The Ancients - The Romans and China

Episode Date: April 9, 2026

How did Roman silver travel from Egypt to China across monsoon seas, pirate waters, and bustling ports? Tristan Hughes is joined by legendary archaeologist Sir Barry Cunliffe for a dramatic journey through the Indian Ocean, where Roman glass, pepper, and silk linked two ancient superpowers. From Sri Lanka to the Malacca Strait, they reveal a dazzling world of traders, middlemen and maritime adventure.MoreOrigins of the Silk RoadListen on AppleListen on SpotifyThe Great Wall of ChinaListen on AppleListen on SpotifyPresented by Tristan Hughes. Audio editor is Aidan Lonergan, the producer is Joseph Knight. The senior producer is Anne-Marie Luff.All music courtesy of Epidemic SoundsThe Ancients is a History Hit podcast.Sign up to History Hit for hundreds to hear an exclusive chat between Tristan and Sir Barry Cunliffe, as well as see hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe.  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Ever wondered why the Romans were defeated in the Tudorburg Forest? What secrets lie buried in prehistoric Ireland? Or what made Alexander truly great? With a subscription to History Hit, you can explore our ancient past alongside the world's leading historians and archaeologists. You'll also unlock hundreds of hours of original documentaries with a brand-new release every single week covering everything from the ancient world to World War II.

Just visit historyhit.com slash subscribe. Hello, I hope you're doing well. I'm recording this from my car, because I've just finished doing an interview with an absolute legend, a legend in the field of archaeology, and quite frankly, a British treasure today. He's none other than Barry Cunliff. Sir Barry Cunleff. He's been involved in archaeological excavations since the 1950s. He's in his 80s now, but he's still going strong. He's still as lovely as ever and as brilliant as ever. I've been up at his house doing this interview all about his new book, which explores the maritime connections, the maritime trading world of ancient history in the Indian Ocean and beyond, the ships carried by the

monsoons. We recreate in this episode a theoretical journey of Roman goods from Roman Egypt and the Red Sea all the way to China. This was so much fun. Barry, is as brilliant as ever. Send love to Barry in the comments, okay, because as mentioned, he is an absolute treasure and I really do hope you enjoy this episode. Let's go. It's 2000 years ago and Sri Lanka, this beautiful island in the Indian Ocean, is one of the great pivots of the world. Here, the Indian Ocean does not divide the world. It tethers it. through bustling ports that can be found scattered along this island's coastline. To the Roman merchants who have survived the gruelling journey here from the Red Sea,

this is Trapra Barnair, the renowned trading land near the edge of their known world. To the sailors arriving from the Han Empire in the east, this is a land renowned for its precious stones, its gems. But for those who live on these docks, it is simply the point where the world meets. The waters are thick with the multi-masted ships of Indian mariners. They are the master navigators of the monsoon, the men whose sturdy vessels and deep knowledge of the currents turn a treacherous ocean into a viable highway. Without their expertise and their fleets, this effort is a very large way. This ancient link between the Mediterranean and the South China Sea would simply cease to exist.

On these keys, Roman silver dinari are traded for bundles of raw silk. The black pepper of the Malabar coast is weighed against the cinnamon stripped from these very hills. Traders going back east to China are loading up their ships with Roman glass. For centuries, this island will stand at the centre. of a great maritime highway, a vital link in the chain that bound the Roman Red Sea to the gates of Han China. Two empires, thousands of miles apart, fascinated by each other and their goods, connected via sea by the great ports and sailors of the Indian Ocean of Sri Lanka and beyond. It is a journey and a world we are going to explore today with our special guest, Dr. Barrier.

Barry Cunleff. Barry, it is such a pleasure to be back here and have you back on the podcast. It's a great pleasure for me as well. There's nothing I like more than talking about the subjects I've been writing about. I have nothing I like more than having you on as well to do it. And we've been doing this for a few years now, haven't we? We have. We have.

We've done Brittany, the Sahara. And now we're covering this amazing story of these extensive sea and ocean trade routes that they were 2,000 years ago. that did link the Mediterranean to China. Yes, the world has always been connected. And it's connected either by people going across deserts like the Sahara or going along the steppe, that wonderful east-west route from China to Europe along the step, or this sort of what I call the underbelly of Eurasia route

through the oceans, through the Indian Ocean and the China Seas. But always the world has been linked. Humans have been mobile and have always wanted to explore. This idea of acquiring things is so important, I think, to humans. They need to acquire things like useless yellow metal that they put down their hands and hang around their necks. And gold that. Okay. All coloured stones, glittery stones.

They want to acquire things that show off, but they also want to acquire knowledge. And I think what we're talking about today is both the acquiring, of commodities, but it's also people wanting to share knowledge and find out about distant places and bring that home and show off their travel experiences and so on. Well, this feels like an important point to address straightaway question to address. So did the Romans say imperial Rome, so the early centuries AD and Imperial China at the same time, did they know of each other? Oh, they certainly knew of each other.

And they knew of each other. first of all, through the silk routes, the roads that joined China and the west, north of the Himalaya Mountains, these roads we call the silk roads, but all sorts of commodities passed along them. These are through the stands today. That's right, starting from Western China, going through the Taklamaka, or run Taklamakan Desert, and into Uzbekistan and then further and further until hitting Europe. and commodities passed. Silk was moving from China into Europe, even before the Romans. So the Romans will have had some idea of what was out there. And similarly, the Chinese were very interested in what was happening in the far west.

And there was one chap called Gan Yang, obviously a Chinese, in 97 AD. Right. The Chinese were the Han dynasty now occupied the whole of China, and they had moved into the Tachlamakan desert area. And they were looking west, and they got Ganyang, and they told him to go and find out about the west. And he went, as far as we can see, he went through the silk rows and then down the Indus Valley to the mouth of the Indus, and then caught a boat from there and went up the Arabian Gulf to the Kahe now in southern Iraq. So that would be in the Parthian Empire, as it then was. And he was collecting information for the Han Emperor. And the Han Emperor wanted to know all about the West.

And when he got to, well, the mouth of the Tigris and Euphrates, he met a load of sailors. And they said, oh, you don't want to go there. It's, oh, don't go there. Take your three years. You know, you'll be scared to death and everything. So he decided to stay where he was and collect information. And he got a file of information about the West and went back home. So here was the Chinese were deliberately attempting to find out about the West.

That's the famous story, isn't it? We hear once in a while about how, you know, the Chinese, they look West and then he gets the Parthians and the Parthians kind of push them off going any further idea, which is so interesting. That's right. Well, the Parthians, if we're talking about the Roman Empire and the Han Empire in China, the Parthians sat in between, covering Persia essentially, the whole of Persia. It was they who commanded the silk roots. And they commanded the price of silk. And the Romans wanted silk desperate. And silk was passing. But they didn't want the Chinese to find another way around to the Romans to cut them out. We've got that wonderful quote of Vempliny about silk, talking about the huge amount of Roman money that's being spent. And he says, I've got in the words here, India, China and the Arabian Peninsula, take 100 million cistercies from our empire every year at a conservative estimate. That's what our luxuries and our women cost. And then he goes on to, say, getting the silk, it comes from very laborious to make.

and it comes from very far away, so distant the region of the globe drawn upon, to enable the Roman matron to flaunt transparent raiments in public. So he's a sort of grumpy old man saying, you know, the silk is costing us a huge amount, and it's really not very good for the morale of the Romans. So in that regard, we know that these Chinese goods are reaching the Roman Empire, but if they're not all coming overland via the parties, Is it then the case, I remember talking to William Dale Ripple about this, that Chinese silk and so much more is coming through the ports of places like India.

It's been ferried from China to India and then Roman traders take it on from there into their empire. Yes, I think that's right. The main silk route is that northern step route, the Silk Road's route. But there was also this southern route by sea. and Silk was getting down to various places, it was going down the Ganges, in fact, and it was going down the Indus and being picked up at various places along the ocean routes as well.

You mentioned plenty there, but also this Chinese writer as well. So for learning more about their trade routes and maybe where they intertwined, where East intertwined with West, in regards to these maritime trade routes, can we reconstruct a potential voyage through sources from, well, from both cultures, I guess. We can, but we've got to be very careful, I think,

because from our sort of Western-oriented point of view and a Roman-centered point of view, which a lot of people hold, they see the Romans as being the entrepreneurs from getting on their boats and going across and trying to get to China and so on. You've got to remember there were a lot of very, very well-trained sailors with thousands of years of experience

in the Bay of Bengal, in the Arabian Sea, in India itself, making these journeys daily. And so there was a whole network of maritime connection. And what Rome did was sort of check into it and make use of it. And sometimes wander along the roots themselves. And we get a wonderful description in Han history. It's called the Han Han Shu, the history of the later Han period. So a Chinese document, it says in a particular year, the Yan Shi year in the reign of Vibhuan, so you can work out that's 166 AD.

And then they say the Da Chin, which is the Roman emperor. And they name him Andon, and now we know that must be Marcus Aurelius. Yes, of course. Sent envoys to China. So sent envoys to China. They end up bringing gifts of an ivory and rhino horn and turtle shell. But then the source says, but nothing of a precious nature. So they're saying, he's a tattie old gifts.

They don't seem that pleased with them. They don't seem pleased with the gifts they've received. That's right. The gifts are not the sort of thing an ambassador would bring to the Chinese emperor. You've got to remember that the Chinese emperors thought themselves to be absolutely at the center of the world, and all the rest of the world was subservient to them. And what they wanted to do was to show all these different people in the world were bringing gifts and bowing down in front of the emperor. And the more people you could get to do that ambassadors to come in, the more your

own people saw you as a really important emperor. So the Chinese were keen to get these ambassadors is coming in, I'm fascinated by this reference to what they were bringing. Because what they were bringing in this rhino horn ivory turtle shell, they could have picked up in a market on East Africa and just sailed across with it, you know, any old tat, a local market. And what I wonder is whether they passed themselves off as ambassadors, but really they were just Roman traders, trying to open up a market. And they didn't bring the right gifts for the emperor.

So that is the only actual case where we've got a text saying the Romans actually came to China. Which is very interesting because we're going to delve into the various port-along route where we know that Romans were. And then when the evidence gets fuzzy from the Roman side and you go the other way and you start figuring out who are the people, who are the sailors who are reaching finally past the Malay, the Malacca Strait and the Malay Peninsula and up into China. But it seems that although maybe the case of actual Romans reaching China is more dubious, there is evidence of Roman goods ultimately reaching far East Asia. Oh, absolutely. One of the products that they really loved in the East was Roman glass. Glass made, well, Syria was probably the most important centre of glass making in the Roman period.

And we get Roman glass ending up. in Korea and in Japan. Wow. Is this Japan? There's Roman stuff in Japan. Yeah. But how that glass got there and who were the carriers is another thing. We mustn't think of a load of Romans loaded up with, you know, rucksacks full of glass getting there.

Around our houses, we've got a load of stuff made in China. But it's not a Chinese trader who brings it here. It comes through middlemen, middlemen, middlemen. And I think that's how much of the Roman material got to the East, but it certainly did. There's a lot of Roman glass, particularly in the burials in Korea, the 4th century AD. That's the high period of it. But one suspects that most of that went via the Silk Roads, Overland. So overland, but also there probably was some that did go via that maritime route as well.

Oh, yes, yes. There is indeed. And there are Roman items, one of the United. finds all the way along that maritime roof. Well, let's start tracing that now, Barry. And I think we're going to take ourselves to the early 3rd century AD. So a time when the Roman Empire, let's say before the 3rd century crisis, so Septimius Severus and likes, the Roman Empire's at his height, and also in China, you have the final years of the Han dynasty as well. So before these crises periods, so they're both of their height. We're going to imagine that we're a trader

sailing with, or let's say items like Roman glass from the west, from what is today Egypt and the Red Sea, and get all the way to China. First and foremost, those waterways at that time, Barry, first millennium AD, from the Red Sea, past Arabia, past the Indian subcontinent, Southeast Asia to China. Just how busy were they at that time? I think they were extremely busy, not just with Roman trade, But they were so interlinked by generations after generation after generation of maritime connection that those seas were alive with people. And when we get little hints of what was going on in the ports from various texts, they were really busy places and they were visited by sailors from all over the place.

That's the interesting thing. Many of the ports along the way, your Roman, would have made. up with people from Arabia, people from India, people from the Malay region. These ports were really cosmopolitan. It really starts, I think, with the Ptolemies. We've just got to go back a little bit before our preferred date. The Ptolemy's death of Alexander the Great, three to three, break up with Alexander's Empire.

Egypt comes under one of one of the old commanders. One of his generals, Ptolemy. Topami. Yep. And the Ptolemy's begin, but what Alexander does is to create Alexandria, the port, the Mediterranean port of Egypt. And the Ptolemies then have the Mediterranean port in their country. They also have the Red Sea port in their country. So they are sitting on this interface between the Roman.

world, as it were, the Mediterranean world, what becomes the Roman world, Mediterranean, and the Red Sea, which provides the link into these great seaway shipping lanes to China. And we find that the Ptolemy's sort of developing these, this one down the Red Sea, and building ports on the African coast of the Red Sea so that their ships can get down. By 118 BC, they are trading down to the southern end of the Red Sea. And then there's a guy called Udoxas, a sailor and entrepreneur and explorer. And one of the Ptolemy's hires him to take an Indian who has been shipwrecked in the Red Sea. So that tells us there were Indian sailors coming into the Red Sea at that stage. So Udoxas takes his Indian and says, you know, show me the way to India. And he makes a trip

across to India. And that is the first information we've got about opening up that route to India from what is to become the Roman world. And then we get this amazing document, the Pericles of the Eritrean Sea. Yes. Which is a most fascinating account. It's really a text for sailors who are making sea journeys from the Red Sea across to India. And it's written in very basic Greek, so anyone can read it. And it gives all the details any sailor would want about all the ports that you visit, how to get there, what the hazards are, what goods are on sale. It's a textbook for a trader.

Information, yes, exactly. What to expect. It's just text, just information. And it was put together sometime in the middle of the first century BC. So after you doxes, one of the things it says, it mentions a man called Hippolytus. There's also a wind called Hippolyt as well. So there's a problem here.

But he was the first person, we're told in the Pheroplas, to sail on the monsoon winds. This is a very important development because getting from the mouth of the Red Sea, you'd come through the straits into the Gulf of Aden. Yep. and the two met at about right angles, and the Gulf of Aden gives out into the northern part of the Indian Ocean. Before, if you wanted to go to India, you would have to sail up the coast and around

the northern end of the, what is called the Arabian Sea, but the northern end of the Indian Ocean, down to the coast of India. Now, what Hippelos does is to show how you can sail on the monsoon winds. He develops these different routes that you can take, one along the coast, one can, cutting across to northern India and one, using the monsoon properly to go right across straight from west to east and hit southern India. So open ocean? You're crossing the open ocean. What is there in between?

There are a few small islands in between, but apart from that, not much. Nothing much at all. Pliny, who writes about this later, says that going from one of the Red Sea ports across to southern India, Moezeris in southern India, would take you 40 days. and he says, but remember to take archers on board because when you get to the Indian coast, there are a load of pirates. Pirates. So if we now go to the time with the Romans in Egypt, so post-Augustus, Anthony and Cleopatra, they're long gone. Egypt is part of the Roman Empire.

They've taken advantage of these ports already created by the Ptolemies and then they take it to the next level with this trade. But let's say then we are a trader in the Roman Empire. Well, let's say we start at Alexandria. We've got our glass, beautiful glass from Alexandria. and we're going to take it east, of course, also wanting to get some goods back from India. But how do we go from Alexandria to these ports on the Red Sea where we begin our naval voyage? Alexandria is beautifully cited, of course, on the sea and on one of the branches of the Nile. So offload at Alexandria, go across the peninsula, reload on a river barge,

go right down the river to Coptis, which is way down past the delftia. And at Coptis, unload again onto a caravan. Now, you've got to get across the eastern desert. And a caravan, by then, let's just clarify. So these are like camels and camels and they're like camels. What is it necessary? But we've got to go across a desert. It's about 200 kilometres of desert to get from the river,

Coptis on the river, to get to the Red Sea. And you can take a whole number of routes. We know they're all there. The direct one, east-west, goes to Ayosormus, which is a red sea port. That's the shortest route, and it's not necessarily the best. You could take a longer route. Instead of going from the river direct east to hit the sea, you could go southeast and hit the sea much further down the red sea, as it were. Bereniki.

Bereniki. Yeah. That's the other port. Now, again, you've got robbers and highwaymen and all sorts of horrors to face. And what the Romans, by the time we're talking about in the first century, the whole area, all the road networks were beautifully protected. Along the roads at certain intervals, a day's journey intervals, there were rest places, fortified rest places with water for the animals and the people,

and garrisons to protect them and so on. So it was safe to travel. And one of the advantages going down to Berniki was that you miss the really dodgy winds at the northern end of the Red Sea. So if you went across at Maris, Hormuz, you would be in a fairly rough area, weather-wise.

So you cut out the bad weather and the currents and so on and spend more time on the desert and you get to Bernici. And then you get on a boat there. And then sail south. Where you go then depends a lot on what you want to do. You might only want to go to the southern end of the Red Sea to trade with people there who are bringing stuff across the Indian Ocean.

But you might want to go right out. And one of the places, the favorite places to go to was Adulis. Adulis, yes. Which is in Axum. Axum, the kingdom of Axum, yes, in Ethiopia. Adelis in, yeah. Adulis is actually in an Eriton. But Adulis is one of the ports of the kingdom of Axum, which is a very big kingdom that develops, by the time we're talking about the third century, it's well underway. It's develops in the third, fourth, fifth centuries. If you think of it, sitting there on the side of the Red Sea by Eritrea, Ethiopia now, and to the north of it, it's Nubia, the north of that, is Egypt. So it's got direct routes through Nubia to Egypt. It's got direct routes through Nubia to Egypt. It's got direct routes. It's got direct.

direct routes right down to the east of Africa, where you get slaves, you get gold, you get rhino horns and all the rest of it, and it's got a direct route to the Sahel, to the west, at the zone south of the Sahara Desert. So Axel sits in a very preferred place for trade and to acquire commodities. So if you went to Adoulis, you could pick up commodities all over the place, including India, because some of the ships from India offloaded. So you might not want to go any further. You might be able to get everything you want to. But we want to go further. We want to go further. Okay. So what you might do then is to sail to one of the ports on the Arabian side of the Red Sea down at the southern end of the Red Sea,

where the Red Sea gets very narrow. There is a little narrow straight where you go from the Red Sea into much wider Gulf of Aden. Right. So this feels like we're approaching the first big as a kind of geographic choke point, as it were. It is exactly that a choke point. Because we've gone from the Nile,

across the desert, to Beroneke or Myers-Hormos, those two big rubber ports, down south through the Red Sea, past the biggest Axum trading port of Adidas. And now we've reached this choke point. Barry, take it away. If you visualize the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden,

at more or less right angles. Within that right angle is the coast of Arabia. Yes. On the east side of the Red Sea, on the north side of the Gulf of Asia. And around that little corner, there are a whole range of ports. They're not in the Roman Empire at all. They are free ports run by their own kings and so on. And you've got Musa, Ocalis, then around.

the corner into the Gulf of Aden, who got Yudemon, which is Aden now, and then Kana, which is further along the Arabian coast. And all those ports were used at this time, and they were absolutely thriving. One of the reasons they were thriving was overseas trade, obviously, but the other reason that they sit right in the middle of the area of incense. Incense. So these ports for a thousand years being incense ports, providing incense for the Mediterranean world and India. So they are very well linked in. And they've attracted sailors from all over the place for at least a thousand years. And then described as really thriving with sailors rubbing shoulders, Indians rubbing shoulders with Arabs and so on. And from there, from that little cluster of ports, it's very, very important.

you can sail up the Arabian coast to the Gulf of, to the Arabian Gulf and around to India, or you can sail down the African coast. And they were doing this. So sailing down the African coast to as far south as Zanzibar. Zanzibar. Yeah. And there were ports down the coast where they were picking up slaves. They were picking up ivory, rhino horn again, and turtle shells and so on.

And we've also got these boats, Indians, coming across from Indian. India, bringing gear from India. So it really was the heart of the ancient world, the commercial heart of the ancient world. I'd love to do an episode in the future about Roman trade with places like Zanzibar and sub-Saharan Africa along the East African coast. But that's the one for another day. So incense, Nabatians as well. So it's not just overland trade. You know, they're using the sea routes to get incense back to the Red Sea. But let's say we're in the Gulf of Aden. But actually, rather than going up the Arabian coast. We've gone along the African coast of what is today Somalia. So we've gone down that way. And then we plan to go across the Indian Ocean to West India.

What's this island that you meet first of all, which also seems really fascinating in the story? Yeah. If you imagine the horn of Africa, which is the most eastern part of Africa sticking out, it's Somalia. Yes. Off the horn of Africa, somewhere about 250 kilometers, off the horn of Africa, is this island of Sokotra. Sokotra. It belongs to Yemen, though, I think.

It's absolutely perfectly cited as a port of trade, because people, sailors have always liked to use islands as ports of trade where they can exchange goods. And Sokotra, we know, for example, that it's... was a base for Indian sailors because they were describing their names on rock surfaces and so on all through the period that we're talking about. There were Indians present there trading. So you have not only the ports on the Arabian coast, but the ports on Sarkotra itself. And I would guess that Salkatra became more and more and more important as the conditions on land became politically. slightly on the stable. So Kotra became more of a centre because it was safer. And again,

we were told that sailors were rubbing shoulders there the whole time. And people were learning about each other there and learning each other's ways and picking up information about where to go, where the best deals could be done and so on. So you can just imagine what life in the ports would have been like there. So our Roman sailors perhaps have decided to stop it. My guess is that those who wanted to go to India wouldn't have. Oh, okay. They probably would have started at somewhere like O'Kyllis, which is where Pliny says those going to India start off from.

So we're still on the Arabian coast. You take on your last water on the Arabian coast, no doubt take on a load of incense and so on, because you can flog that in Indian ports, along with whatever you're bringing from... The Mediterranean world. And from there, you could, but in the third century, the Romans wouldn't sail up the Arabian coast and across the Gulf of Amman and then down the Indian coast. They wouldn't do that because the Sasanians were now occupying what is Persia, in fact.

And they were controlling the Arabian Gulf. So it was a bit dangerous for a Roman to go up there. So what you could do is sail part way up the Arabian coast and then out to sea across to India using one of the routes that would be available during the monsoon winds and you would hit the coast of India, Barbaricum. So is this the first port that you would see? That would be probably, yes, you could go directly to Barbaricum, you could go to another port Zagara, or you could go to a third port, Moziris, all the way down the coast.

So the northernmost of the ports would be barbaricum. That was a popular port to go to. But the sailing routes, you could take which one you wanted to go wherever you wanted, because those were the three routes that were used time and time and time again. And those were the ones that were recommended by the peripus. Barbaricum's an interesting name for a port, isn't it? So it sounds like barbarian. So does that give a hint that there are all these foreigners here, I guess?

Yes, I suppose so, because there are some Scythians that settled down in that area as well. It was a real mixing pot for people. We should say where it is. It's actually at the mouth of the Indus River. It feels like it would be the Indus River Valley. So somewhere that actually Alexander the Great had been before, it's like Patala and that area. That's right. It was a site that, yes, Alexander had. gone, when he'd gone through the whole of the Persian Empire, he ended up there. And then he actually set up, set a couple of ships off from there to explore the seaways. So it was a port, you know, an important port at that time. Its importance is the link that it gives north through the Indus Valley. Commodities that were coming from the north was silk from the silk

rose, commodities like turquoise, azurite and rare stones like that, coming down from Iran and Afghanistan. So you're getting commodities coming down from the north and also commodities coming from all over India. So it was a very good place to go for a trader. Then Lazegaira further south was another good port, this was on the Indian coast again, because it latched into a very productive area for all kinds of commodities like rice and wheat and things like that. It was very prolific, but also all kinds of oils. It's a rice. The Romans imported rice from Barry Garza or Bazaar. Well, you could, it was one of the things listed as an export. I wouldn't have thought about the Romans and rice. I didn't know that rice would have made it back, but evidently, yeah.

Well, it's what the peripus mentions. It's rice. Rice is one of the commodities. So that gave you a different set of commodities. If you had a sort of shopping list, you'd choose your port and choose which of the monsoon winds to catch to get to your port. But the really exciting one, I think, is this one directly across from Achilles to Maziri. Maziris, okay. So this is the further south of the three that we've talked about. That's right.

And it's on the Malabar coast now. So it's still where India is coming. to a point, a southern point, is quite close. It's the western side of India before you get to the tip of the Indian Peninsula. Kerala. Is it Kerala, race? Kerala? Yeah, yeah. We know quite a lot about Muziris. I mean, it's the one that Pliny talks about. I should have said that the peripus written in the mid-first century, B.C. gives a lot of information, but Pliny, who writes natural histories is about the 70s of the first century.

First century, yeah. He gives a huge amount more information. So during that time, the whole Indian Ocean trade has opened up and he's got access to vast amounts of information. Miseries, for example, we're told that there are areas where the foreigners live. So there are foreigners, it might be Romans,

it might be Roman traders. You know, they could be Arab traders, but there's a foreigners' quarter there. There's even a temple to Augustus. That's interesting. So it does suggest that the Romans were present in large numbers. Reading Pliny, it clearly is the favoured route. It's the route that they went to. Now, the beauty of Mazziris is that down the west coast of India is a sort of mountain range,

cuts the coast off from much of the rest of the peninsula. But at Mozilla, there are routes through the mountain range, so that commodities landing at that port could go inland and across the peninsula. And that clearly is what happens. And commodities could come from the peninsula through the mountains to Mozilla. It's almost certainly the place that is now called Patanum, An excavation went on there, well, has been going on there for some years, and it has produced evidence of maritime trade. It's produced Roman coins, Roman things, Arabian material.

It's produced harbour works. There's a beautiful piece of excavation they did a few years ago, showing the harborside with brickwork all the way down it, protect it. And in the mud at the bottom, a boat six metres long was preserved. And in the mud of the harbour, the most amazing array of stuff, seeds of just about everything, I found suddenly rice and wheat and watermelon and grapes and all sorts of exotic things. So you can imagine all these commodities coming in and not just the hardware we talk about, the glass and pottery and things like that, but all the foods that were being moved around as well. So there's some archaeological evidence for Miseries as well.

It's a wonderful opportunity to excavate a major point. So do we very much get a sense from our Roman sources that Muzeris was the furthest that Roman traders seemed to have gone if they were looking for precious commodities from India to bring back? You mentioned that temple of Augustus, which I think is also shown in an ancient map, which is really interesting, so they built a temple there to make the Roman spirit. at home, but does this feel like a natural end point for many Roman sailors that they wouldn't go further than this, usually, Roman traders? To start with, yes. The peripus, remember first

century BC, Pliny, first century AD, their information runs out there. They've got some hints of what's round the corner, as it were, in the Bay of Bengal. But that's, you know, it's hearsay, stuff picked up in the harbour like Muzeris, for example. It's harboured talk, their hard knowledge runs out there. But when we get to a little bit later, middle of the second century, about 140, we've got Ptolemy's geography. Now Ptolemy was an Alexandrian who wrote this geography of the world. Yeah, and to avoid confusion, this is a like intellectual Ptolemy and not the Ptolemy's we're mentioning earlier. This is a Ptolemy writing under the time of the Romans. That's right, Claudius. Claudius Ptolemy. Yes.

Just a plain old author, not a king. He gathers together all the information he can about the world. And now he's got a lot more, well, not a lot more, but he's got more information. And what he does is talk about Sri Lanka, for example. He knows a lot about it. Plinyin knows that it exists. Indeed, and there is a Greek, another Alexandrian Greek, called Aristophanes. in 200 BC, he knew about Sri Lanka.

It's known that that island existed, but so little is said about it until Ptolemy. So by the second century, Sri Lanka is now part of the system. You're getting Romans going there. Well, you're getting ships coming from the west going to Sri Lanka. It's Taproban. It's called. Pliny actually talks about a customs officer from the Red Sea, somehow gets blown off course,

and he lands up on Sri Lanka. So this must be first century 80. He stays in the court of the king of Sri Lanka and tells him all about the wonders of the Roman world. And the king is so excited that he sends an ambassador to Rome, to the emperor. So you can see these links beginning to grow. And clearly if anyone looking at the map would see how important Sri Lanka was to East-West trade. Again, we know from archaeology that there were two major ports there. There's one on the north side.

And that's the port. It's called Manti. It would be the port used by ships that were rounding the southern end of India and beginning to go up the east coast of India. And Manti would be, they'd go up this strait. between the Indian mainland and Sri Lanka and Manti would be a port there. So that was an important port for those going north. And then for those wanting to go across the Bear Bengal, which is the next stage, there was a port called Godavaya on the southern end of the island.

That was excavated. It has a whole range of material. It's got Roman coins, for example, are found there, and pottery from Han China. So now we've got the Chinese, or people carrying Chinese goods, are at least going to Sri Lanka. This is like a maritime east meets west kind of thing, isn't it? It's where the two come together. This is like the Begrim Horde as well on the main.

This is the area. It's like an equivalent, isn't it? The central area where now, and also, quite frankly, I love the fact you mentioned there, had no idea that ambassadors from a Sri Lankan king went to the Roman world. That's also really cool. But going back to this, maybe we could even imagine maybe a Roman ship or an Indian ship with Roman goods, reaching Sri Lanka coming from the west. But in the same port, there are actually being Chinese ships that came from, you know, Southeast Asia.

It's a distinct possibility, although at this stage, the Han weren't terribly interested in bartering the sea rooms. So I think it's on balance of evidence, it's more likely that these were Chinese gods. brought across by ships, Malay ships or Indian ships bringing things back, I think. But we can't prove it. But it's still a funny. It's still an open question. Well, let's go on from there, Barry.

You mentioned the next stage, which is crossing the Bay of Bengal. So how do we get from Sri Lanka to Southeast Asia to get across the Bay of Bengal? First of all, what do we know that the Romans knew? And again, we've got to rely on Ptolemy. here. Tolemy gets a bit vague from this point. He knows Sri Lanka very well. If you look at any map that is drawn up based on what Ptolemy information Ptolemy gives, Sri Lanka is very large. India is small. Sri Lanka is very large. So it's important to him. And India isn't terribly important. So it's the important place. Now beyond that, what Ptolemy talks about is golden

in Kersen-Kers-Nesos, which is almost certainly the Thai-Malais peninsula down to Sumatra and Java, that sort of area. Beyond that, the Great Gulf, which would be the Gulf of Thailand and the South China Sea, and beyond that, he talks about China. And he uses two words for China. And this I find absolutely fascinating. One is Saini, which is rather like China, you know, that sort of word. Yeah, Sino, yeah, like Sino.

Yeah, okay, yeah. Then the other word he uses is Sereka, which is silk. And he's using these two words. And he possibly doesn't realize that the China that he is seeing from the sea is the same China that is producing the silk. He divides them into two, as it were. So he's got this sort of vague idea of China. as being beyond the Great Gough. So that's what a Roman of the second and third century would have in their mind.

Going back to your question, how did they get there? You could sail all the way up the East Coast of India to the Ganges and down. And there's evidence of massive trade up and down the East Coast. For example, there are pots, Roman pots are found on certain East Coast ports. Roman pots of the first century BC, first century AD. And that I should have said, huge numbers of Roman coins are found in India as well. So you could do that round the Bay of Bengal trip, as it were,

or you could just go straight across. Ships did go straight across, so there's no reason why a Roman would need go all the way around the land. A Roman catching a lift on a local ship or talking to local sailors and saying, show me the way across. So he specialised in the ships by this time. given how great seafarers they would have been,

if they were Romans going that far, all of Roman goods, they wouldn't be in their Roman cargo vessels anymore. They probably would be on a specialised Indian ship. Almost certainly. The Indian ships were specially built, and they were very good for that kind of sea. They might well have changed ships at a number of ports. You know, they don't have to think of a Roman galley

doing this journey right across. The probability is they change ships at a number of ports. then they would hit the Thai Malay Peninsula, just hit it in the middle. That is something of a barrier. Now, if you wanted to get across into the South China Sea, you could do it by going between the Thai Malay Peninsula and Sumatra and down the Straits of Malacca. The Malacca Strait.

And then right around the end of the Malay Peninsula and into the sea. So you could do it direct by sea if you knew the route. And there's no reason why you shouldn't do it. What the archaeology suggests is that one of the favoured routes was going across to where the peninsula was at its narrowest, at the Krah Peninsula. It's called Khauri. It's only about 70 kilometres wide there. And you would offload your stuff on the west shore, and it would be taken by portage across the ports on east shore, and then you would load it up on another boat and take it through the shore. South China Sea. And that's, we know from the archaeology of ports along that that crucial

little narrow bit, that there were large numbers of people, traders from the Arab world, from India, Roman goods coming in and Chinese goods coming in. So it was a real interface again between the South China Sea system and the Indian Ocean system. Some of the material from one of the ports on the east side of the peninsula suggests that Indian craftsmen were there at work because they were working metals in the same way that the Indians worked metals. So you've probably got these very cosmopolitan ports with foreigners everywhere and all with their different skills adding to the economy in some way and taking from the economy. But real ports of trade in the sense of the word that this is.

where everything happened. Our Roman traders then, if they were still attached to their goods, and they hadn't broken all the glass, they would get off on the west side of the Kroar Peninsula across the peninsula, pick up another ship. Now that would presumably be a ship used to the Gulf of Thailand and the South China Sea. One of the first places that it would almost certainly stop that would be in what is now the Mekon Delta, which is Cambodia Vietnam, a insular Cambodian, Vietnam. And it was a place that the Chinese called Funan. Funan. And a place which Ptolemy refers to as well as Katigara, Katigara.

And those two places are almost certainly the same. Katigara is Funan. So Ptolemy, is this like the furthest that he mentions? He mentions this area Funan, or Katigara, as you say, which is like Cambodian South Vietnam today. Yep. He will have heard of that. And I don't know where the name actually comes from, but his description fits and the measurements he gives fits. So here is a place known to the Romans, which is absolutely central in the South China Sea system.

A settlement there called Ok-eo. Ock Ayo. It's now in Vietnam, a very large settlement. It's joined by canals to other settlements. So it's a real centre activity. And there's Indian material there, there's Roman material there, there's Chinese material there. And again, it's one of these ports where all the ships met. And then from there, if you wanted to get to China, you would sail up the coast of Vietnam, Champa.

It was called in that time, where there were a number of little states or maritime states. And you would end more or less at Hanoi, which is where the Red River comes down. And that was Gulf of Tokyo. It's a very important Chinese port. It's now in Han China. It was the time we're talking about was in Han China. And we can presume as well, I mean, Funan, which also seems to be this big trading place, that also had strong ties with Han China as well.

as soon as we get into the Gulf of Thailand and further east, are we very much in, I dare I say, like Klein Kingdom territory of the Han, where they're the dominant power and they have close connections with all these people? Yes, the Han Chinese were moving down the coast south, and they'd got to the Red River area by this stage. So they occupied that. In the Champa region were these little free states down the coast of Vietnam, but they were in different sorts of relationships with the Chinese. So they were almost ready to be taken over by the Chinese. They weren't. They were almost. So we're getting closer and closer and closer to China. But then landing, if you landed in the mouth of the Red River, you would be in Chinese territory.

And then it would just be a matter of going around to Pan Yu, which is the port in South China, the main port in South China. It was founded by that, well, just before the Han Dynasty, in about 2.14, I think it was. That is Gangesh now, the big maritime port of Gangesh. That's where you would stop. And if you were an ambassador with your tautousel, and your boring old... And your broken glass from Alexandria that didn't survive the journey. Then you would have to go by road up to wherever the emperor was. So Ganyu and that line, so those are the final destination ports.

They're the Chinese equivalent to somewhere like Nios Hormos. or Berniceke or I guess Alexandria in the West. They're the sort of the Alexandriots. That's the Alexandriotian. So that is quite the journey, isn't it?

And to be able to, you know, use it with the Chinese sources, with the archaeology and the Roman sources as well, to piece it together this theoretical idea of how Roman goods could have got from the Roman Empire to Han China via these

maritime routes to all of these cosmopolitan ports in almost 2,000 years ago. It's an amazing story to retell. It is, but what it reflects is going back to this idea of how mobile humans are and how they have this acquisitive design. Now, as an archaeologist, I keep coming back to this. It's a driving force, this acquisition.

Humans are the most mobile of all animals, after all. This acquisitive desire building networks very, very early on. And then what we can see archaeologically is how these networks come into existence and die down and new networks grow. But always there is movement of contact and trade and exchange. And I think the Rome-China story is probably the most exciting of them all. This is a theoretical question and something from me who doesn't know anything about this. But if the Han Dynasty didn't collapse in the third century AD, do you think there would have been a growing interest from them of maritime trade going westwards?

Do you think we would have had more literary evidence from the Han court, an equivalent of the peripolis or something like that, detailing a bit more about Chinese ships going west and maybe reaching somewhere like Sri Lanka, interacting with Roman goods coming from further west, and then us getting that perspective. Because we've used like Ptolemy and Pliny and the Peripus in the chat. We've mentioned a few Chinese sources.

But do you think if the Han Dynasty hadn't collapsed, we'd have had more and then they would have more focus on that sea travel? China's always been interesting, I think, and still is. Because unlike the West, which is unconstrained geographically, China is very constrained geographically. If you think of the rivers of China being the heart of China, it's constrained by the mountains of the Himalayas. It's constrained by the Gobi Desert in the north.

It's constrained by the forests in the south. And it's just kind of a small sea front. And for a long period of time, China was never really interested in the sea. I think there is something about the geography that makes China in terms of its roots more interested in the land roots than the sea roots. And it's not until you get to the Ming period, 14th, 15th century now, when suddenly they get terribly excited by the sea and they get their Admiral Zheng He to go right across to Africa. He goes up to Mecca, for example, with a great fleet of trading ships.

Then suddenly the Ming emperor says, no, finish, don't want it. And it all packs up. And Ming sort of pulls in on itself and closes itself and stays closed until the 20th century. This has been absolutely fascinating. We've completed our voyage from the Roman Empire to these Chinese ports. But as you also said earlier, almost an extra step here, evidence of Roman goods has been found in Japan and the Korean Peninsula as well. So I guess could we go a step further and say maybe they went on another ship and that, you know, Roman goods went by the sea further north and then across to Japan? It's possible. My guess is the Korean material and stuff in the... Japan actually went in through local systems.

But I might be wrong. That's the beauty of archaeology. Last but certainly not least, you have written a book which covers all of this, these incredible maritime trade routes from the time of Roman and dynasty China, and so much more. The book is called and it is about.

It's called Driven by the Monsoons. And it's literally about what I've called the underbelly of Eurasia. the sea that links the west to the east. And I start with the Upper Paleolithic. Well, no, I start with the Palolytic, with Homo sapiens moving out of Africa. And we end with the formation of the British East India Company in 1600. Wow. It's a beautiful book. The amount of detail you've been able to go into just for this episode, Barry, is brilliant. And I must say, lastly, I hope you don't mind me asking. Barry, you are now in your mid-80s, if I'm not, last day.

Nudging 86. Nudging 86 and you are still so eloquent and such amazing speaker and you are still hammering out books. You are a legend in the field and there's so much more still to come. I hope so. I've got another book in preparation and thinking about the next. No, always such a pleasure and it just goes to me to say thank you so much for taking the time to come back on the show today. It's a pleasure for me to. Thank you. Well, there you go. There was the one and only Barry Cunleff reimagining a journey of world.

and goods from the Red Sea in Egypt all the way via the Indian Ocean and places like Sri Lanka, the Malacca Straits and so on, all the way to the ports of Han China some 2,000 years ago. I hope you enjoyed the episode. Now, if you'd like to hear more from Barry, a bit of an insight into his incredible life story, where we did record an extra bonus episode with him, where we shined the spotlight on Barry, on his career. We released it a few weeks ago to our ancient subscribers. So if you'd like to hear about Barry and his story, well, if you sign up, you can listen to that special bonus episode.

Thank you for listening to this episode of the ancients. Don't forget, you can also sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries with a new release every week. Sign up at historyhit.com slash subscribe. That is all from me. I'll see you in the next episode.