Bloomsbury
Review by Brian Tanguay
In early March 2022, at Berenike, a barren spot on the shores of the Red Sea, a team of archaeologists made several remarkable finds. From a storeroom of the Isis temple emerged the head and torso of a Buddha, the first discovered to the west of Afghanistan. Sculpted from Procennesian marble from the island of Marmara off the Turkish coast, the Buddha was likely fabricated in a workshop in second-century CE Alexandria at the behest of a wealthy Indian Buddhist sea captain. Also dislodged from the sands of Berenike were pottery from Spain, beads from Vietnam and Java, and huge pots full of Indian black peppercorns.
These archaeological finds provide evidence of significant contact between early India and Roman Egypt. As historian William Dalrymple describes in his marvelous new book, The Golden Road, the finds from Berenike have been mirrored by equally compelling evidence of Roman trade emerging from excavations in India. How do these discoveries reorient our thinking about India’s influence in the ancient world?
Dalrymple tells us with his inimitable style and superb scholarship. The Indian peninsula sits in the middle of a vortex of winds that predictably blow one way for six months a year, then reverse themselves for the next six. The monsoons generated by these winds allowed Indian sailors to travel at speed across the oceans, to the east coast of Africa and the wealthy kingdoms of Ethiopia. For 300 years, the main arteries of early east-west travel and trade — the Golden Road — were the waters of the Red Sea and Indian Ocean. What motivated sailors to make this dangerous journey was the desire for gold and wealth. “Through these waters,” writes Dalrymple, “passed boatload after boatload of Indian exports, while in reverse the wealth of Rome drained into Indian pockets.” The Roman naval commander, Pliny the Elder, described India as the sink of the world’s most precious metals.
But India’s exports extended beyond pepper, spices, ivory, cotton, gems, teak, and sandalwood. Where trade led, ideas and the arts followed. In one of the most dramatic periods of cultural exchange and dialogue in world history, India exported Buddhism, art, philosophy, astronomy, Sanskrit, and advanced mathematics, including the profound notion of the numeral zero. The Indosphere included both sides of the Bay of Bengal. Contrasting ancient India’s cultural influence to that of ancient Greece, Dalrymple notes that India “came up with a set of profound answers to the big questions about what the world is, how it operates, why we are here and how we should live our lives.” No wonder then that Chinese scholars like Xuanzang traveled thousands of difficult miles across the wastes of the Taklamakan desert to study at Nalanda, the largest Buddhist library in the world.
For a thousand years, India’s ideas traveled the Golden Road with its traders, creating a massive cultural zone that lapped over political borders. The massive Khmer temple of Angkor Wat, four times the size of the entire Vatican City, is one of the most spectacular examples of Indian influence. But what is perhaps most astonishing about the Indosphere, and what sets it apart from the Hellenised world fashioned by Alexander the Great, is that India’s influence was spread by the powers of its ideas rather than by force of arms. In one of history’s many ironies, Dalrymple writes, “India gave the west the financial and commercial tools that Europe would later use to take over India itself.”
