Indian Shipping/Book 1/Part 2/Chapter 1

by Radha Kumud Mukhopadhyay

 

BOOK I.— PART II.

The History of Indian Maritime Activity.

 

BOOK I.—PART II.

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CHAPTER I.

The Pre-Mauryan Period.

Both Brahminical and Buddhistic texts are thus replete with references to the sea-borne trade of India that directly and indirectly demonstrate the existence and development of a national shipping and shipbuilding. It is now necessary to narrate the facts of that trade, and for this we shall have to draw upon all sorts of evidence, literary, inscriptional, and numismatic, and both Indian and foreign. For India alone has not the monopoly of these evidences; and if she really had commercial connection with the outside world it is natural, and in fact necessary, that they be also supplied by those countries with which she carried on her intercourse, thus confirming those conclusions that are reached by a study of the purely Indian evidences. And so do we find, as a matter of fact, in various foreign works abundant allusions to India's commerce, arts, and manufactures, indicating the glorious position she once occupied and for long maintained as the Queen of the Eastern Seas.

Indeed, all the evidences available will clearly show that for full thirty centuries India stood out as the very heart of the commercial world, cultivating trade relations successively with the Phoenicians, Jews, Assyrians, Greeks, Egyptians, and Romans in ancient times, and Turks, Venetians, Portuguese, Dutch, and English in modern times. A genial climate and a fertile soil, coupled with the industry and frugality of the Indian people, rendered them virtually independent of foreign nations in respect of the necessaries of life, while their secondary wants were few. Of the latter, tin, lead, glass, amber, steel for arms, and perhaps coral and to a small extent medicinal drugs, were all that India had need to import from Europe and Western Asia, while to Arabia she was indebted for the supply of frankincense used in her temples. On the other hand, India provided Europe with wool from the fleeces of the sheep bred on her north-western mountain ranges, famous since the days of Alexander the Great; with onyx, chalcedony, lapis-lazuli, and jasper, then esteemed as precious stones; with a resinous gum, furs, assafoetida, and musk; with embroidered woollen fabrics and coloured carpets which were as highly prized in Babylon and Rome as their modern reproductions are in London and Paris at the present day. But the most valuable of the exports of India was silk, which, under the Persian Empire, is said to have been exchanged by weight with gold. It was manufactured in India, as well as obtained for re-export from China. Next to silk in value were cotton cloths ranging from coarse canvas and calicoes to muslins of the finest texture. India also supplied foreign countries with oils, brassware, a liquid preparation of the sugar-cane, salt, drugs, dyes, and aromatics, while she had also a monopoly in the matter of the supply of pepper, cinnamon, and other edible spices, which were in great request throughout Europe.

Through ages India thus occupied a unique position in the commercial world as the main supplier of the world's luxuries. As a consequence she throughout had the balance of trade clearly in her favour, a balance which could only be settled by the export of treasure from European and other countries that were commercially indebted to her. For India desired nothing which foreigners could give her but the precious metals. Thus has she been for many centuries the final depository of a large portion of the metallic wealth of the world. Her supply of gold she obtained not as did Europe from America in the 16th century by conquest or rapine, but by the more natural and peaceful method of commerce, "by the exchange of such of her productions as among the Indians were superfluities but were at the same time not only highly prized by the nations of Western Asia, Egypt, and Europe, but were obtainable from no other quarter except India, or from the farther East by means of the Indian trade."^[1] It was this flow or "drain" of gold into India that so far back as the 1st century A.D. was the cause of alarm and regret to Pliny, who calculated that fully a hundred million sesterces, equivalent, according to Delmar, to £70,000 of modern English money, were withdrawn annually from the Roman Empire to purchase useless Oriental products such as perfumes, unguents, and personal ornaments.^[2] It was probably also the same flow of gold into India from outside that even earlier still, in the 5th century B.C., at least partially enabled the Indian satrapy of Darius, naturally the richest and most populous part of his empire (including as much of Afghanistan, Kashmir, and the Punjab as the Persian monarchs could keep in subjection), to pay him "the enormous tribute of 360 Euboic talents of gold-dust or 185 hundredweights, worth fully a million sterling, and constituting about one-third of the total bullion revenue of the Asiatic provinces."^[3]

We shall now enter upon a relation of the facts of this trade which served to create "the wealth of Ind," a brief survey of its course which undoubtedly is an important, though neglected, aspect of Indian history, the story of her old, abounding international life.

The antiquity of this trade will be evident from the fact that it is foreshadowed even in the Ṛig-Veda, one of the oldest literary records of humanity, which, as I have already shown, speaks in many places of ships and merchants sailing out into the open main for the sake of riches, braving the perils of the deep, "where there is no support, nothing to rest upon or cling to." India thus began her sea-borne trade with the very beginning of recorded time, and the trade of the Ṛig-Veda was very probably carried on with countries on the west like Chaldaea, Babylon, and Egypt. I do not feel myself competent to deal with this subject of India's prehistoric trade relations; Egyptologists or Assyriologists alone can do full justice to it. I can but briefly refer to some of the conclusions reached in regard to this subject and the evidences on which they are based. According to Dr. Sayce,^[4] the famous Assyriologist, the commerce by sea between India and Babylon must have been carried on as early as about 3000 B.C., when Ur Bagas, the first king of United Babylonia, ruled in Ur of the Chaldees. This is proved by the finding of Indian teak in the ruins of Ur. Mr. Hewitt is of opinion that this wood must have been sent by sea from some port on the Malabar coast, for it is only there that teak grew near enough to the sea to be exported with profit in those early times. Again, Dr. Sayce points to the use of the word sindhu for muslin in an old Babylonian list of clothes as the clearest proof "that there was trade between Babylonia and people who spoke an Aryan dialect and lived in the country watered by the Indus." This trade must have been sea-borne, and the muslin must have been brought by sea, for, as Mr. Hewitt points out, if Zend-speaking traders had brought it by land they would have called the country by the Zend name, Hindhu, altering the s into an h.^[5] These conclusions of Dr. Sayce and Mr. Hewitt regarding the extreme antiquity of the Indian maritime trade with Babylon are not, however, accepted by all scholars. Mr. J. Kennedy,^[6] for instance, in a learned article on the subject, says that he "can find no archaeological or literary evidence for a maritime trade between India and Babylon prior to the 7th century B.C. . . . but for the 6th century B.C. direct evidence is forthcoming." This direct evidence, which is so very interesting, may be thus presented after him:— (1) Mr. Rassam found a beam of Indian cedar in the palace of Nebuchadnezzar (604-562 B.C.) at Birs Nimrud, part of which is now exhibited in the British Museum. (2) In the second storey of the Temple of the Moon-god at Ur, rebuilt by Nebuchadnezzar and Nabonidus (555-538 B.C.) Mr. Taylor found "two rough logs of wood, apparently teak, which ran across the whole breadth of the shaft," and Mr. Rassam thus says of it in a letter: "Most probably the block of wood which Taylor discovered was Indian cedar like the beam I discovered in the palace of Nebuchadnezzar. There is no doubt that this wood was imported into Babylonia from India." (3) The Baveru-Jātaka, as we have already seen, relates the adventures of certain Indian merchants who took the first peacock by sea to Babylon. Mr. Kennedy remarks, "the Jātaka itself may go back to 400 B.C., but the folks-tale on which it is based must be much older." We have already cited the opinion on this Jātaka of the late Professor Bühler, according to whom, if the age of the materials of the Jātakas be considered, "the story indicates that the Vanias of Western India undertook trading voyages to the shores of the Persian Gulf or its rivers in the 5th, perhaps even in the 6th century B.C., just as in our days. This trade very probably existed already in much earlier times; for the Jātakas contain several other stories, describing voyages to distant lands and perilous adventures by sea, in which the names of the very ancient Western ports of Surparaka-Supara and Bharukaccha-Broach are occasionally mentioned."^[7] We may also note in this connection that in the Digha Nikaya (I. 222) of Sutta-Pitaka, the date of which has been placed by Mr. Rhys Davids^[8] in the 5th century B.C., there is an explicit reference to "ocean-going ships out of sight of land." (4) Certain Indian commodities, e.g. rice, peacocks, sandal-wood, were known to the Greeks aiid others under their Indian names in the 5th century B.C. "It follows that they were imported from the west coast of India into Babylon directly by sea; and this conclusion is borne out by the statements of the Baveru-Jātaka. And we must further conclude that they were first imported into Babylon in the 6th century B.C., not only because direct intercourse between Babylon and India practically came to an end after 480 B.C., but because rice and peacocks must have reached Greece at the latest in 460 or 470 B.C. in order to become common at Athens in 430 B.C." After this review of the evidence Mr. Kennedy puts forward the following conclusion: "The evidence warrants us in the belief that maritime commerce between India and Babylon flourished in the 7th and 6th, but more especially in the 6th, centuries B.C. It was chiefly in the hands of Dravidians, although Aryans had a share in it; and as Indian traders settled afterwards in Arabia and on the east coast of Africa, and as we find them settling at this very time on the coast of China, we cannot doubt that they had their settlements in Babylon also." And he further remarks: "The history of the trade between Babylon and India suggests one remark: the normal trade route from the Persian Gulf to India can never have been along the inhospitable shores of Gedrosia."

Mr. Rhys Davids,^[9] who has also dealt with this subject, has thus stated his conclusions:— (1) Sea-going merchants, availing themselves of the monsoons, were in the habit, at the beginning of the 7th (and perhaps at the end of the 8th) century B.C., of trading from ports on the southwest coast of India (Sovira at first, afterwards Supparaka and Bharukaccha) to Babylon, then a great mercantile emporium. (2) These merchants were mostly Dravidians, not Aryans. Such Indian names of the goods imported as were adopted in the West (Solomon's ivory, apes, and peacocks, for instance, and the word "rice") were adaptations not of Sanskrit or Pali, but of Tamil words.

The same view of this Indian trade with the West has been held by Mr. A. M. T. Jackson, I.C.S.^[10] According to him, "the Buddhist Jatakas^[11] and some of the Sanskrit law-books^[12] tell us that ships from Bhroach and Supara traded with Babylon (Baveru) from the 8th to the 6th century B.C."

There have been also other scholars who are disposed to view this maritime commerce of India with the West as of very great antiquity. According to Lenormant, the bas-reliefs of the temple of Deir-el-Bahari at Thebes represent the conquest of the land of Pun under Hatasu. "In the abundant booty loading the vessel of Pharaoh for conveyance to the land of Egypt appear a great many Indian animals and products not indigenous to the soil of Yemen—elephants' teeth, gold, precious stones, sandal-wood, and monkeys." Again, "The labours of Von Bohlen (Das alte Indien, vol. i., p. 42), confirming those of Heeren, and in their turn confirmed by those of Lassen (Ind. Alt., vol. ii., p. 580), have established the existence of a maritime commerce between India and Arabia from the very earliest period of humanity."^[13] The principal commodities imported from India were gold, precious stones, ivory, etc. Further, according to Wilkinson,^[14] the presence of indigo, tamarind-wood, and other Indian products has been detected in the tombs of Egypt, and Lassen also has pointed out that the Egyptians dyed cloth with indigo and wrapped their mummies in Indian muslin.

Lastly, this early maritime commerce of India, first vaguely hinted at in the Ṛig-Veda, and proved by the evidence of Egyptian and Assyrian archaeology, is further supposed by many competent authorities to be alluded to in several places in the Bible itself. "Even in the Mosaic period (1491-1450 B.C.) precious stones which were to a great extent a speciality of India and the neighbouring countries appear to have been well known and were already highly valued. It is probable that some of the stones in the breast-plate of the high priest may have come from the far East."^[15] In the Book of Genesis^[16] there is mention of a company of traders with their camels bearing spicery, balm, and myrrh, going to Egypt. In the days of Solomon (about 1015 B.C.) there could be supplied from India alone the ivory, garments, armour, spices, and peacocks which found customers in ancient Syria. In the Book of I Kings it is stated^[17] how the ships of Solomon came to Ophir and fetched from thence gold, plenty of almug trees, precious stones, and the like. In the Book of Ezekiel, which dwells on the commerce of Tyre, there are mentioned commodities which are undoubtedly of Indian origin.^[18] Thus the ivory and ebony included in them are characteristic Indian products and were recognized as such by classical writers like Megasthenes,^[19] Theophrastus,^[20] and Virgil.^[21] Besides, another proof that the Bible really refers to the foreign trade of India may be found in the fact that there have been discovered some old Dravidian words in the Hebrew text of the Books of Kings and Chronicles of the Old Testament, where there is given the list of the articles of merchandise brought from Tarshish or Ophir in Solomon's ships "about 1000 B.C." Thus the word for "peacock" in the Hebrew text is tuki in Kings, tuki in Chronicles, while "the ancient, poetical, purely Tamil-Malayalam name of the peacock is tokei, the bird with the (splendid) tail."^[22] Again, the Hebrew words ahalim or ahaloth for the fragrant wood called "aloes" in Proverbs vii. 17, etc., is derived from the Tamil-Malayalam form of the word aghil.

Without dwelling at any further length on the meaning of these Biblical allusions, I quote below the following interpretation put upon them by the learned bishop Dr. Caldwell, in his monumental work, A Comparative Grammar of the Dravidian Languages:—

It seems probable that Aryan merchants from the mouth of the Indus must have accompanied the Phoenicians and Solomon's servants in their voyages down the Malabar coast towards Ophir (wherever Ophir may have been) or at least have taken part in the trade. ... It appears certain from notices contained in the Vedas that the Aryans of the age of Solomon practised foreign trade in ocean-going vessels, but it remains uncertain to what parts their ships sailed.^[23]

Bishop Caldwell's opinion is further supported by another erudite clergyman and scholar, the Rev. T. Foulkes,^[24] who, in a very learned essay, comes to the same conclusion, and says:—

The fact is now scarcely to be doubted that the rich Oriental merchandise of the days of King Hiram and King Solomon had its starting-place in the seaports of the Dakhan; and that with a very high degree of probability some of the most esteemed of the spices which were carried into Egypt by the Midianitish merchants of Genesis xxxvii. 25, 28, and by the sons of the patriarch Jacob (Gen. xliii. 11), had been cultivated in the spice-gardens of the Dakhan.

Thus the first trade of India of which there is any record was with Western Asia and Palestine. King Solomon tried to appropriate a share of this trade for the Jewish people by creating facilities for his Eastern traders both on land and sea routes. On the land route he built as resting-places for caravans the cities of Tadmor (Palmyra), Baalbec (Heliopolis), and Hamath (Epiphania), and his foresight in protecting these caravan routes bore fruit in the great trading centres of Mesopotamia, viz. Babylon, Ctesiphon, Seleucia, and Ossis, which all flourished for a long time on the profits of their commerce with the East. The Jewish monarch was also equally interested in the sea-borne trade of the East. His fleets made periodical voyages to and from the head of the Red Sea and the ports in the Persian Gulf, and we know from Holy Writ that "Ezion-geber, which is beside Eloth on the shore of the Red Sea in the land of Edom," was the Syrian port for the arrival and departure of the fleets sent on these voyages. Their cargoes were carried by caravans to Petra and distributed some to Egypt and others to Rhinocolura, a port of the Mediterranean, for transhipment to Europe. The Phoenicians also took an active part in this trade, with Tyre as their headquarters. After the conquest of Tyre by Alexander the Great, and the foundation of Alexandria, the Egyptians came into the field, and after the successive decline of the Jewish, Phoenician, and Persian powers in Western Asia, they retained with the Arabians a monopoly of this commerce for about 900 years between Alexander's death and the conquest of Egypt by the Musalmans in the year 640 A.D.

We have now dealt with the foreign trade of India in the age of the Bible, and proceed to consider the notices left by the Greek writers of this period of the international intercourse of India. The earliest, probably, is that of Herodotus (450 B.C.), the father of history, whose reference to the Indian contingent^[25] of Xerxes' army, clad in cotton garments and armed with cane bows and iron-tipped^[26] cane arrows, is well known. Herodotus also speaks of the inclusion of a part of India as the twentieth satrapy of the Emperor Darius,^[27] a fact which in the opinion of scholars accounts for the traces of Persian influence^[28] on old Indian art, architecture, and administrative methods. Among Indian products Herodotus noted the wool which certain wild trees bear instead of fruit, "that in beauty and quality excels that of sheep,"^[29] of which Indians make their clothing.

Herodotus also gives us some insight into the nature and extent of certain Indian mineral productions. Babylon obtained precious stones and dogs (probably Tibetan mastiffs) from India.^[30] In the enumeration of the nations and tribes which paid tribute to the Persian monarch Darius, the Indians alone, we are told, paid in gold, all the others paying in silver. The amount of this gold was 360 Euboic talents, equivalent to £1,290,000. Herodotus also pointedly speaks of India as being "rich in gold,"^[31] and he relates the famous and widespread fable of the gold-digging ants, which has been shown by Sir Henry Robinson and Dr. Schiern^[32] to have originated in the peculiar customs of the Tibetan gold-miners; and the name "ant gold" was possibly first given to the fragments of gold-dust brought from Tibet on account of their shape and size. The "horns of the gold-digging ants" mentioned by Pliny and others have been supposed to be simply samples of the ordinary pickaxes used by miners, which in Ladakh and Tibet were made of the horns of wild sheep, mounted on handles of wood. Herodotus may also have meant the gold-diggers of the desert of Gobi, who were in the habit of excavating gold from beneath the earth, and from them Indian traders of the Punjab neighbourhood could obtain their supply of gold. The portion of India conquered by Darius was situated chiefly to the north-west of the Indus, and, according to the authoritative testimony of Professor V. Ball, F.R.S., the eminent geologist, "the Indus itself, as well as some of its tributaries, is known to be auriferous." Professor Ball also rejects the view held by Lassen, Heeren, and many others that gold (and silver) was not indigenous to India, but imported from abroad, e.g. from Tibet, Burma, or even Africa;^[33] for as he points out, "our most recent knowledge of India affords evidence that the amount of gold derived from indigenous sources must have been very considerable before the alluvial deposits were exhausted of their gold."

The further remarks of Professor Ball in this connection are worth quoting in full:—

When it is remembered that about 80 per cent. of the gold raised throughout the world is from alluvial washings, and when this fact is considered in connection with the reflection that wide tracts in Australia and America, formerly richly productive, are now deserted, being covered with exhausted tailings, it can be conceived how these regions in India—and there are very many of them—which are known to be auriferous, may, in the lapse of time, after yielding large supplies of gold, have become too exhausted to be of much present consideration. More than this, however, recent explorations have confirmed the fact, often previously asserted, that in Southern India there are indications of extended mining operations having been carried on there.

Evidence exists of the most conclusive kind of large quantities of gold having been amassed by Indian monarchs, who accepted a revenue in gold-dust only from certain sections of their subjects, who were consequently compelled to spend several months of every year washing for it in the rivers.^[34]

In Ctesias' Indica (400 B.C.), the earliest Greek treatise on India, is to be found, among other things, the existence of a really Dravidian word which Ctesias used for cinnamon.^[35] The word used by Ctesias is karpion, which Dr. Caldwell derives from the Tamil-Malayalam word karuppa or karppu, to which is akin the Sanskrit word karpura "camphor."^[36]

Ctesias also refers to a lake in the country of the Pygmies upon the surface of which oil is produced. This is supposed to mean Upper Burma, where there is a tribe answering to this description, and where "there are also the only largely productive petroleum deposits, which, moreover, we know to have been worked since the earliest times."^[37] Ctesias also mentions gold being obtained on certain "high-towering mountains" inhabited by the Griffins, which have been recognized as Tibetan mastiffs, "specimens of which, by the way, appear to have been taken to the Persian Court as examples of the gold-digging ants first described by Herodotus."^[38]

 

1. C. Daniell, F.S.S., I.C.S., Industrial Competition of Asia, p. 225.
2. Pliny, Natural History, xii. 18. See also Mommsen's Provinces of the Roman Empire, vol. ii., 299-300.
3. Herodotus, iii. (V. A. Smith's Early History of India, New Edition, P. 34).
4. See his Hibbert Lectures for 1887 on the Origin and Growth of Religion among the Babylonians.
5. J.R.A.S., 1888, p. 337. Mr. Hewitt, late Commissioner of Chota Nagpur, is the author of many works on primitive history.
6. See J.R.A.S., 1898, on the Early Commerce between India and Babylon.
7. Origin of the Indian Brahma Alphabet, p. 84.
8. See J.R.A.S., April, 1899, p. 482.
9. Buddhist India, p. 116.
10. Bombay City Gazetteer, vol. ii., ch. vi., p. 3.
11. Nos. 339 and 463 (Fausboll).
12. S.B.E., ii. 228; xiv. 146, 200, 217.
13. Hist. Anc. del Orient, English edition, vol. ii., pp. 299, 301, quoted in I.A., vol. xiii., p. 228.
14. Ancient Egyptians, ii. 237, quoted by Delmar, Director of the Bureau of Statistics, U.S.A.
15. Professor V. Ball, M.A., F.R.S., F.G.S., in his highly valuable article on "A Geologist's Contribution to the History of Ancient India," in the I.A. for August, 1884.
16. Gen. xxxvii. 25: "Behold, a company of Ishmeelites came from Gilead with their camels bearing spicery and balm and myrrh, going to carry it down to Egypt."
17. I Kings ix. 26, 27, 28: "And King Solomon made a navy of ships in Ezion-geber, which is beside Eloth, on the shore of the Red Sea . . . And Hiram sent in the navy his servants, shipmen that had knowledge of the sea, with the servants of Solomon. And they came to Ophir, and fetched from thence gold, four hundred and twenty talents, and brought it to King Solomon." I Kings x. 11: "And the navy also of Hiram, that brought gold from Ophir, brought in from Ophir great plenty of almug trees and precious stones."
18. Ezekiel xxvii. 24: "These were thy merchants in all sorts of things, in blue clothes, and broidered work, and in chests of rich apparel, bound with cords." Ibid. 15: "They brought thee for a present horns of ivory and ebony."
19. Strabo, xv. 37: "Ebony grows there."
20. History of Plants, iv. 4, 6, quoted by McCrindle.
21. Georg. i. 57: "India produces ivory." The Periplus also mentions logs of ebony exported from Barygaza-Broach.
22. Dr. Caldwell, in his Grammar of the Dravidian Languages, p. 91. We may remember also in this connection the well-known reference in the Baveru-Jātaka to voyages made by Indian merchants to Babylon, in the second of which they took thither the first peacock for sale.
23. Grammar of the Dravidian Languages, p. 122.
24. The Indian Antiquary, vol. viii.
25. Herodotus, vii. 65, viii. 13, ix. 91. V. A. Smith remarks: "The archers from India formed a valuable element in the army of Xerxes, and shared the defeat of Mardonius at Plataea."
26. Cf. V. Smith, Early History of India, p. 35: "The fact that the Indian troops used iron in 480 B.C. is worth noting."
27. Herodotus, iii.
28. See Smith's Early History of India, pp. 137, 153, 225, for an account of this Persian influence.
29. Herodotus, iii. 106, in McCrindle's Ancient India as Described in Classical Literature.
30. Ibid., i. 192.
31. Ibid., iii. 106.
32. I.A., vol. iv., pp. 225 ff.
33. Asiatic Nations (Bohn's ed.), vol, ii., p. 32.
34. I.A., August, 1884.
35. Ctesias, translated by McCrindle, p. 29. His Indica embodies the information he had gathered about India, "partly from the reports of Persian officials who had visited that country on the King's service, and partly also perhaps from the reports of Indians themselves who in those days were occasionally to be seen at the Persian Court, whither they resorted either as merchants or as envoys bringing presents and tribute from the princes of Northern India, which was then subject to Persian rule." (McCrindle's Ctesias, Introduction, p. 3.)
36. Dr. Caldwell in his Grammar of the Dravidian Languages, p. 105.
37. Professor Ball in the I.A., vol. xiii., p. 230.
38. Ibid.