Latest / Trade Routes That Changed Human History Forever — Fexingo History / The Lost Roman Roads of India: How the Pax Romana Reached the Bay of Bengal
Transcript
- Lucas: So we've talked a lot about the Silk Road — the land routes that connected China to the Mediterranean. But there was another highway, just as vast, just as wealthy, that the Romans discovered and named the 'Maritime Silk Road' — except it was really an Indian Ocean highway, running from the Red Sea down to the Malabar Coast and all the way around the tip of India to the Bay of Bengal. Luna: You mean Roman ships were sailing directly to India? Lucas: Absolutely. And not just occasionally — by the first century AD, there were hundreds of Roman merchant vessels making the trip every year, riding the monsoon winds. Pliny the Elder actually complained about it. He wrote that Rome was bleeding a hundred million sesterces a year to India, China, and Arabia — mostly for luxury goods like pepper, silk, and gemstones. He called it 'the drain of our empire.' Luna: A hundred million sesterces — that's an insane amount. And all for pepper? Lucas: Pepper was the big one. It was like gold in Rome. But they also imported cinnamon, ivory, pearls, cotton, and exotic animals — tigers for the Colosseum, parrots for the rich. And in return, they sent wine, glassware, gold coins, and a lot of Mediterranean coral that Tamil poets mention as being strung into necklaces. Lucas: If this kind of journey into the past has been worth even a coffee to you, you can keep the show ad-free and independent with a small contribution at buy me a coffee dot com slash fexingo. Just a thought — anything helps. And honestly, if today's conversation is worth a cup, that's the link. Luna: Yeah, it's a small way to say thanks for the research Lucas puts into these. Lucas: Well, I love it. So let's talk about the archaeological proof. The most famous Roman trading post in India is called Arikamedu, near modern Pondicherry on the Bay of Bengal. It was discovered in the 1940s by the British archaeologist Mortimer Wheeler, and what they found was astonishing — amphorae from Italy, Roman glass, intaglios, and even a piece of a Roman water clock. Luna: Wait — a water clock? How did that end up there? Lucas: Exactly. The best theory is that it belonged to a Roman merchant or maybe a retired soldier who settled there. Arikamedu wasn't a Roman colony — it was a Tamil port, probably the one the Greeks and Romans called Podouke. But the locals had a taste for Mediterranean wine and tableware. They even imitated Roman pottery — there's a local version of the Roman 'Arretine' ware, stamped with Tamil motifs. Lucas: And then there's Muziris, on the Malabar Coast — the most important Roman port in India. It's described in the Periplus of the Erythraean Sea, a first-century sailor's guide to the Indian Ocean. The author says Muziris was 'teeming with ships from Arabia and Greece.' But for a long time, no one could find it. Then, in 1983, a team discovered a hoard of Roman gold coins — about a thousand of them — near the village of Pudukottai, in what was the Chera kingdom. Luna: A thousand Roman gold coins in rural Tamil Nadu — that's a serious hoard. Lucas: It's the largest ever found in India. And the coins were from emperors spanning the first to the third centuries — Nero, Augustus, Trajan, Hadrian. But here's the interesting part: the coins weren't melted down or restruck. They were used as bullion, or sometimes worn as ornaments. The Tamils had their own coinage, and they valued Roman gold for its purity — but they didn't use it as currency in the Roman sense. It was treasure. Luna: So they were stockpiling Roman gold almost like a commodity? Lucas: Exactly. And the trade wasn't one-way. The Tamil kingdoms — the Cheras, Cholas, and Pandyas — were sophisticated maritime powers themselves. They sent ambassadors to Rome. We know from the historian Strabo that a delegation from an Indian king — probably Pandya — visited the emperor Augustus in 20 BC, bearing gifts including a tiger and a man with no arms. They even left an inscription in Greek at Athens. Lucas: There's also a fascinating temple to Augustus — actually a 'Temple of Augustus' — built at Muziris. We know about it from the Tabula Peutingeriana, a medieval copy of a Roman road map. It shows a temple to Augustus right on the coast of India, with the note 'templum Augusti.' This is the only known Roman temple in the Indian subcontinent. Luna: Was it built by Romans or by locals? Lucas: That's the big question. The map doesn't say. But it's likely that it was built by Roman merchants for their own worship. They had a substantial community there — maybe hundreds of them, living in a kind of factory quarter. And they weren't just traders; some of them stayed for years, married locals, and blended into Tamil society. Lucas: One of the most striking pieces of evidence for that blending comes from the Sangam poems — classical Tamil literature from the first few centuries AD. There's a poem that describes a 'yavana' — a Greek or Roman — arriving at a port with gold and wine. The word yavana is used throughout Tamil poetry for Westerners. And in one poem, a yavana is even mentioned as a guard at a king's gate — a foreign mercenary. Luna: So you had Romans serving as soldiers in Indian kingdoms? Lucas: It's very possible. The poem says his 'sword shone like a star.' And we have other evidence: Ptolemy's Geography lists Roman settlements along the Indian coast, including a place called 'Kottayam' — possibly a Roman garrison. The Romans were pragmatic — they hired out as bodyguards and mercenaries all along the Silk Road. Why not in India too? Lucas: But the trade didn't last forever. By the third century AD, the volume dropped sharply. The reasons are debated: the Antonine Plague, the Crisis of the Third Century in Rome, the rise of the Sassanid Empire in Persia, which disrupted the Red Sea routes. And in India, the Sangam age was ending — the old kingdoms were fragmenting. The direct Rome-India connection faded, though not completely — Byzantine gold coins have been found in India as late as the sixth century. Luna: So it wasn't a total collapse — just a slow decline as the world changed. Lucas: Exactly. And what's remarkable is that for about three hundred years, the Roman Empire and the Tamil kingdoms were intertwined in a way that many people don't realize. You had Roman wine in Tamil palaces, Tamil pepper in Roman kitchens, and Roman gold buried in Tamil soil. It was one of the first great experiments in global trade — before the Silk Road became the star of the story. Luna: It makes you wonder — what else have we forgotten about ancient globalization? Lucas: That's the question. And maybe next time, we can look at the other side — what Indian goods made it to Rome, and how they changed Roman culture. But for now, I think the image of a Roman centurion standing guard at a Tamil king's gate is a pretty good place to stop and think.