A. In the reign of the Roman empero

A. In the reign of the Roman emperor Nero (A.D. 54 to 68), there was a huge annual trade deficit between Rome and India. Rome’s taste for luxuries fueled the trade, which had roots in much more ancient commerce.
B. The incense trade in frankincense and myrrh, for which there was an insatiable demand in Egypt, had long linked the Nile and Red Sea with the “incense states” of southern Arabia. Since Sumerian times, merchant ships had coasted along age-old inshore routes, sailing from Arabia into the Persian Gulf and on to the Indian coast.
C. The coastal routes were like desert tracks, sailed by lateen-rigged vessels that could sail against the northeast monsoon along the Arabian coast for days, then turn into the Persian Gulf or round the corner to India.
D. Sometime in the first millennium B.C., Indian skippers mastered the secrets of the monsoon winds.
1. Through the summer months, from June to September, they blow across the Indian Ocean from the southwest. In November, they reverse and blow from the northeast.
2. From India, too, it was possible to ride the monsoons across the Bay of Bengal to Southeast Asia, where Indian merchants came in touch with Chinese traders and an entirely different commercial world.
E. At first, the Arabians and Indians kept their navigational secret to themselves, until an Indian ship was wrecked and its skipper brought to Alexandria, Egypt. In about 115 B.C., the first Greek skippers used the monsoon to cross to India. Instead of coasting, they ventured offshore and sailed directly to India on the wings of the southwestern monsoon.
F. The new routing strategies made the Indian Ocean, known at the time as the Erythraean (“Red”) Sea, the center of a huge mercantile world. In the east, the trade routes extended to southeastern Asia and, indirectly, to China. The monsoons linked the ivory-rich East African coast with India and the Red Sea with South Asia and helped forge a web of interconnectedness in new and lasting economic relationships.
V. The Indian Ocean routes brought South and Southeast Asia, as well as China, in contact with the Western world.
A. The unchanging cycles of the monsoon winds were the southern equivalent of the ancient Silk Road across Central Asia.
B. As we shall see in Lecture Twenty-Seven, this web of interconnectedness helped create new civilizations and bring otherwise remote peoples into the spider’s web of a much wider world.
Essential Reading:
Chris Scarre and Brian Fagan, Ancient Civilizations, Part V Introduction and chapter 5.
Supplementary Reading:
Raymond Allchin, The Archaeology of Early Historic South Asia.
Questions to Consider:
1. Why was Buddhism so important to the Mauryan empire?
2. What was the significance of the discovery of the monsoon wind cycle to the story of civilization? ©2003 The Teaching Company Limited Partnership 7
Lecture Twenty-Seven
Africa: A World of Interconnectedness
Scope: Lecture Twenty-Seven continues the theme of interconnectedness and explores the contributions of tropical Africa to the Indian Ocean world. We begin with the revolution in desert travel caused by the camel and the rise of Meroe in the Sudan. Then, we discuss the Aksum state in highland Ethiopia, which dominated Red Sea trade in the mid-first millennium A.D. In the third part of the lecture, we visit the stone towns of the East African coast, where a distinctive African and Islamic civilization was engaged in the monsoon trade. Finally, we follow the source of the African gold and ivory trade far inland to the highland plateau of southern Africa and explore Great Zimbabwe and the cattle kingdom of which it was part.
Outline
I. In the eighth and seventh centuries B.C., Nubian lords ruled briefly over Egypt before being conquered by the Assyrians in 667 B.C. They retreated far into their desert homeland. By 350 B.C., their successors resided at the city of Meroe, downstream of modern-day Khartoum in the Sudan.
A. After 500 B.C., the camel had revolutionized desert travel between southern Arabia and the eastern Mediterranean world.
1. Camels are ideal for crossing deserts because their padded feet travel easily on soft sand, they store fat in their humps, and they conserve water efficiently.
2. Once efficient load-carrying saddles were developed, the camel replaced the wheeled cart over enormous areas of the desert world.
3. As a result of camel trade, the Red Sea became the crossroads between Asia and Africa and between India and the Mediterranean world.
B. Meroe prospered off the camel trade. It was a trading city, an important ironworking center, and a major terminus of the camel caravan trade between the Sahara and the Red Sea, as well as with Nile trade routes.
C. Meroe’s greatest prosperity was in the first century A.D., after which trading activity shifted further south in the Red Sea region. In about A.D. 330, King Ezana II of Aksum in the Ethiopian highlands conquered Meroe, which passed into obscurity.
II. Aksum lay at a strategic location close to the mouth of the Red Sea and controlled an enormous volume of trade through its port, Adulis. Ideas flowed freely across the Red Sea between Africa and Arabia. Aksum was another gateway to African products, such as gold and ivory, a state ruled by a hereditary elite that controlled both agriculture and trading activity.
A. The powerful monarchs of Aksum maintained overland trade routes with Aswan in Egypt, a thirty-day journey northward, as well as with the Red Sea, eight days away.
1. They resided in imposing palaces built of timber-reinforced masonry, which were of local design but also owed something to Roman and Arabian influence.
2. Aksum’s monarchs were buried in imposing sepulchers topped by tall masonry columns as much as 108 feet high, carved to represent multistory buildings.
B. For seven centuries after the death of Christ, Aksum was a gateway to tropical Africa for a rapidly changing Mediterranean world. The state’s connections extended as far as Rome and Byzantium, to Syria, Armenia, the shores of the Persian Gulf, and to India.
C. Aksum was a symbol of a new, much more international world that in later Islamic hands was to transform Africa and Indian Ocean lands. It lay at the center of a web of trade routes that linked the Mediterranean, India, and Africa.
D. Aksum’s rulers adopted Christianity in the fourth century, challenged an expanding Islam in the eighth century, but went into decline by the tenth, as Islam grew stronger and erratic rainfall caused the population to disperse.
8 ©2003 The Teaching Company Limited Partnership
III. In A.D. 70, an anonymous Egyptian-Greek skipper compiled The Periplus of the Erythraean Sea, a set of sailing directions to the Indian Ocean. The manual describes the monsoon ports and the east coast of Africa, where ivory; rhinoceros horn, a much-prized aphrodisiac; tortoise shell; and mangrove poles were to be found.
A. For centuries, the East African coast lay on the edge of the Indian Ocean world, visited by occasional traders, but as the monsoon trade intensified, East Africa was drawn into the expanding web of interconnectedness. By the tenth century, Islam and Islamic merchants from Arabia had reached the coast.
1. Soon, small stone-built towns clustered at strategic bays. Lamu in northern Kenya was one such port. So was Mombasa, also in Kenya, and the southern port of Kilwa Island off the Tanzanian coast, where an important sultan dwelt.
2. Kilwa was an important transshipment point for many centuries, where gold, ivory, and slaves were sent north and east to Arabia and India in heavily laden dhows.
B. For more than 800 years, a distinctive cosmopolitan coastal civilization blended African and Islamic culture in towns controlled by prominent merchant families. Behind them lay the vast, little visited African interior, from which gold, ivory, and copper came, brought to the coast by intermediaries.
C. The East African trade generated enormous profits, because African ivory was much in demand in India, being softer to carve than that of the Indian elephant. More prosaic commodities, such as mangrove poles from coastal swamps, were also staples of the trade.
D. In exchange, the coastal merchants sent cheap Indian cloth and glass beads, seashells collected by the thousand from local beaches, and other baubles to the interior, goods worth a fraction of the value of the exports. But some of the