Across the Arabian Sea
1For thousands of years, many traders bartered, swapping one good for another, or paid with weighed pieces of metal. Barter works only when each side wants what the other has. After about 600 BCE, stamped coins spread from Lydia, in present-day Turkey, to Greece, Persia and beyond. By about 400 BCE, people in India were making silver coins stamped with small symbols.
2In the first century CE, merchants from Roman Egypt sailed straight across the Arabian Sea to India. Ships left Red Sea ports such as Berenike in July, when strong monsoon winds blow from the southwest toward India. Months later, when the winds turned and blew from the northeast, the ships sailed home. At the Red Sea ports, Roman officials collected a tax of one-fourth of the value of goods arriving from India.
3One of the busiest Indian ports was Muziris, on the southwest coast of India, in a land ruled by the Chera kings. Pepper vines grew in the hills nearby. Ships from Egypt also stopped at Barygaza, a port in northwest India.
4Evidence survives at both ends of the route. At Berenike, archaeologists found about 7.5 kilograms of black peppercorns in a large jar made in India, and pieces of pottery scratched with names in Tamil, a language of southern India. In southern India, people have found many buried hoards of Roman silver and gold coins. Some of the gold coins have a deep cut across the emperor's face. Some historians think the cuts showed that people valued the coins as metal, not as Roman money.
5Ideas traveled with the goods. Sailors shared knowledge of the winds, and Greek and Roman writers described Indian plants, ports and kings. Over the following centuries, traders and teachers carried Buddhist and Hindu ideas from India by sea to Southeast Asia.