have bought you a premier estate in the middle of Tuscany in the first century AD. Wow. Just for a crate. That's amazing. Just for a crate. And the profits were sufficient to make you eligible for the Senate. In other words, the top, top cream of Roman society. One successful shipment of one crate from India of either pepper or ivory. I mean, I want to talk about pepper for a minute because pepper was almost as valuable as gold.

8:59I mean, it's just like really hard to think because it's so ubiquitous. You have it on everyone's dining table. Nobody thinks twice about it. But there's a lovely thing that you've got, which is sort of the 400 AD, Alaric the Visigoth when he comes and holds Rome to ransom. He doesn't just ask for gold. What does he ask for? He asks for pepper. He asks for a year's supply of pepper from the Romans. He doesn't ask for silk either significantly. His idea of what a real luxury good is, you know, the sort of the equivalent of sort of duty free bonanza for Alaric was an enormous load of pepper. And this sort of stuff has been in plain sight.

9:36There is, for example, in Sicily, a wonderful site, which I've been to, Piazza Amarina. And it's famous for those pictures of Roman girls in bikinis playing sort of, you know, ball games on the beach. Have you seen that picture? It's often in the ancient Roman volleyball team. Exactly. aware. That's the one that keeps getting reproduced. But another one that in the same house, which is less well known, has a picture of an Indian looking goddess holding a large ivory elephant's tusk. Behind her are strings of Indian pepper. Peppercorns, yeah. And behind, she's flanked either side by an elephant and a tiger.

10:11And that's shorthand for all the things that Romans were importing from India. And the theory is, by our culture, is that this beautiful villa in the middle of the Sicilian highlands was the retirement villa of a successful merchant who'd been trading with India. And, you know, according to some recent calculations, this is not just some merchants. Customs taxes on trade with India may have generated, is this right, as much as one-third of the entire income of the Roman exchequer? So when I first read that, I thought that sounded absurd. Yes, something's wrong. Surely some mistake. Surely some mistake.

10:46But no, this actually is from the new Oxford book of the Roman economy. My colleague at All Souls in Oxford, Andrew Wilson, this extraordinary archaeologist who's run the Roman coin hoard survey, has done extraordinary work on this. The coin hoard shows, and it's very interesting, that Roman coins obviously distributed all around the Mediterranean, Marinostrum, the Roman Sea, all the coasts. You have this bright orange of little dots where coin hoards were found. There's another little sort of scattering of them up the north coast of Scotland. And obviously, I think they're now finding in early Pictish sites a lot of Roman imports of olive oil and wine, the luxuries that the Scots were enjoying.

11:30There is nothing to the east of Afghanistan. There's not a single coin hoard being found in either Xinjiang or in wider China. but there is an enormous cluster of thousands of Roman coin hoards all over the coasts of Kerala, Tamil Nadu and Sri Lanka. So I mean just again to spell this out what it means is that the trade was being done over water. Correct. The trade was being done with India and these coin hoards are basically evidence of trade where a merchant has sold a great deal of goods and he's hiding the money. I mean, not in a bank, but hiding it. So that's what these, it really is sort of operation deep throw, follow the money and find out where exactly these operations are going on.

12:16And this Miserius papyrus shows that if you transpose the customs take for those goods, the ivory, the pepper, the cottons, the silks, they show that one third of the Roman economy, In other words, the cost of building Hadrian's Wall, of defending the Rhineland frontier, of building all the forts in Algeria to defend against nomads coming up through the Sahara. This enormous global empire, one third of the money came from the take on all the Indian luxury goods being imported by the Red Sea. And this is something that we actually get. Again, you look at Roman literature, it's there everywhere once you're looking for it.

12:57I mean, we're talking about sort of large figures, but it would be really helpful to know just how large the figures. Do you have numbers to pin on this? So the figures in the Miserius papyrus are extraordinary. Scholars have worked out that if the figures in that papyrus were transmuted over a wider area, we're talking about Indian imports into Egypt worth over a billion sesterci per annum, of which the tax authorities of the Roman Empire were creaming off no less than 270 million. Now, these revenues surpassed that of entire countries. When Julius Caesar conquers Gaul, he imposes a tribute of 40 million, the Rhineland frontier is defended by eight legions at a cost of 88 million.

13:45But the take from the Red Sea customs is 270 million, essentially. But nobody's seen it, but nobody's really accepted it until recently. Is that right? It's in the last 10 years that people are realizing this. So Pliny, who is a wonderful natural historian and writes volume after volume on the natural world around him, is this sort of puritanical, plain-spoken North Italian naval commander. a very familiar sort of type. He's a clipped military man who doesn't like sort of fussiness and farango. And he said, I just don't understand why everyone wants the pungency of this new pepper. Why would anyone have ever thought of putting pepper on their food?

14:27Even more, he's suspicious of silks, the decadence of Roman matrons, he says, wearing see-through clothes. And this means that the wealth of our empire debouches into India, which he says is the sink of the world's most precious metals. That's so interesting. Also, we're not inviting him to our Christmas party. He doesn't sound that much fun at all. He's an extraordinary man and he has this wonderful ending. In our sister podcast, The Rest is History last year, Tom Holland did a wonderful episode, one of my favorite podcasts ever, on the end of Pompeii. Pliny goes in as a rescue operator. he sails his boat to pick up those who are fleeing and then he makes the mistake of spending the night in a villa of his friend and he's basically gassed the following morning never makes it out yes I've been to those sites have you?

15:15I haven't oh no I mean it's amazing it's amazing and you sort of imagine Pliny in his boat bobbing up and down trying to collect people who are fleeing covered in soot and ash and then he himself just making that terrible decision that okay I'm a bit tired now and it's a decision that kills him but it's not just Pliny There's this other guy, Strabo, who is in Alexandria, and he says he goes with the governor of Egypt up the Nile. And he says the most extraordinary thing, which I had no idea about, though I live in Alexandria, he says. There are now 250 boats a year coming out of one port, Mayas Hormus, going to India every single year.

15:51And the archaeologists have dug in Berenayki and Mayas Hormus the landing sites. and these are significantly larger vehicles than our parking in ports in the Mediterranean, you know, austere and sites like that. These are enormous oceanic freighters of the day. And they contain particularly large enough to import elephants, which are being used in the theater and they're landing on this Red Sea coast. And these elephants are rhinos and tigers along with pepper and ivory. There's an ungent that they buy from India, which is a sort of balm. It appears in St. Matthew's Gospel where Martha rubs it over the feet of Christ.

16:29Nard. Nard. That's exactly the word. Nard is from some sort of Himalayan sort of civet cat or something. I can't remember what it is. Do you ever wonder who was the first person to realize that a civet cat's ghoulies were a good thing to be rubbing over a human body? I often cast my mind back to the very first time. What happened? What the hell was that? A pair of testicles, let's use those. What was going on there? Or even more extraordinary, whales vomit, amber grease on the shores of the sea. Who would have thought of taking that and turning it into perfume? Well, listen, people have hobbies.

17:08You have some strange hobbies, actually. I have some strange hobbies. Nothing is quite as disgusting as that. Covering bottles with sort of clay. Clay, yes, I do like doing that. Okay, well, enough about me. Let's talk about you and your book. I'm interested that this scholarship is so newly minted, if you like, only in the last 10 years? Because I'm just thinking back to the East India Company. They dug up lots of things. They were enthusiastic archaeologists. Did they not find these golden hordes and things? They did. There's this major Roman trading station at a place called Arakamedu, south of Madras, which is the modern Puduke.

17:42And there they found tens of thousands of amphorae, all these Roman goods being imported. You have a little faking business, rather like sort of, you know, Bangladeshis making fake Gucci and Louis Vuitton luggage. They're making fake Roman intaglio rings on that coast and then selling it on to Thailand as the real thing, which is lovely. People who like their history series are going to hate this observation, but one of my prized possessions for years was a gucky purse when they spelt it with a Y. I just loved it so much. Anywho. Okay, so these things were found, but the scholarship of that trade route that you've talked about, those bits of the puzzle are only really newly being put together.

18:27Absolutely. And once you start looking in Roman literature, it's all there. There are references to Indians and the audiences of the games in Alexandria. You have references to Buddhist monks wandering around Alexandria. All over India as well, there are Roman finds turning up in Maziris, which is the counterpart to Veroniki on the Keralan coast, in Arakamedu, and in Gujarat, and at the mouth of the Indus. So what you have is this enormous trading partnership going backwards and forwards. And the people who are gaining most out of it are the Indians, because they're just in gold. They're selling goods that are very common there at enormously inflated prices.

19:11And we see in the archaeology at Berenike, there's this amazing dig at the moment going on. There's a fantastic guy called Steve Sidebottom, who's been digging there for 20 years, found on the coast of Egypt, an entire Indian port with Indian cooking, Indian goods, and there's a whole network of traders. For example, there is a Roman family that we know of who were the big sort of wine manufacturers north of Rome. And their goods have been found in Carthage, in North Africa, in shipwrecks across the Mediterranean. And in their own village in the Abruzzi, there's actually a tombstone of one of these guys with a picture of camels carrying Roman amphorae across a desert scene.

20:01And this was their trade. They took the equivalent of Chianti across from the Nile to the coast in camel caravans. And we even have one of their pieces of graffiti in a rock shelter halfway on that desert route, where one member of this family has written his name on a rock shelter on his way to the coast to sell this to India. And there are versions of plays, Euripides plays, which have been found in papyrus in Egypt, where great jokes are made of the fact that Indians love Roman wine so much. There wasn't a great deal of wine, obviously, in ancient India. And they imported it. It was their big import.

20:39They got duty free. Except it wasn't duty free. It was duty plus. They paid a great deal of duty. Buckets of gold, yeah. So there's a scene where the Indians, after drinking Roman wine and an adaptation of Euripides' play, are made to speak in sort of gobbledygook, having got too drunk. And in the story that becomes Ariadne and Naxos, Ariadne is rescued by her brother, having got the Indians drunk on Roman wine. That's a neat connection, isn't it? It's a lovely story. Listen, we're going to take a break now, but join us after the break where we talk about somebody I'm absolutely fascinated with.

21:13and this is one of the apostles, St. Thomas, who comes to India. Now, had I known that you would be writing about this, I wouldn't have spent three months researching this, let me tell you, because I have been very into St. Thomas coming to India. It's a fantastic story, but join us after the break when we'll tell you more.

21:36Welcome back. So, just before the break, we were talking about Chianti making its way throughout about India and again, these amazing connections between two spheres of influence, the East and the West. Let's talk about St. Thomas now, because this is the same doubting Thomas, is it not, that most people who are brought up in a Christian background will know of. Tell us a little bit first of all about who he was and why he is important with the India story. So Thomas is a figure who appears in all the Gospels, and he is sometimes referred to as the brother or even the twin of Christ. His Greek name was Didymus, which simply means twin.

22:18And he was also a carpenter, presumably in the same workshop as Jesus was. And there's a whole range of apocryphal literature which grows up around him. There is an Acts of Thomas, which is written in what's now Urfa in Southeast Turkey, where I was this time last week, funnily enough. There is a Gospel of Thomas, which is a Gnostic gospel, which gets thrown out by the church fathers when they're settling on which books are going to make it into the Bible. And this one is one of the ones that doesn't make it. But just like we know that St. Paul and St. Peter traveled westwards across the Mediterranean to convert the people, St.

22:58Paul working in what's now Anatolia in Turkey, St. Peter sailing obviously directly to Rome where he's martyred. So we forget that there were other apostles like Bartholomew and Thomas who are supposed to convert the people of Arabia and India. But the story of doubt, well, first of all, why was he doubting Thomas Latton in itself? If you don't know, it's an interesting story. He supposedly refused to believe in the resurrection. And the phrase is, until I have placed my hands in the holes left by the nails and the wound left by the spear. And the spear is going to be important in the St. Thomas story.

23:33It's a foreshadowing, they call it in the films these days. But it's in the Acts that they talk about this trip. Is it only in the Acts they talk about St. Thomas going to India? Well, no, there's a whole variety of early Christian references to St. Thomas going to India. But the Acts is the only major work of Christian literature associated with it. We have to say it's quite a dotty, late piece of writing. It's written not in Palestine, but in what's now Turkey, Urfa, Odessa, probably as late as the 4th century. And it's full of sort of crazy ideas. But it does seem to reflect a whole tradition, which is there in relics, in other pieces of literature, that of the various apostles who found out across the world to spread Christianity, St.

24:22Thomas was given this gig, the gig of India, and he didn't want to go there. He did want to go. So first of all, wait, don't rush through the story. The acts tell this so very well. So they are, I mean, it sort of paints a picture of all the apostles sitting around together and they are almost casting lots about which direction they are going to go and spread the word in. And poor Thomas is assigned India and he says, well, I don't want to go. What is the sentence? I am a Hebrew. How can I go amongst Indians and preach the truth? He says, but go he does. And where does he wash up? He washes up in Kerala.

24:54So his brother, who is now resurrected and is appearing to the apostles, doesn't take no for an answer. And according to the Acts of Thomas, sells him into slavery. And he's taken as a slave to South India, where he's bought by an Indian nobleman who wants him to build a palace. So this reflects a whole tradition of inscriptions that we get in the west coast of India, where Yavana converts to Buddhism are raising Buddhist temples, and they describe themselves as Yavanas, which is the same word as Ionian or Greek. So there is a whole tradition of both bodyguards and soldiers and architects from the Mediterranean seeking employment in India at this point.

25:38So one can regard the Acts of Thomas as a bit of gossip or a myth, but it reflects the reality that there were many people from Palestine and Egypt and the Red Sea area who were seeking employment in the rich lands of India. Yeah. And do the acts mention names that we can verify in the historic record? They do. They mention a man called Gondafaris, who's the king who summons Thomas to build him a palace. And Gondafaris turns out, when the Acts of Thomas was first translated into English in the 19th century, no one knew who this Gondafaris was. But then, And, of course, his coins begin turning up when archaeologists are digging in Gandhara, that's modern Peshawar region in Pakistan.

26:22And Gondafaris is not just one man, but there's a whole dynasty of Indo-Parthian kings who have been found to give donations to Buddhist monasteries and turn up in coins all over India. So he's a real figure. Yeah, he's a real figure and he's linked to Taksala. He rules Taksala, which in India is hugely important. Taksala University and the academics who flocked to Taksala as a place of great learning and enlightenment. Correct. So there's this tradition associated with two areas of India. There's Gondafaris, who places the Thomas myth in the far north in Peshawar, but there's a separate series of myths, which is again echoed in early Christian literature in Europe as early as the second, third, fourth century of St.

27:07Thomas going to Kerala. And in Kerala today, there's this whole communities of, they call themselves the St. Thomas Christians. Well, there's the Mount of St. Thomas. I mean, still, you know, you see it in maps, you see it in road directions. St. Thomas is everywhere. On the edge of Madras. No, and even in sort of around Cochin, there are places named after him. And you get, you know, references in early Christian texts in Egypt and in Palestine to St. Thomas and St. Bartholomew and Indian Christians arriving in Alexandria, wanting more bishops, wanting more books, wanting more Christian paraphernalia.