An Edible History of Humanity (7 page)

The “Periplus of the Erythraean Sea,” a sailor’s handbook written by an unknown Greek navigator in the first century A.D.,
gives a flavor of the frenetic commercial activity in the markets interconnected by the Indian Ocean. It lists the ports along
the west coast of India and their specialties, from Barbarikon in the north (a good place to buy costus, spikenard, bdellium,
and lapis lazuli), to Barygaza (good for long pepper, ivory, silk, and a local form of myrrh) and right down to Nelcynda,
almost at the southern tip of India. In this region the main trade was in pepper, which was “grown in quantity” inland, according
to the Periplus. Also on offer was malabathrum, the leaf of the local cinnamon plant and a particularly valued spice: A pound
of small leaves would fetch seventy-five denarii in Rome, or about six times the typical monthly salary. In all these ports
Roman traders offered wine, copper, tin, lead, glass, and red coral from the Mediterranean, which was valued in India as a
protective charm. But mostly the Roman traders had to pay for spices with gold and silver, since most of their goods had little
appeal to Indian merchants. Tamil poems of the first century A.D. refer to the “yavanas,” a generic term for people from the
west, with their great ships and wealth that “never wane[d],” a reference to the vast quantities of gold and silver that were
handed over in return for spices.

The Periplus goes on to tell of the ports on India’s east coast and of the small vessels that traded between the east and
west coasts. It also mentions the much larger ships that plied the Bay of Bengal between India and southeast Asia, which were
probably Malay or Indonesian vessels. Given the size of Roman vessels, the fact that the size of these ships is remarked upon
suggests that they were very large indeed. They would have carried goods from farther east, including nutmeg, mace, and cloves
from the spice islands of Indonesia (the Moluccas) and silk from China.

Beyond this point the Periplus becomes rather vague. But it provides at least a glimpse, from the European perspective, of
a vast trade network, the first connections of which had been established thousands of years earlier. Cardamom from southern
India had been available in Mesopotamia in the third millennium B.C., Egyptian ships were bringing frankincense and other
aromatics from the land of Punt (probably Ethiopia) in the second millennium B.C., and Pharaoh Ramses II was buried in 1224
B.C. with a peppercorn from India inserted in each of his nostrils. In a wave of expansion between 500 B.C. and 200 A.D.,
however, the spice-trade network came to encompass the entire Old World, with cinnamon and pepper from India being carried
as far west as Britain and frankincense from Arabia traveling as far east as China. But the full extent of this network was
generally unknown to its participants, since they were not always aware of the origins of the goods they traded. Just as the
Greeks thought that the Indian spices that reached them via Arab traders actually originated in Arabia, so too the Chinese
seem to have assumed that nutmeg and cloves came from Malaya, Sumatra, or Java, though these were in reality just ports of
call on the way along the maritime trade routes from their true source farther east, in the Moluccas.

Spices also crossed the world by land. From the second century B.C. overland routes connected China with the eastern Mediterranean,
linking the Roman world in the west and Han China in the east. (These routes were dubbed the Silk Road in the nineteenth century,
even though they carried far more than silk and there was in fact a network of east-west routes, not a single road.) Musk,
rhubarb, and licorice were among the spices traded along this route. Spices also traveled by land between the north and south
of India, between India and China, and between southeast Asia and inland China. Nutmeg, mace, and cloves were available in
India and China in Roman times but did not regularly reach Europe until the dying days of Roman rule.

The extent of this trade, and the amount spent importing exotic foreign goods, provoked some opposition in Rome. For one thing
it was extravagant, which was not in keeping with the supposedly traditional Roman values of modesty and frugality. It also
meant that large amounts of silver and gold were flowing east. Compensating for this outflow required that the Romans find
new sources of treasure, either through conquest or by opening up new mines. And all of this was for products that were, strictly
speaking, unnecessary and were sold at heavily marked-up prices.

As Pliny the Elder put it: “In no year does India absorb less than 55 million sesterces of our wealth, sending back merchandise
to be sold to us at one hundred times its prime cost.” In total, he reported, Rome’s annual trade deficit with the east amounted
to one hundred million sesterces, or about ten tons of gold, once Chinese silk and other fine goods were taken into account
along with the spices. “Such is the sum that our luxuries and our women cost us,” he lamented. Pliny professed to be baffled
by the popularity of pepper. “It is remarkable that its use has come into such favor, for with some foods it is their sweetness
that is appealing, others have an inviting appearance, but neither the berry nor the fruit of pepper has anything to recommend
it,” he wrote. “The sole pleasing quality is its pungency—and for the sake of this we go to India!”

Similarly, Pliny’s contemporary Tacitus worried about Roman dependence on “spendthrift table luxuries.” When he wrote these
words around the end of the first century A.D., however, the Roman spice trade was already past its peak. As the Roman Empire
declined and its wealth and sphere of influence shrank in the centuries that followed, the direct spice trade with India withered
in turn, and Arab, Indian, and Persian traders reasserted themselves as the main suppliers to the Mediterranean. But the spices
continued to flow. A Roman cookbook from the fifth century A.D., “The Excerpts of Vinidarius,” lists more than fifty herbs,
spices, and plant extracts under the heading “Summary of spices which should be in the house in order that nothing is lacking
in seasoning,” including pepper, ginger, costus, spikenard, cinnamon leaf, and cloves. And when Alaric, king of the Goths,
besieged Rome in 408 A.D., he demanded a ransom of 5,000 pounds of gold, 30,000 pieces of silver, 4,000 robes of silk, 3,000
pieces of cloth, and 3,000 pounds of pepper. Evidently the supply of Chinese silk and Indian pepper continued even as the
Roman Empire crumbled and fragmented.

But during the period when direct trade with the east had thrived, it briefly brought the people of Eu rope into the vibrant
Indian Ocean trade system. In the first century A.D., this trading network spanned the Old World, linking the mightiest empires
in Eurasia at the time: the Roman Empire in Europe, the Parthian Empire in Mesopotamia, the Kushan Empire in northern India,
and the Han dynasty in China. (Rome and China even established diplomatic contacts with each other.) Spices were just one
of the things that traveled around this global network by land and sea. But since they had a high ratio of value to weight,
could only be found in certain parts of the world in many cases, were easily stored, and were highly sought after, spices
were exceptional in being traded from one end of the network to the other, as shown for example by the references in Roman
sources to cloves, which grew only in the Molucca Islands on the other side of the globe. Spices brought a flavor of southeast
Asia to Roman tables and the scent of Arabia to Chinese temples. And as spices were traded around the world, they carried
other things along with them.

Goods are not the only things that flow along trade routes. New inventions, languages, artistic styles, social customs, and
religious beliefs, as well as physical goods, are also carried around the world by traders. So it was that knowledge of wine
and wine-making traveled from the Near East to China in the first century A.D.; and knowledge of noodles traveled back in
the other direction. Other ideas soon followed, including paper, the magnetic compass, and gunpowder. Arabic numerals actually
originated in India, but they were transmitted to Europe by Arab traders, which explains their name. Hellenistic influences
are clearly visible in the art and architecture of the Kushan culture of northern India; Venetian buildings were decorated
with Arab flourishes. But in two fields in particular—geography and religion—the interplay between trade and the transmission
of knowledge was mutually reinforcing.

One of the things that makes spices seem so exotic is their association with mysterious, far-off lands. For early geographers
in the ancient world, attempting to put together the first maps and descriptions of the world, spices often marked the boundaries
of their knowledge. Strabo, for example, referred to “the Indian cinnamon-producing country” which lay “on the edge of the
habitable world,” beyond which the earth was, he said, too hot to allow humans to live. Even the more worldly author of the
Periplus had little idea what happened east of the mouth of the Ganges: there was a large island, “the last place of the habitable
world” (possibly Sumatra), after which “the sea comes to an end somewhere.” To the north was the mysterious land of “Thina”
(China), the source of silk and malabathrum (cinnamon) leaves.

Traders and geographers depended on each other: Traders needed maps, and mapmakers needed information. Traders would visit
geographers before setting out, and might then share information on their return. Knowing how many days it took to travel
from one point to another, or typical itineraries of particular routes, made estimates of distance possible, and hence the
construction of maps. In this way geographers learned about the layout of the world as an indirect result of the trade in
spices and other goods. This is also why so much information about spices comes from the early geographers. Neither they nor
the traders wanted to reveal all their secrets, but some give and take made sense for both parties. Merchants worked hand
in hand with mapmakers, culminating in the map compiled in the second century A.D. by Ptolemy, a Roman mathematician, astronomer,
and geographer. It was surprisingly accurate by modern standards and formed the basis of Western geography for more than a
thousand years.

The interdependence between geography and trade was pointed out by Ptolemy himself, who noted that it was only due to commerce
that the location of the Stone Tower, a key trading post on the Silk Road to China, was known. He was well aware that the
Earth was spherical, something that had been demonstrated by Greek philosophers hundreds of years earlier, and he agonized
about how best to represent it on a flat surface. But Ptolemy’s estimate of the circumference of the Earth was wrong. Although
Eratosthenes, a Greek mathematician, had calculated the circumference of the Earth four hundred years earlier and arrived
at almost exactly the right answer, Ptolemy’s figure was one-sixth smaller—so he thought the Eurasian landmass extended farther
around the world than it actually did. This overestimate of the extent to which Asia extended to the east was one of the factors
that later emboldened Christopher Columbus to sail west to find it.

Ptolemy also believed that the Indian Ocean was landlocked, despite reports that it could be reached from the Atlantic by
going around the southern tip of Africa. (Herodotus, for example, told of Phoenicians who had circumnavigated Africa around
600 B.C., taking around three years to do so and finding the seasons strangely reversed as they headed south.) Arab geographers
realized that the idea of a landlocked Indian Ocean was wrong during the tenth century. One of them, al-Biruni, wrote of “a
gap in the mountains along the south coast [of Africa]. One has certain proofs of this communication although no one has been
able to confirm it by sight.” Al-Biruni’s informants were undoubtedly merchants.