quote: Literary traditions often overlap, and in the Song of Songs we have > tentative evidence of a remarkable cross-fertilization of two > traditions - the Hebrew and the Tamil. 1Kings 10:22 mentions > imports of apes, peacocks, and ivory in Solomon's time, the trip > taking three years to reach its destination. The Hebrew word for > peacock, tukki, is borrowed from the Tamil word for peacock, tOkai. > Further evidence of contact with Tamils early in the first > millennium BCE....
Archaeologists Uncover Ancient Maritime Spice Route Between India, Egypt
Archaeologists from UCLA and the University of Delaware have unearthed the most extensive remains to date from sea trade between India and Egypt during the Roman Empire, adding to mounting evidence that spices and other exotic cargo traveled into Europe over sea as well as land.
"These findings go a long way toward improving our understanding of the way in which a whole range of exotic cargo moved into Europe during antiquity," said Willeke Wendrich, an assistant professor of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures at UCLA and co-director of the project. "When cost and political conflict prevented overland transport, ancient mariners took to the Red Sea, and the route between India and Egypt appears to have been even more productive than we ever thought."
"The Silk Road gets a lot of attention as a trade route, but we've found a wealth of evidence indicating that sea trade between Egypt and India was also important for transporting exotic cargo, and it may have even served as a link with the Far East," added fellow co-director Steven E. Sidebotham, a history professor at the University of Delaware.
Wendrich and Sidebotham report their findings in the July issue of the scholarly journal Sahara.
For the past eight years, the researchers have led an international team of archaeologists who have excavated Berenike, a long-abandoned Egyptian port on the Red Sea near the border with Sudan.
Among the buried ruins of buildings that date back to Roman rule, the team discovered vast quantities of teak, a wood indigenous to India and today's Myanmar, but not capable of growing in Egypt, Africa or Europe. Researchers believe the teak, which dates to the first century, came to the desert port as hulls of shipping vessels. When the ships became worn out or damaged beyond repair, Berenike residents recycled the wood for building materials, the researchers said. The team also found materials consistent with ship-patching activities, including copper nails and metal sheeting.
"You'd expect to find woods native to Egypt like mangrove and acacia," Sidebotham said. "But the largest amount of wood we found at Berenike was teak."
In addition to this evidence of seafaring activities between India and Egypt, the archaeologists uncovered the largest array of ancient Indian goods ever found along the Red Sea, including the largest single cache of black pepper from antiquity - 16 pounds - ever excavated in the former Roman Empire. The team dates these peppercorns, which were grown only in South India during antiquity, to the first century. Peppercorns of the same vintage have been excavated as far away as Germany.
"Spices used in Europe during antiquity may have passed through this port," Wendrich said.
In some cases, Egypt's dry climate even preserved organic material from India that has never been found in the more humid subcontinent, including sailcloth dated to between A.D. 30 and 70, as well as basketry and matting from the first and second centuries.
In a dump that dates back to Roman times, the team also found Indian coconuts and batik cloth from the first century, as well as an array of exotic gems, including sapphires and glass beads that appear to come from Sri Lanka, and carnelian beads that appear to come from India.
Three beads found on the surface of excavation sites in Berenike suggested even more exotic origins. One may have come from eastern Java, while the other two appear to have come either from Vietnam or Thailand, but the team has been unable to date any of them.
While the researchers say it is unlikely that Berenike traded directly with eastern Java, Vietnam or Thailand, they say their discoveries raise the possibility that cargo was finding its way to the Egyptian port from the Far East, probably via India.
The team also found the remains of cereal and animals indigenous to sub-Saharan Africa, pointing to the possibility of a three-point trade route that took goods from southern Africa to India and then back across the Indian Ocean to Egypt.
"We talk today about globalism as if it were the latest thing, but trade was going on in antiquity at a scale and scope that is truly impressive," said Wendrich, who made most of her contributions as a post-doctoral fellow at Leiden University in the Netherlands. "These people were taking incredible risks with their lives and fortune to make money."
Along with the rest of Egypt, Berenike was controlled by the Roman Empire during the first and second centuries. During the same period, the overland route to Europe from India through Pakistan, Iran and Mesopotamia (today's Iraq) was controlled by adversaries of the Roman Empire, making overland roads difficult for Roman merchants. Meanwhile, Roman texts that address the relative costs of different shipping methods describe overland transport as at least 20 times more expensive than sea trade.
"Overland transport was incredibly expensive, so whenever possible people in antiquity preferred shipping, which was vastly cheaper," Sidebotham said.
With such obstacles to overland transport, the town at the southernmost tip of the Roman Empire flourished as a "transfer port," accepting cargo from India that was later moved overland and up the Nile to Alexandria, the researchers contend. Poised on the edge of the Mediterranean Sea, Alexandria has a well-documented history of trade with Europe going back to antiquity.
Over the course of the grueling project, the researchers retraced a route that they believe would have moved cargo from Berenike into Europe. Wendrich and Sidebotham contend cargo was shipped across the Indian Ocean and north through the Red Sea to Berenike, which is located about 160 miles east of today's Aswan Dam. They believe the goods were then carried by camels or donkeys some 240 miles northeast to the Nile River, where smaller boats waited to transport the cargo north to Alexandria. Cargo is known to have moved during antiquity from Alexandria across the Mediterranean to a dozen major Roman ports and hundreds of minor ones.
The team believes that Berenike was the biggest and most active of six ports in the Red Sea until some point after A.D. 500, when shipping activities mysteriously stopped.
Shipping activities at Berenike were mentioned in ancient texts that were rediscovered in the Middle Ages, but the port's precise location eluded explorers until the early 19th century. The former port's proximity to an Egyptian military base kept archaeologists at bay until 1994, when Wendrich and Sidebotham made the first successful appeal for a large-scale excavation. At the time, Egyptian officials, eager to develop the Red Sea as a tourist destination, had started to relax prohibitions against foreign access to the region. But the area's isolation remains a challenge for the team, which has to truck in food and water, and to power computers and microscopes with solar panels.
"The logistics are really tough there," said Wendrich, who is affiliated with the Cotsen Institute of Archaeology at UCLA.
The Berenike project received major funding from the Netherlands Foundation for Scientific Research. The National Geographic Foundation, National Endowment for the Humanities, Utopa Foundation, Gratama Foundation and the Kress Foundation also provided support, as did private donors.
posted
I found this at the Indo-Eurasian Yahoo site
> It is also interesting to note that Clement of Alexandria clearly > presents accounts of Indian religion (Buddhism in particular) > that, unlike the accounts of Indian religion presented by Church > Fathers derivative of earlier Greek/Hellenistic accounts, is quite > new. This suggests that there were new contacts between Roman > Egypt (e.g., Alexandria) and India at the time he wrote (3rd > century CE [actually, end of 2nd century CE -- FB]). These dates > correlate more with what Salomon found [i.e., Brahmi script on > pottery shards from Egyptian excavations, supposedly representing > epigraphic remains of Indian traders --- FB].
A long-term presence of Buddhist communities in various centres of the Hellenistic world seems certain to me, particularly as far as the cosmopolitan city of Alexandria is concerned. Alexandrian authors wrote about Indian ascetics in a general way, but the Church Father Clement of Alexandria (c150-c215 CE) mentioned in greater detail the tenets of the Brahmanical Hindus, Jainas and Buddhists in his _Stromata_ (`Miscellanies' ). He was also the only Western Greek writer to mention Buddha by name (he spelled it as Boutta), although some scholars maintain this reference to Buddha probably comes from Megasthenes and not from Clement's direct encounter with the doctrines of Buddhism in Alexandria.
The following are the key passages from Clement's work in which Indian ascetics are described. Portions of them are quotes from Megasthenes, yet the author integrates these quotes with certain observations of his own (the "quite new" accounts referred to by Benjy). The text reproduced here is taken from the translation by JEL Oulton and H Chadwick in _Alexandrian Christianity: Selected translations of Clement and Origen_, Philadelphia, 1954 (the explanatory notes were added by me):
"The Indian Gymnosophists are also in the number, and the other barbarian philosophers. And of these there are two classes, some of them called Sarmanae [1], and others Brahmins [2]. And those of the Sarmanae who are called Hylobii [3] neither inhabit cities, nor have roofs over them, but are clothed in the bark of trees, feed on nuts, and drink water in their hands [4]. Like those called Encratites [5] in the present day, they know not marriage nor begetting of children. Some, too, of the Indians obey the precepts of Buddha; whom, on account of his extraordinary sanctity, they have raised to divine honours."
[1] Gk. sarmanai, Skt. s'raman.a. Buddhist, and probably also Jaina, ascetics. Besides, Clement a few lines earlier mentions the "Samanaeans" (Gk. samanaioi) of the Kus.aan.a realm of Bactria, a name that was but another variant Gk. form of the Skt. term s'raman.a. Clement presumably did not suspect that the terms sarmanai and samanaioi were derived from variant forms of the same Indian word. [2] Gk. brachmanai, Skt. braahman.a. Both terms were introduced in the Greek literary tradition by Megasthenes. [3] Gk. hylobioi, `forest dwellers', a term introduced by Megasthenes and which seems to represent a Gk. translation of Skt. vanaprastha (`forest-dweller' , a Brahmanical Hindu in the third, or ascetic, stage of life). Not clear how they could be termed as sarmanai = s'raman.as (i.e., Buddhist or Jaina ascetics). [4] Clement's account here seems to refer more to Jaina than to Buddhist s'raman.as since in Buddhism nakedness is regarded with horror, while in Jainism it is regarded as a holy practice [5] From Gk. enkrates, `controlling one's self, continent', a heterodox Christian group based in Syria who rejected wine, meat, and often marriage.
"[T]he Brahmans neither eat animal flesh nor drink wine. [...] They despise deaths and reckon life of no account. For they are persuaded that there is a regeneration. The gods they worship are Heracles [1] and Pan [2]. And the Indians who are called Holy Men go naked throughout their entire life. They seek for the truth, and predict the future, and reverence a certain pyramid [3] beneath which, they think, lie the bones of a certain god [4]. Neither the Gymnosophists nor the so-called Holy Men have wives. They think sexual relations are unnatural and contrary to law. For this cause they keep themselves chaste. The Holy Women are also virgins. They observe, it seems, the heavenly bodies and from what they indicate foretell future events."
[1] Probably S'iva, whose cult was at times conflated with that of Heracles in Hellenized Bactria. [2] Any suggestion for the ID of this deity? [3] This is most likely a reference to a Buddhist stuupa, but there is once again confusion here since Buddhists don't go naked. [4] Most likely a reference to the Buddhist cult of relics.
Does anybody here know how old was the Buddhist community in Alexandria at the time Clement was writing about it?
The date of Clement's _Stromata_ (roughly the 190s CE) matches those (2nd or 3rd centuries CE) proposed by Richard Salomon for the Brahmi- inscribed potsherds recovered in Egypt during the last decades, but does this in and by itself imply that the establishment of a Buddhist community in Alexandria and the beginning of an intensive phase of trade between India and Egypt could not have antedated that period? (N.B. Buddhists were probably the most active oversea traders in ancient and early medieval India.)
Lastly, is there any update on the Ptolemaic gravestone, allegedly marked with the symbols of the Dharma-cakra and the tris'uula, described by the Egyptologist William Flinders Petrie more than a century ago? According to that scholar, that gravestone would prove (alone?) that Buddhism had already penetrated into Egypt by the Ptolemaic period.
Regards, Francesco
Posts: 13012 | From: Chicago | Registered: Jan 2006
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posted
Yes that is correct. Later species ID confusion bred the word turkey (mistaken American peacock.
Other loan words in TN"K from that region that aren't remotely related to biblical Hebrew are: pardes - ancient Persian for garden qof - Sanscrit for ape tukee - Malabar for peacock
quote:Originally posted by Clyde Winters: Does anyone know if the Hebrew word for peacock is Tukki?
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Posts: 8014 | From: the Tekrur in the Western Sahel | Registered: Feb 2006
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posted
Live and learn (and research just a little). Yes I am quite serious. I'm not sporting.
Israelite communities along the Malabar also make the same claim.
I know nothing about Tamils in Egypt but have heard of the Gymnosophists. Also in Hinduism there are holy sites in East Africa.
Posts: 8014 | From: the Tekrur in the Western Sahel | Registered: Feb 2006
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