Empire: World History - 180. Gold & God: Connecting India & Ancient Rome

Episode Date: August 26, 2024

It was actually India, not China, that was the greatest trading partner of the Roman Empire. During this era, it’s clear that sea travel was the fastest, most economical and safest way to move people and goods in the pre-modern world, costing about a fifth of the price of equivalent land transport. The Golden Road of early east–west commerce, in other words, lay less overland, through a Persia often at war with Rome, and much more across the open oceans, via the choppy waters of the Red Sea  and the Indian Ocean. Listen as William and Anita discuss the trade links between India and Ancient Rome. To fill out the survey: survey.empirepoduk.com To buy William's book: https://coles-books.co.uk/the-golden-road-by-william-dalrymple-signed-edition Twitter: @Empirepoduk Email: [e-mail] Goalhangerpodcasts.com Assistant Producers: Anouska Lewis and Evan Green Producer: Callum Hill Exec Producer: Neil Fearn Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

If you want access to bonus episodes reading lists for every series of Empire, a chat community. Discounts for all the books mentioned in the week's podcast, add free listening and a weekly newsletter, sign up to Empire Club at www.mpowerpoduk.com. In March 2022, a team of archaeologists were excavating a newly discovered temple of the Egyptian goddess Isis at Beronike on the shores of the Red Sea, when they unearthed a series of remarkable finds. Beronike is today a bleak and desolate spot. Here, under pale blue skies,

the flat, treeless, red dust wadies 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. Nevertheless, these unprepossessing ruins easily missed as you drive up the Red Sea coast were the landing point for generations of Indian merchants traveling 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 Dharam Port, and we continue in this series talking about what has been dubbed to the Indosphere,

which is the reach and the influence of ancient India in the rest of the world in some rather surprising ways. And in the last episode we talked about Angkor Wat, Cambodia, Vietnam, Thailand, Lao, 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 the world. Asia. But now we're going to look at when that Indosphere crosses over with the Roman Empire. Because, I mean, William Dauron, Paul, we talk about the Roman Empire a lot, an awful lot, because it's so interesting. We do any talent. It's so interesting, William Daur and Paul. It is a very interesting subject. It dominated Europe, parts of Asia, North Africa, again, from an enormous period of time.

It is always, you know, deemed to be the peak of, well, I wouldn't even say Western society. culture, just culture is how, you know, people talk about the Roman Empire. In the West, yeah. Yeah. So just tell us about, you know, what you have found and what drew you in to, you know, 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 very

a Nike 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 Buddha statues. And 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. In 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 C.E. But this trade has been going ever since the time of Antony Cleopatra.

And you may remember from your Shakespeare that at the very end of that tragic play, Anthony and Cleopatra both commit suicide and Octavius, who will become the Emperor Augustus, absorbs Egypt into the Roman Empire after the Battle of Actium. 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 ivory is 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. Pepper 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. You know, 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 Goa are on 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, and 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 bearer. Nike statue that you're talking about, the second 200 AD roundabout. There are 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 dull. And so exactly what you'd expect so that Indians arriving in Egypt today to be doing is happening in the first century AD. But 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 Moziis Papyrus. And this manuscript is a shipping invoice. Exactly as, you know, 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 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. Go on. Tell us like what? I mean, the money won't mean much in terms of Sestershe, because he's a lot. 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. I 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, Allerick, the Visigoth when he comes and holds Rome to ransom. He doesn't just ask for gold. What does he ask for? He asked for pepper. He asked 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. Amazing. And this sort of stuff has been in plain sight. There is, for example, in Sicily, a wonderful site, which I've been to, Piazza Armarina. And it's famous for those pictures of Roman girls and 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. Yes, I am. 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 elephants tusk. Behind her are strings of Indian pepper. Peppercorns, yeah. And behind, she's flanked neither side by an elephant and a tiger. And that's shorthand for all the things that Romans were importing from India. and the theory is, by our cultured, 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. But 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, Mari Nostrum, the Roman Sea, all the coasts. You have this bright orange of little dots where coin hordes 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 Pictishites a lot of Roman imports of olive oil and wine. The luxuries that the Scots were enjoying. There is nothing to the east of Afghanistan. There's not a single coin hoard been found in either in Zhang or in wider China.

But there is an enormous cluster of thousands of Roman. Roman coin hordes all over the coasts of Kerala, Tamil Nad 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 hordes 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. follow the money and find out where exactly these operations are going on. And this Mozilla's 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 buildings 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 in Roman literature. It's there everywhere once you're looking for it. I mean, we're talking about sort of large figures, but it would be really helpful to know just how large the figure. Do you have numbers to pin on this? So the figures in the Missouri 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 sestercii 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 Sershi. The Rhineland Frontiers defended by eight legions at a cost of 88 million. But the take from the Red Sea customs is 270 million, Sershi. 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's kind of, you know, 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 fuzziness and frango. 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? Even more, he's suspicious of silks. The decadence of Roman matrons, he says, wearing seet-through clothes. And this means that the wealth of our empire debushes 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 how much fun at all. He's an extraordinary man, and he has this wonderful ending. In our sister podcast, the rest of history last year, Tom Holland, did a wonderful episode, one of my favorite podcasts ever on the end of Pompey. And 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? I 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 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, Myers-Hormos, going to India every single year. And the archaeologists have dug in Beronikean and Mayas-Hormos, the landing sites. And these are significantly larger vehicles than our parking in ports in the Mediterranean, Duranian, you know, austere and sites like that. These are enormous oceanic freighters of the day. Wow. And they contain particularly large enough to import elephants, which are being used in the theatre. 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. And it appears in St. Matthew's Gospel, where Martha rubs it over the feet of Christ.

Nard. 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. It's a sort of... Do you ever wonder who was the first person to realise that a civet cat's goolies were like a good thing to be rubbing over a human body? I often cast my mind back to the very first time. What happened on that?

What the hell was... What was going on there? Or even more extraordinary whales vomit, amber grease on the shores of the... of the sea, who would have thought of taking that and turning it to perfume? Well, listen, people have hobbies. You have some strange hobbies, actually. 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 in 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 gold? and hordes and things. They did. There's this major Roman trading station at a place called

Aracamedu south of Madras, which is the modern Poudouquet. And 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 prize possessions for years was a gucky purse when they spelled it with a why. I just loved it so much, I can't tell you.

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. Absolutely. 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 Berra Niki on the Karelan coast in Aracamadu and in Gujarat and at the mouth of the Indus. So what you're 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 getting gold. They're selling goods that are very common there at enormously inflated prices. And we see in the archaeology at Berneke'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 are 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. And this was their trade. They took the equivalent of Kianti 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. They got duty-free.

Except it wasn't duty-free. It was duty-plus. They paid a great deal of duty on it. 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. to speak in sort of gobbledygook, having got too drunk. And in the story that becomes Ariadne in 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, and 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. Welcome back. So just before the break, we were talking about Kianti, making its way throughout

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 Didimus, which simply means twin. And 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 axe of Thomas,

which is written in what's now Urfa in Southeast Turkey where I was this time last week, fun 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 he, you know, just like we know that St. Paul and St. Peter travelled westwards across the Mediterranean to convert the people, St. Paul, working in what's now Anatolia and 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 were supposed to convert the people of Arabia and India. But the story of doubt, well, first of all, why was he doubting Thomas Latin in itself, if you don't know, is 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. It's a foreshadowing, they call it, in the films these days. But it's in the acts that they talk about this trip. And only in the, 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 Axe 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 fourth 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 Thomas was given this gig, the gig of India. And he didn't want to go there. He didn't want to go. So first of all, they don't rush through the story. It's great. 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 Paul 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. So his brother, who is now resurrected and is appearing to the apostles, doesn't take no for an answer. And according to the Axe 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 the 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 Yavinas, which is the same word as Ionian or Greek. Wow.

So there is a whole tradition of both bodyguards and soldiers and architects from the Mediterranean seeking employment in India at this point. So if you, you know, one can regard the acts of Thomas 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 did 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 Gondifaris turns out, when the Axe Thomas was first translated into English in the 19th century,

no one knew who this Gondafaris was. But then, of course, his coins begin turning up when archaeologists are digging in Gandara, that's modern Peshawahua region in Pakistan. And Gondifaris is not just one man, but there's a whole dynasty of Indo-Pathian 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 Tachshula. He rules Tachshula, which in India is hugely important, Tuxela University and the academics who flocked to Tachlera 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 Peshalla, 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. Thomas going to Kerala. Yes. And in Kerala today, there's this whole community of, they call themselves, the St. Thomas Christians. Well, there's a mount of St. Thomas.

I mean, still, you know, you see it in maps, you see it in road direction. St. Thomas is everywhere. On the edge of Madras. No, and even in sort of around coaching, there are places named after him. And you get 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. And so that Christianity arrives early in India is not in question.

Whether it was, in fact, the figure of St. Thomas or whether he's a mythical placing of someone that appears in the Gospels to this mission. Well, we don't know that. But what we do know is what the story, the acts tell us about how Thomas died, in that he gets into a ruckus with a Brahman because he's converting people, because people are converting. There's already a Jewish community around Kerala, so he is among people who understand him, see him, he can live with,

but he's pushing further into the Indian population, and one Brahman doesn't like it. So takes a spear and pierces his side. And he dies of a spear wound, much the same as Christ did, the same wound that he wouldn't believe happened or was the resurrection happened afterwards until he could place his hand in it. So there is a symmetry and neatness to the end of that story. So I'll tell you something. You know how a month ago you and I were both performing at latitude? Yes.

Which I think you were calling latitude at one point. Oh, do not do that. People just have to go back and listen to your ridiculous pronunciations, Napaam. Seriously. A number of people who tell me, what is that with his pronunciation? I just say, he speaks posh. It's fluent, posh is what it is. Yes, okay, Latitude. Congratulations for knowing how to say it. Well done.

When we were at Latitude, just outside the gates of that festival, there is a beautiful church in Suffolk called Blythebra, with famous hammer beam roof with these wonderful angels on it. In the choir of that church is a whole series of sculptures of the apostles, and among them is St. Thomas, and he's holding carpentry tools, because he was a carpenter in the axe of Thomas who went to India. So this is something which, you know, was known in Britain very early on. And in fact, the first time we have any record of a Englishman going to India is in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle when King Alfred, who of course is the star of The Last Kingdom, which is the wonderful Netflix series with Utrid, son of Utrid. Also known for burning cakes, also known for a few other things. Anyway, so Alfred sends Sighalm off to India and St. Thomas to bring back the spices of India. SIGhelm goes off and then he comes back and in the 12th century we have references from William of Malmesbury saying that at Sherbourne, there were still the gems that were brought back from India by Sikhelm on his trip to St Thomas, meaning the shrine of St. Thomas in India. So that's literally the first Englishman to go to India did so looking for the shrine of St. Thomas.

But it isn't just as late as the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, which is what the 8th, 9th century, Alfred. You have early church historians like Eusebius, who's writing in the third century, Jerome, writing in the fourth century, all talking about Indian Christians, St. Thomas, Bartholomew. There's a reference in the writings of the Church of Alexandria to the patriarch sending off the Stoic philosopher Pantanus, who discovered a flourishing Christian community. waiting for him on the Indian coast. And at the Council of Nysia, where the words of the creed,

the Christian creed are thrashed out, Nicaea is modern Isnik in Turkey, just to the east of Istanbul. At that council, there are more Indian and Persian bishops than there are from Western Europe. We think of Christianity, of course, now is this Western religion,

but it's born in Palestine. And it spreads first east before it spreads west. So is that, I mean, if the acts are true and St. Thomas did indeed, or somebody, did come to India and to Kerala, probably, because you know, you see the springing up of Christian churches around and about that same time, very early, earlier than most places in the world. Does, is this the pushback? You know, first of all, India is exporting its culture and its religion,

and now something is being imported in? Is this the founding of Christianity in India, in the East? Well, in any trading relationships, goods trade in both directions. If you've got ships going from Egypt to Kerala and from Kerala to Egypt, you're going to find stuff going midway. We even have refcords. There's an extraordinary new discovery on the Isle of Sucotra. Now, Sucotra lies halfway between Aden and either Somalia or Ethiopia, certainly the Horn of Africa. It's that island in the middle. And in a cave on Sucotra have been found something like a thousand inscriptions from sailors of the period who went to this cave

that was obviously a very holy place and there are references to Christian gods but there are also many references to Krishna, to the Buddha and to St. Thomas Christian on this cave and what it shows

is that two thirds of the inscriptions are from sailors coming out of Gujarat. Right. So you have this large diaspora of Indian sailors as today sailing the Gulf in the Middle Ages, This was where all the Dows were made for sailing up the Red Sea and through the Gulf.

I just kind of love this when they turn up and then they carve into a wall. Jay Patel was here. I mean, it's the equivalent, isn't it? And it's literally that. It's literally that. Yeah, yeah. It's great. So this cave is called the Hock Cave.

People stopped at Socotech because it had fresh water. So if you're sailing up the sea, you obviously need to keep your sailors from getting too thirsty. But they could also buy something called red Indian. Sinibar Resum, which is known as Dragon's Blood, which again went for a large sum of money at the time. And there are inscriptions in Persian, Palmyran, Aramaic, Ethiobic, Axamite, Arabian and Abertean, but most of the graffiti has been left by Indians, mainly Gujaratis from modern Gujarat. Out of 219 inscriptions, dating from the 2nd of the 5th century, 192 are written in the Indic Brahmi script, and one each only in Bactrian and Karohti.

and the names they give are unquestionably Indian. Vishnu, son of the merchant, Gunja, Scandabuti, the sea captain, or just the nicely laconic, Badra arrived. So these guys are arriving, just carving their names, as you say. Yeah, yeah, yeah, Kilroy and Badra. So, I mean, would you say these Buddhist finds in Egypt are the counterpoise to these Christian finds in India? I mean, are we seeing sort of a pincer movement where one influence is going out one way and another influences going out the other way?

It's absolutely that. And we've known about these legends of St. Thomas. No one knows whether St. Thomas himself actually did go to India, but we know that early Christians were definitely at work there, that there were churches in India before there were churches in Britain, which is not counterintuitive, but it's very obvious if you look at the Roman trade routes. And the thing that always intrigues me, and I don't have the answer to this, is the whole question of monasticism, because as we talked about in earlier episodes,

Buddhist monasticism and this whole business of finding a cave, going apart from the world, going up a mountain, living on your own, apart from society. This begins in India as early as 250 BC. We have these early caves, first of all in the Gengengetic Plain, then in the Western Ghats, then spreading to Sri Lanka and so on. This was an idea which was entirely novel, in the sense we take monasticism for granted today, but it's not an idea that existed in the West. And the great question, I think these finds of Indian Buddhist items turning up on the Red Sea coast, is did the monasticism, which had become very common in India, across Afghanistan, across India,

across Sri Lanka, was that an influence on early Christian monasticism? Because where does early Christian monasticism begin? It begins on the Red Sea. The first Christian monk is St. Anthony, who leaves Alexandria around 300. He goes into the desert. He's followed by his admirers. And in order to get away from his admirers, he wants to live on his own as a hermit. He goes up a mountain overlooking the Red Sea, and his followers that he organizes into a community at the base of his cave near a spring at the bottom of the mountain. And that's St. Anthony's monastery that's widely recognized to be the first Christian monastery. So among all the other ideas that may have come originally from India, we now have to ask the question, is it possible that Buddhist monasticism was somehow an inspiration

to Christian monasticism? We know that there were Jewish ascetics in the Roman period. And the Essines who were in the deserts of Judea, doing things very similar to early Christian monks, were they also influenced by Buddhist practice? It is a tantalizing question to leave this episode on. What are we going to be talking about in the next episode, William? Just tell us where you're taking us next. So from here, we are heading back to China.

We talked in the early episodes that we did in April. about the wonderful monk, Shwan Zhang, who left China, traveled through the Gobi deserts and the Taklimakan, and went to study in Nalanda. And we left the story on the important moment of his return with all these Sanskrit texts from Nalanda, bringing not just Buddhist learning, but all the learning of the University of Nalanda back to China. The next story is the Buddhist conquest of China. And with the victory of Buddhism in China comes an enormous tidal wave of Indian learning in maths, astronomy, literature, furniture, food, cosmology, and a whole variety of other things. So what you find is this extraordinary moment when Indian culture briefly takes over China.

And we should say that if you want to buy William's tremendous book, you can pre-order a copy from a link in the show notes right here right now. But till the next time we meet, it's goodbye from me, Anita Arnind. And goodbye from me, William Duremple.