The Romans and India with William Dalrymple
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The waters of the Arabian Sea are calm. A large merchant ship sails west, heading for the Red Sea and the thriving port town of Berenike in Roman Egypt. The ship's captain looks at his cargo, full to the brim with items that will be worth a fortune in Berenike's markets. Silks, spices and ivory.

It's a journey he has done many times before, traversing thousands of miles by boat over the course of his career, with regular stop-offs along the Arabian and African coasts. He is Indian, born and raised in the flourishing port of Miseris in southern India, and he is one of many taking advantage of this lucrative trade route between his home and this ever demanding market across the seas.

It's the Ancients on History Hit. I'm Tristan Hughes, your host, and today we are talking all about India's remarkable ancient history with a particular focus on its connections with the Roman Empire. Because India was the single greatest trading partner of the Roman Empire.

For centuries, Indian sailors navigated the Indian Ocean and the Red Sea, sailing up to Greco-Roman ports in Egypt and bringing their goods and ideas with them. Ideas which included their religious beliefs, like Buddhism.

Going the other way were huge fleets of merchant ships sailing to important ports along the Indian coast, like Miseris, ready to buy precious items such as silk, spices, gems, ivory, wild beasts, precious metals and much more. It was one of those great trade routes of ancient history.

To talk all about how India was right at the centre of the ancient world, exporting its goods and ideas all the way to the Red Sea in one direction and the Pacific in the other, I interviewed the one and only William Dalrymple, co-host of the podcast Empire and the writer of a brand new book all about ancient India.

William and I, we met up in person in London. We sat down in the Spotify studio and recorded this interview that I'm delighted to now share with you.

William, what a pleasure. It is great to have you on the Ancients podcast. Well, I have to say this is my favourite podcast. And not only is it in general my favourite podcast, I have been driving the last two weeks all over Scotland, binging on the Ancients. I listened to Septimius Severus and the Roman marching camps when I was at Fort Tiviette.

I went picting with Gordon Noble in the car with me. And now you have accompanied me up and down the spine of the Grampians, through the Lothians, through Perthshire. It's been great, great company. So it feels very odd and exciting to be here. You've asked me and we must also mention your podcast alongside Anita Empire, which is also incredibly popular. And so this is The Crossover.

that we've long been waiting for and it has happened. And of course, we are here to talk about your brand new book, all about India. And because it's such a vast area of history that you cover, we're kind of focusing on India and its importance to the Roman Empire because the trade routes between the Roman Empire and the Indian subcontinent...

This is one of the most important yet often overlooked trade routes of the whole of ancient history. Well, not overlooked by the ancients, of course, because you had a very, very good episode, which I also listened to in Scotland, with Steve Sidebottom, who's the great hero of the excavation of Berenike.

And the whole story of the discovery there of so much Roman material, so much Indian material, which was left by Indian merchants who sailed with the monsoon from India and arrived often as little as a couple of months later on the shores of the Red Sea.

And since Steve came on this podcast, which must be about two years ago, a lot has turned up in Brodakia, which I'll be very happy to talk about. We will talk about all of that. And you mentioned Red Sea there. So when trying to almost the background for this chat, get a sense of almost the end points for this great trade route is the Red Sea one terminal and the Indian coastline, the Western coastline, the other.

The central thesis of this book is that in our eagerness to talk about that very romantic idea, which again you've done on your podcast, the Silk Road, I think a lot of the centrality of India to Asia and to the Roman world has been lost. The Silk Road is a notion that was invented by a German geographer called von Richthofen in the 1880s. It's not an ancient concept that many people assume that it is.

And it's not referred to in any classical source. No one talks about a Silk Road, nor does any medieval source. Marco Polo never mentions a Silk Road. And it's such a romantic idea, the idea of those bat-tring camels tethered together, crossing over the Pamirs and through the sand dunes to Dunhuang and so on.

The idea has inspired Netflix series, every hotel bar or cafe between Istanbul and China is called the Silk Road this or the Silk Road that.

not to mention shops selling silks or carpets or anything else which has to do with silk itself. And in the traditional map of the Silk Road, there is a line like a motorway which runs from Chang'an or even the China Sea right across the, almost horizontally across the waste of Asia and ends up in Antioch or on the Mediterranean. And in those maps, India is completely left out.

And I think that map is absolutely right and proper if you're talking about the 13th century. So Marco Polo did indeed take that route and traveled with incredible speed and a Mongol passport from Mediterranean to the China Sea without having to cross a single border with incredible speed and ease because he had in his baggage one of these passes from the great Khan himself and everything was put at his disposal.

But at almost every other stage of history, there's been a major block on the Persian-Roman Byzantine border, which was one of the most hostile

militarized regions in antiquity and the early middle ages. So Roman Persian accent was like Euphrates, Tigris River area, Mesopotamia. Just where I've been coming back from. Cities today on the map like Diyarbakir or Urfa in Eastern Turkey, which were continually being destroyed rather like the kind of Scottish border towns like Melrose and Gebra being sacked by, alternatively by Scottish and English armies. So these unfortunate towns were continually being sacked either by the Achaemenid Persians or the Sasanian Persians or

or the Parthians, and in reverse by Byzantines and Romans heading in the opposite direction. And so while trade did pass through that border, it was never an easy motorway to travel from east to west. And what I think we are now realising with great clarity is that much more trade travelled by boat. And in the case of India, you have

From the time of the Battle of Actium, when, as all ancient listeners will know well, Octavian defeats Mark Antony, and suddenly Egypt is absorbed into the Roman Empire, and Rome has a sea border with India. You can travel from the ports of Marasumas or Bernici straight down the monsoon routes, and in little over two months or less, if you get it right, can find yourself either on the mouth of the Indus

in Gujarat, one of the great ports of Gujarat, or largest probably of all, Muziris, which is the great port of Kerala. Or you can even go around the coast to Arikamehdu, Poduke, where there's also a great deal of Roman material turning up in Indian sites.

So these were easy routes to travel. They were very quick. And we know from Strabo, Greek based in Egypt, who goes down the Nile and talks about going with the governor on a trip. And he says that he went to Myosomus and 250 boats a year are leaving in a great fleet for India every year. And that's not even the biggest sport because it looks like very Nike's bigger.

So there is a genuine, massive trade route. And this is reflected in trading manuals like the Periplus of the Erythraean Sea,

which are like the kind of trader's lonely planet of the day. And they have a deep and intimate knowledge of every port, particularly on the West Indian coast, right down to details like there's one place in Gujarat that really, really will pay a fortune for singing boys. Not always very, very sort of charming details, but these are the sort of thing that you, if you were a ruthless merchant, you might consider packing in your cargo.

This is something which I think has simply not made it into the popular consciousness at all. That, as is now clear from a fantastic new coin survey that's been done out of Oxford, particularly Andrew Wilson at All Souls has been running this. It's completely clear that the largest trading partner of the Roman Empire was India. And there's almost no reference to China at all.

There is one reference in the Peripolis to a place, a city called Thina, which is hard to get to. And there is a few Roman coins found in one hoard in a tomb. But since the time of the East India Company, tens, often hundreds of thousands of Roman coins, often gold coins of very high value, are turning up in India.

and are turning up also in what is now sort of Pakistan and Afghanistan, but particularly Sri Lanka and the south around Mazaris. So this was the major trade route. And I think outside the world of academia, I don't think anyone has really clocked this. And I'll tell you what, William, it is absolutely fascinating. And also you said, so Battle of Actium, so 30 BC, so the late first century BC. This seems to be when, as I said, Romans take control, direct control of Egypt from the Ptolemies.

And that is when you start seeing this trade really kicking off. These harbours exist under the Ptolemies. They're built by the Ptolemy. Berenike is actually named after a Ptolemaic queen. But as Strabo says, they kick off massively under the Romans. And there are many, many examples of...

trade not just with Roman Egypt, but Italian traders as far away as Rome operating on the street. So we have, for example, a lot of ostraca from the Petitchi family who seem to be from the Abruzzi. And there is, in fact, in their hometown, a picture of a camel carrying wine over sand dunes, you know, on a tombstone. So you have a family, you know, who today might be the equivalent of sort of exporters of Chianti Classico.

Their name has turned up in Carthage, in various shipwrecks around Italy. These were big exporters of wine. And among the markets was India. And we have even one wonderful, very large inscription, or graffiti rather, done on the rock shelter between the Nile and Berenike, just to prove it was a particular wine.

So these guys were shipping their wine to Alexandria. It was going down the Nile, being unloaded at the Nile port of Coptos, then going by camel caravan over the desert to Bernike and then being shipped off to India, where there was a very thirsty recipients of large quantities of Indian wine. And there was even in the Oxyrhynchus papyri, one reworking of a Euripides play where the

drunken Indians are part of the jokes of this version of the play. This seems to have been a running joke that Indians loved Roman wine and were

were not always necessarily very good at keeping their heads after they were drinking it. It sounds like the types of source material we have to learn more about this trade route and from the Indian end and from the Roman Empire end. So you've already mentioned people like the Greek geographer Strabo, so we've got these literary sources. You mentioned these sailing manuals like the Periplus, which are amazing, talking about goods and ports to go to and so on. And then things like Oxyrhynchus, so parchment and papyrus. Yeah.

There's one particular papyrus which is hugely important, and that may be from Oxyrhynchus. That's a settlement in Egypt, yeah. Oxyrhynchus is, I think, a late antique settlement in Egypt, which I've been to, actually. On the rubbish stubs there, you crunch across...

pottery and it's on the surface and two celebrated archaeologists Hunt and Grenfell dug it in the 1890s and within a day of arriving they'd found a lost work of Sappho and the Gospel of Thomas which was previously unknown just in their first days he said you didn't even have to dig you just turned it up with your foot and the Gospel of Thomas sorry quick tangent but that also has a link with India it does indeed and we'll come back to that because the Gospel of the whole story of the myth of St. Thomas

as the apostle who was the apostle of India is something that is very much part of Egyptian and East Byzantine Christian mythology, if you like. Whether it's true or not, we don't know. But certainly there is a life, an axe of Thomas, which is written in Urfa, in Edessa, in the third or fourth century, which presents as fully fledged a whole story of St. Thomas's activities after the resurrection. But so back to the Miseris Papyrus.

The Miseris Papyrus, which is now in Vienna, is a shipping invoice for a single shipment, a single container in a ship called the Hermapylon. And it's a contract taken out by an Alexandrian Greek merchant and delivered to a supplier who's not named in Miseris, which is in Kerala.

And not only does it have details of one particular shipment in the Hermapelon, which was full of ivory, silks and cottons, pepper, nard, which is used in perfume, and malabathrum, which is another plant used in perfume. What it has, which is crucially important, is the values of these things. And the first thing that's striking is that they're very, very expensive.

And that this one single container on one ship, which, as we know, there are maybe 250 coming out of Maas Hormuz alone and more coming out of Berenike. So you can imagine that many of these are going. That one shipment alone would have allowed the merchant who sold it, if he did sell it for the prices which the customs are being estimated, would have bought him one of the largest estates in Egypt.

or a premier estate in Tuscany, and would have been sufficient to have got him elected to the Senate. They passed the wealth threshold for election to the Roman Senate. So even one successful container being brought from Carolina, and there are many risks on the way, pirates, shipwreck, a million things could go wrong, obviously.

But if you've got one container like this full of ivory, full of pepper, full of cotton from one place to the other, then you were a rich man. You could retire. It's amazing. And as we go on, it's a tax records. Amazing. So interesting. That's the next thing. So not only does it give the total value for this one container, it also gives, and this is crucially important, the tax take.

and the customs at Berenike were 25%. And there's a long discussion about this. A Northern Irish scholar called Raoul MacAuflin first came up with these figures. There have been various challenges to them by Matthew Cobb and others. And so the whole thing is very much in play in academia at the moment. But the value is enormous. This was a major source of value for the Roman Empire.

And according to Raoul's initial figures, which again, I say are challenged and are not settled, but just to give an idea of the scale, he posits that one third of the entire Roman imperial budget was paid for by the tax cake of the Red Sea. Now, that's not just India. That's also stuff coming from Axum in Ethiopia, incense coming in from Arabia. There's all sorts of other stuff going on there. But India is a big part of it. Yeah.

And we have, in a sense, proof of this by the fact that Pliny is very, very anxious in his work about how India has become the sink of all the precious metals in the world, how he puts it. And he, Pliny, who's wonderful, is also, as you know, this sort of slightly puritanical North Italian naval commander who's rather like a sort of British...

admiral of the sort of of the kind of 18th century and he's a plain speaking man who who likes things simple and doesn't approve of metropolitan luxuries and so on and he says why do roman matrons have to wear this semi-transparent silk he's talking about for their soirees in rome who on earth would have thought of putting this pungent material talking about pepper

on their food. Why? Why do they do it? And he can't understand why the wealth of the Roman Empire, as he says very explicitly, is draining into India. So all these coin horns that we're finding in sites in India are a reflection of the fact that Romans were able to pay over price for luxuries from India. And these included gems as well as spices. And we even have a wonderful mosaic from Piazza Amarina in Sicily, which

Could easily, presumably, might have been someone involved in this trade because he has a picture of what's clearly based on a Roman mosaic, which is clearly based on an image of an Indian yakshi. She's holding onto a tree, which is an image that remains in Indian art and passes even into mogul art centuries later.

This sort of voluptuous, large-breasted, thin-waisted woman is holding onto a tree. Behind her are strings of pepper. Over her are red silks. In her arms has been cradled an enormous outside ivory tusk. Underneath the side of her are wild beasts for the circus, a tiger and an elephant.

And this is apparently a statement of the luxury exports of India. And here in Sicily is the whole thing boiled down into, if you like, a single mosaic image of the riches of India. So I think we've got to reimagine these trade networks.

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Well, let's move on to the Indian end of the trade route now. And maybe as we get nearer the end, we can potentially talk about these places on the trade route, the sea trade route itself. You mentioned earlier Ethiopia, and then I know there's also an island that you talk about in your book, really interesting one. But if we talk about India now, and let's say the beginning of that Roman trade in the first century BC, I must admit, when I think about India and ancient history, I will obviously go to Alexander the Great, the successors, Triandraggupta, and so on and so forth. But

And then, of course, you get the Mauryan Empire and Ashoka, the rise of Buddhism. So by the first century BC, has there been a lot of interaction between India and the Greco-Roman world? Yes, but on a limited scale compared with what happens in the first century. So there are occasional Ptolemaic goods dug up as far east as modern Chennai in Arkham Adu and Pudikei.

And we have textual sources for Persian and Greek and Indian sailors passing backwards and forwards. There's also a very important new set of sources in the Huck Caves in Socotra, which have recently been studied very brilliantly.

And in these caves, which seem to have been a sacred site, you have thousands of inscriptions. One or two of them are in Latin. A few of them are in Greek. There are some in Ethiopic and some in Palmyran. But the overwhelming majority are in various forms of Indian languages, mainly Brahmi. And a lot of the sailors seem to be coming from Gujarat.

So, Socotra seems to be the stopping off point during the Roman period for Indian sailors. This is the island I was referring to earlier that you were talking about, Socotra. There we go, that was the name. And Socotra was the source of dragon's blood, cinnabar. But it was also a place clearly where you could get fresh water on this route. And there was a safe harbour. So...

If the inscriptions in this cave are anything to go by, they give a good hint that a lot of the people actually manning the shipping at this period were Indian sailors who understood the monsoon. So it's quite possible that ships were owned by maybe Greek ship owners in Alexandria. Some of these, according to the Ostrika and Berenike, seem to be of Jewish heritage. Some of them are women. And we know women owning ships that were sailing on this route.

But the Sokotra evidence would seem to indicate you've got Indian sailors who understand the workings of the monsoon winds actually on board, putting the ropes up and down, putting the masts up. Because India has a long maritime history, doesn't it, of shipbuilding and so on. So even before the time of the Romans and to the time of the Romans,

I'm presuming it's not just Greek and Roman bioreams or triremes or those kind of trading ships. Those are military vessels, but you know what I mean. There are also Indian crafted, made vessels doing that trip, going back and forth, because they know those winds so well. A lot of the South Indian dynasties, like the Satavahanas, put ships on their coins, an indication of the importance that they put to sea travel and the sea trade.

There are also lovely images of ships and shipping in the Ajanta caves dating from the 6th century AD. And these are Buddhist caves? These are the great Buddhist caves. Ajanta is the great picture gallery of ancient India. There are two sets of paintings. There's particularly cave one, which dates to about 650, which has these unbelievably gorgeous and sophisticated images, including...

a particularly famous image of the Bodhisattva Padma Pani caught as the wonderful art historian Stella Cramrish put it, caught in a gale of stillness. And these images are very, very famous.

But one of the interesting new finds, and actually something that propelled me back into this era of history. I've been writing 18th century history for too long. Come back. I know. It's all my archaeological roots are calling me very strongly backwards at the moment. And I paid a trip to Ajanta, which is a big Indian tourist site. I mean, you know, tens of thousands of tourists visit it every year. Wonderful caves in Maharashtra. But I paid a visit about 10 years ago.

And in Cave 10, which is one of the less visited caves because it's further down the rock face from the main caves, I could see over the barrier, as then was, all these images that I didn't know. And as with the Sistine Chapel or any famous site, if you're interested in this stuff, you know the images roughly that you're going to see. Here at Cave 10 were all these images I had never seen. I couldn't understand why I hadn't seen them. So I got permission to study them properly and talk to the

the local archaeologist from the ASI, the Archaeological Survey of India, and it turned out that in cave 10 were the oldest Buddhist paintings in the world, dating from 750 years before the other paintings.

in Cave 1. In Cave 10, stuff dating from 100 to 150 BCE. Completely different style, completely different era of history, and very probably the oldest existing Buddhist paintings and the oldest existing, other than pictograms from very, very early on, the earliest Indian paintings with faces and human expressions and so on. And it turned out that a wonderful conservator who's based in Durangabad had cleaned these caves the year before, but no one had sort of followed up on this.

And he was called Manager Singh. Manager Singh had done a terrific job restoring this because in the 19th century, the Zam of Hyderabad, who controlled Magenta at that time, got in a team of Italian conservators to look at the caves and try and conserve them. And after they'd finished their job, they put on shellac varnish, which almost instantly attracted batshit, which turned the whole cave black within a year.

And they've never been studied and photographed because they've been invisible to the eye, although they were recorded at the time. And Manu Jasing restored these. And I happened to visit by pure good fortune when these had just been put on display. So I took a few months off and wrote a whole series of articles in Indian journals such as Marg, which is the great art history journal, but also in New York Books and other places.

these extraordinary early pictures. And this very much set me off on the strip because I began to raise quite how much new material was turning up and how...

Little it's known outside of India any of this stuff It is so interesting you have those sources because of course we large being talking about that the Roman and Greek sources that we have for this kind of trade But also that's why we want to focus on the Indian archaeology that has been found in India Which shows just how important this constant and the people were I mean well We should say at this point that Indian archaeology is controlled by the ASI which is a government bureau it's kept very underfunded and and

As a result, for example, you were mentioning, in a sense, marine archaeology, because we were talking about Indian boats, but there's been virtually none in India. The resources have not been given to bring up the wrecks, which are undoubtedly there across the Indian coast. And so we know far less about Indian shipping than we should do, other than the images of Janta, other than the coins of the Santa Fajanas and so on, other than images of Indian shipping arriving at sites like Borobudur in Java.

We just don't know much at the moment. And there is now a marine archaeology cell in the ASI, which is kicking off now. And I think over the years to come, we're going to find a lot more data coming up. Yeah.

It's very exciting indeed. Let's then go back to the archaeology that has been found. The Roman traders, Greco-Egyptian traders, whoever they are, who are coming to the Indian coastline and are looking for these exotic goods. We talked about pepper, silk, spices. Gemstones. Gemstones, wild animals, as you say, for the Colosseum, arenas and all that. But what was going the other way? What were those traders bringing to India that the Indians really wanted?

So this is Pliny's worry that there's very little that the Indians want from the West and they just want cash. They just want gold.

There's never been enough gold in India to satisfy demand, which has always given it a premium because it's unavailable. Just like spices. There was never enough spices in the West to satisfy demand. So it gained a massive inflation of value. So gold in India. There actually are major gold deposits at a place called the Kola gold fields in the Deccan, which is in central South India.

But they, I think, had not been fully discovered or worked in classical times. So there is a great...

need in india for gold and the great value of gold so the indians just you know were selling their stuff exporting their stuff and while there's a little there's some indications that the that roman wine was very popular and led to mass drunkenness on arrival in these ports you can imagine lots of sort of horizontal figures around around these triremes as the amphorae landed

The idea is, I think, that it is Indian goods that are desired by the Romans, not vice versa. And so there's lots of amphora found in sites like Arakamedu and in Muziris. There are intaglias. And there's even indications that the Indians were faking them, rather like sort of Gucci bags being faked in Bangladesh today, that you get...

fake Roman intaglios made in India, turning up in sites in the Mekong Delta, further east, and being exported beyond, which is rather nice. But there is...

evidence that many of the traders who came were being also rather dazzled by what they saw in India. And as well as the most famous caves in Lujantha, there are two or three thousand other Buddhist cave sites on the Western Ghats and along the west coast of India. And many of these have inscriptions by people who describe themselves as Yavanas. And Yavanas

There's a lot of debate about who exactly Yabaners were. And the term seems to have included people like Scythians and possibly Parthians. But basically, it's Ionians. Yabaners is Ionian, it's Greeks.

And Indian Buddhist monks from the beginning used to crowdfund their holy sites. So, for example, at the Buddhist stupa of Sanchi, you have the Ivory Workers Guild patronize a single gateway of the site. In the site of Kala, you have crowdfunding pillar by pillar of the excavations in these cave sites.

And several of the pillars are paid for by Yavanna traders. So you wonder, you know, were they just kind of keeping in with the locals? Were they excited by Buddhist philosophy? And there are sort of odd hints that Buddhism is finding some takers in Alexandria.

In Steve Sidebottom's wonderful Excavations of Baranaki, we've had this extraordinary new head, which is kind of the most multicultural object ever. It is a head of the Buddha, vaguely based on a sort of Gandharan Buddha head of the second or third century.

But it has a series of sun rays coming out of it, rather like Solon Victus or a Palmyran sun deity. It has a lot in common with Palmyran art.

So almost they're trying to assimilate, like they do associate gods from a different culture with their own almost. The syncretism, which is absolutely the norm at the time. But it's also wonderfully, it's in Proconessian marble from the Marmara and it seems to have been sculpted in Alexandria because it has these particular drill techniques. The Buddha's hair is in what the archaeologists have described as tortellini curls.

which is a brilliant description, but quite different from the techniques used in Gandhara. What a great object. They've also found a triad of very early Hindu gods at the same site, all with inscriptions in perfect bilingual Greek and Sanskrit.

And names of the traders who were coming, Vasolina the warrior. There are ostraca also from any Indian captains. They found an enormous jar full of black peppercorns. And it's just going on. More and more stuff. Pet monkeys. I remember when Steve came on the pod, he talked about that. You have bones of pet monkeys, bones of elephants. Of course, ivory must have been another precious good that they were bringing. But also for the circus. For the circus. And you had these special boats.

Elephantine boats. Yes, you see them on mosaics, don't you? Those beautiful boats. And the berths for these ships at Baranaki are bigger than for the Mediterranean. So they've got these enormous ocean-going vessels, which were not only big enough to survive the monsoon winds, bulky enough to take the battering that the monsoon storms could give them, but which could contain elephants.

And maybe even, judging by the Sicilian mosaic, maybe other wild animals too. So evidence of Indian gods, like Hindu gods and the Buddha, going to the Roman Empire that way. So let's say in an Indian port, is there evidence of them bringing their gods with them there? So there's a map in the Vatican library, which is, I think, an early medieval copy of a Roman map, which says very clearly in Miseris, the Temple of Augustus.

So the idea that the Romans may have set up actually a temple there was an extraordinary thought in the first century. But the biggest import was, of course, Christianity and Judaism. There was a Jewish community in Cochin thriving throughout the whole last 2,000 years, only since the birth of Israel has it slightly diminished. In reverse, you have a very intriguing possibility. Buddhism had advocated moving into the desert,

building monastic caves from the third century BCE. And you have all of the Western Ghats examples. You have it even into parts of Persia and into Central Asia.

And the fact that you've got all this going backwards and forwards between the Red Sea and India now raises the question, which we can't answer yet, but at least it's certainly worth asking. How much did Christian monasticism owe to Buddhist monasticism? Because if you think of it, where does it begin? It begins on the Red Sea. St. Anthony of Egypt goes from Alexandria to the Red Sea. The monastery of St. Anthony is still there, the monastery of St. Paul on the shores of the Red Sea.

And it spreads out along caves in the Nile, very much on the Buddhist model. And we have references, nearly Christian sources, to Buddhist monks wandering the streets of Alexandria. So we can't answer that question yet. And of course, you know, Christian monotheism also has its roots possibly in the Essenes and the ascetics living in the Judean desert before Christianity. But it raises a very strong question mark that if you have

ascetics living in caves, giving up everything and following a religious life in caves right up to the Red Sea and Buddhas appearing in ISIS temples on the Red Sea. Could St. Anthony and his contemporaries have been inspired partly by that when they went into the caves of the Red Sea and along the Nile?

to found the monastic movement of late antiquity. And of course, within a generation or two, the desert had become a city, as they say in the sources. But of course, isn't it St. Jerome or one of them who also talks about Indian Christians and them being part of the wider church and everything? So there's frequent references in almost all the early Christian sources to Indian Christians. You also have delegations of Indian Christians turning up in Alexandria and asking for bishops and gospels and texts.

And this shouldn't be a surprise to us. It's only us today who, in a sense, imagine Christianity as a Western religion associated with Europe. The idea that Christendom is synonymous with Europe is a very late medieval idea. The home of Christianity is Palestine. And there were more representatives from India and Persia at the Council of Nicaea than there were from Western Europe.

So it's perfectly natural. And today there is archaeological work going on in Dubai and right along the Gulf on Nestorian Christian sites, right down that trade route. So we have a very distorted view of Christianity as a Eurocentric religion, which is actually a rather late chapter in its history.

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I always want to ask, I mean, this might be something that I've kind of overlooked a little because we talk about the Roman Empire as one terminal for this trade route. These ports in India, which I presume get very rich from all of this trade, are they part of a wider kingdom or are they their own kind of cities, powerful cities? I mean, do we know the kind of the political makeup of the India and the Indian seaboard that the Romans were trading with? We do. And

One of the interesting things is that it's in strong contrast to China. China is from very early on a centralized state with periods of disintegration. India is almost the reverse. It's almost always a fragmentation of different kingdoms. So when the famous Chinese monk Xuanzang arrives in Jalalabad, which he regards as the boundary of India, he talks about India, this holy land, this region of 70 states.

So there are many, many different small kingdoms. Kerala, where Misericis was probably under the Cheras,

The Deccan and part of the eastern coast is under the Satavahanas. Further north, you've got the Guptas in the Ganges Plain. So there are many, many different kingdoms. And that is the norm. The moments in Indian history when under Ashoka or the Mughals or the Delhi Sultanate or the British, when India unites into a single political unit,

other rarities. India is very clearly a cultural area. People recognize it as a geographical expression, as a cultural holy land. It's associated with the holy places of Hinduism and Buddhism. But as a political unity, those are brief moments of Indian history. So this trade between the Roman Empire and India seems to endure for centuries and is really, really important, really rich and wealthy. What happens? Why does it end?

Like any trade route, it has its ups and downs. The high point is the first century. There's definitely more going on. AD. First century. It begins in the first century BCE with Augustus, the very end of that. It's going at its strongest in the first century CE. And it carries on up and down until the fifth century. And you've still got, for example, if you think of Sutton Hoove,

or any of those gorgeous Merovingian pieces of jewellery that you see in French museums, there are still Indian and Sri Lankan garnets reaching northern Europe as late as the 5th century. But that stops when Berenike is taken over by the Blemmis, these nomad tribes. And also there's a Persian blockade which is trying to stop

Justinian and the Byzantines getting their hands on the wealth of... They realise how powerful it is. And they want it themselves. So Persian vessels become increasingly an important part of Buddhist texts. When Buddhist monks are going from Sri Lanka to Java, they often hop on a passing Sasanian vessel heading in that direction. So it's no longer just a Roman gig. There are all sorts of

There's also a lot of interest from the Ethiopic kingdoms like Aksa. There are images of Ethiopian courtiers in magnificent long robes with swords being presented to Indian rulers in the sculptures of Amaravati. But this trade winds down with the Blemis, with the Justinian plague. It's a big feature. There's a wipeout. Many of these ports are running into the ground by the 4th century, and they're kind of over by the 5th.

And there seems to be a crisis in India because India has got very, very rich. Gold has been pouring in for 400 years. We see that in these coin hordes, which have dug up very frequently. And so at this stage, you find India realigning itself to look eastwards.

And this is the point you get the founding both in the Pallava kingdom, which is associated with the eastern seaboard in Tamil Nadu, and slightly more inland with the Chalukya ports, which are looking slightly more to the west, and the Cheras in Kerala. These trading guilds begin to be formed with, like the East India Company, their own military wing. And there are inscriptions about...

not only escorts, but sort of armed camps for Indian merchants developing as they head into this often quite sort of tribal landscape in Southeast Asia. But this area is found to be rich in gold deposits and known in Sanskrit as Suvarna Bumi, the lands of gold. And certain islands are known as Suvarna Dwipa, the islands of gold.

And this appears in the Mahabharata, in the Jataka tales, in the Ramayana particular. Sugriva, the monkey king in the Ramayana, advises one of his followers to the islands of gold to get riches. And this is the beginning of a realignment of India looking towards the east so that from the 6th and 7th century, archaeological sites such as Ok'eo and Angkor Barre in the Mekong Delta, you begin to find

Indian plans of cities, Indian influence, brick sizes, Indian influence, technologies for irrigation and so on. And a little bit later, wooden Buddhas and small handheld Vishnus, then later than that, monumental Khmer sculpture and large-scale Buddhist monuments. So that by the 7th and 8th centuries, you're getting

Buildings that look very like those of Tamil Nadu, coming up in Java, at Nongzongo, in the Dieng Plateau. And by the 9th, 10th, and 11th centuries, you're getting large-scale polities developing in Southeast Asia. The Khmers on the Cambodian mainland, the Sailendras in Burma,

And they are building monuments which are of distant Indic inspiration, such as Borobudur, the great Buddhist site in Java. But most dramatically, the largest religious monument on earth, which is Angkor Wat, is a temple to Vishnu.

And it's sculpted with images of stories that are set all around near where I live in Delhi. There's images of Krishna cavorting in Mathura, which is 100 miles south of Delhi. There are images of the great Mahabharata battlefield of Kurukshetra, which is 100 miles north of Delhi. Yet these are on the Mekong Delta, 6,000 miles away from Delhi, from northern India. And you have this process by which the landscape of Southeast Asia becomes renamed.

after that of India. So the old capital of Thailand is Ayutthaya, which is named after Ayodhya, the capital of Lord Rama and the Ramayana. There are Kurukshetras founded in Laos. And you even find an attempt to sort of convert the streams and rivers of Southeast Asia into Buddhist holy streams and Hindu holy streams, such as

the stream which waters Angkor Wat, which comes out of a mountain called Phnom Kulen. And there they have, someone has dammed the river for a while, and they've sculpted the riverbed with Shiva lingams and yonis. So in a sense, convert it into a Hindu river. So it becomes a Hindu only river, like the Yamuna, like the Jamuna. And India extends itself into Southeast Asia, but it's not...

ever a direct copy. Hinduism and Buddhism takes very different forms in Southeast Asia. So, for example, the caste system never travels there. People eat pork, love pork. All over Angkor Wat, there's a picture of a whole pig being dipped at one point in the royal kitchens into some vat of oil or water. And the architecture, while of Indic inspiration and conforming to the Shilpa Shastras, the different forms that they're meant to take, they are their own forms.

The statues of Vishnu carved by Khmers have him with Khmer physiognomy, wearing short Khmer lungis. You could never mistake something sculpted in Vietnam or Laos or Cambodia or Vietnam or Burma for what is being carved in Tamil Nadu or Kerala. They're different. And so it's India...

It's like a garden which is producing seeds, which when planted elsewhere produces strange new hybrids and new varieties. Well, William, that's a lovely way to end it. We looked west and now at the end we've looked east as well, showing how India was really at the centre. And you, of course, talk all about this that we've covered in our chat and so much more in your brand new book, which is called... The Golden Road, How Ancient India Transformed.

the world. Well, William, it just goes for me to say thank you so much for taking the time to come on the podcast today. Well, it's an enormous privilege and excitement and pleasure to be here. Well, there you go. There was William Dalrymple talking all things ancient India with a particular focus on India's strong trade links with the Roman Empire. An extraordinary topic. I hope you enjoyed today's episode as much as I did recording it. William was such a fantastic guest and hopefully we'll get him back on the ancients very soon.

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