The Roman Exploration of the Indian Ocean

A History of Mankind (241)

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Throughout most of the Roman Empire’s era, a steady but moderate volume of trading was conducted in and out of the Mediterranean basin through the Red Sea, widening the scope of the Roman globalization drive.

This was a complex trade, carried across a series of ever-smaller trading posts centered in the Ptolemaic-era Egyptian ports of Myos Hormos and Berenike, later connected with the Nile River valley through the Via Hadriana opened in 137. Such towns weren’t isolated dots on a faraway coast, but part of significant business networks also involving the Nile port of Coptos, set where the Nile valley is closest to the Red Sea, and important mines just inland north of Myos Hormos: those in Mons Porphyrities and in Mons Claudianus.

In the 1^st century AD, the “Periplus of the Erythraean Sea,” a Graeco-Roman book written in Greek, described the navigation, trade routes and commercial opportunities from the Red Sea across the Horn of Africa to the Persian Gulf and the Indian Coast, particularly the western coast, where multiple trading depots are cited.

The southernmost locations cited on the text – written by an anonymous author, perhaps a Greek Egyptian from Berenike, both as a logbook and traveler’s handbook – are believed to be on the east African coast, perhaps in modern Kenya and Tanzania, where Roman trade items have been found in Mafia Island, the third-largest in the Zanzibar Archipelago, the famed Spice Islands; the area is described as controlled by Arab traders and enforcers almost certainly from Aden.