Crossings: Early Mediterranean Contacts with India.

• Author: SIDEBOTHAM, STEVEN E.
• Position: Review

Crossings: Early Mediterranean Contacts with India. Edited by F. DE ROMANIS and A. TCHERNIA. New Delhi: MANOHAR, 1997. Pp. 283, illus. Rs 425, $34.

This collection of essays on early Mediterranean contacts with South Asia is translated into English from the French and Italian originals. An overview by R. Thapar opens the volume.

Thapar, Tchernia, and de Romanis note that Mediterranean trade with India fluctuated chronologically and geographically depending upon what commodities westerners sought there. They do not add that demands for western goods in India probably also influenced trade patterns. Items desired by westerners were available only from certain parts of India: e.g., teak from the west coast, ebony and pepper from the south. North Indian ports, especially Barygaza, exported both local goods and items from far afield (e.g., China) while emporia in southern India primarily exported locally available products.

Pepper was an excellent crop. It was harvested and dried just as ships from the Red Sea arrived on the southwest monsoon. Pepper cultivation was not labor intensive and increasing Roman demands required no major revolution of the local economies which produced it. Roman silver and gold coins found in India derive especially from southern inland regions rather than coastal emporia. These coins may have played a more important role in transforming local chieftains into emerging kings than they did in facilitating commercial relations between Rome and India.

Using inconclusive south Arabian evidence, C. Robin believes that the Periplus Maris Erythraei was a first century A.D. document. Indian evidence suggests to G. Fussman that the Periplus dates between 30 and 50 A.D., coinciding well with L. Casson's opinion (The Periplus Maris Erythraei: Text with Introduction, Translation, and Commentary [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989]) that it was produced sometime between 40 and 70.

S. Mazzarino asserts that the Hippalus monsoon derived its nomenclature from a wind and not from the name of a westerner who purportedly discovered it. De Romanis, dealing with the zenith of commercial contacts between 30 B.C. and the first century A.D., observes that the development of the three sailing routes to India recorded in Pliny the Elder's Natural History was not due to new navigational techniques; rather, these Indian destinations had what Roman merchants wanted. Unsettling political conditions, e.g., pirates or conflict between south...