Before 1500 spices reached the Mediterranean by incense caravans across Arabia and by monsoon sailing across the Arabian Sea. How those routes worked, who ran them and what the evidence shows.
Overview¶
The ancient spice routes were mostly sea routes. The overland "Silk Road" across Central Asia carried some spices, but bulky, relatively low-value-per-weight goods such as pepper moved far more cheaply by ship. Three systems mattered most: the incense caravans of southern Arabia, the Red Sea and monsoon route between Egypt and India, and the seaways of Southeast Asia that linked India to the islands where cloves and nutmeg grew.
The incense route¶
Frankincense and myrrh, resins from trees growing in southern Arabia and the Horn of Africa, were the original luxury aromatics of the Mediterranean and Near East. From at least the early 1st millennium BC camel caravans carried them north through the Arabian peninsula to Gaza and Damascus. Kingdoms such as Saba (biblical Sheba) and later the Nabataeans, whose capital was Petra, grew wealthy taxing and protecting the traffic. Indian goods, including pepper and cinnamon-like barks, joined these caravans at Arabian ports.
Greek writers were vague about where the goods came from, and the Arabian middlemen had no reason to enlighten them. Herodotus, writing in the 5th century BC, reported that cinnamon was gathered from the nests of giant birds and cassia guarded by winged creatures. These are travellers' tales, not history, but they show how little Mediterranean buyers knew about the sources.
Monsoon sailing and the Red Sea¶
The monsoon winds of the Arabian Sea blow from the south-west in summer and the north-east in winter. Sailors in the region had used them for centuries, but from roughly the late 2nd or 1st century BC Greek-speaking merchants in Ptolemaic and then Roman Egypt began to sail directly across open water to India, rather than hugging the coast. Greek tradition credited a navigator called Hippalus with the discovery; modern historians treat that as a simplification of knowledge long held by Arab and Indian sailors.
After Rome annexed Egypt in 30 BC, the trade grew sharply. Ships left Red Sea ports such as Myos Hormos and Berenike in July, reached India in about two months, and returned on the winter monsoon. Cargo was carried by camel across the desert to the Nile and by river to Alexandria.
The evidence¶
- The Periplus of the Erythraean Sea, an anonymous Greek handbook of the 1st century AD, lists ports, goods and customs from Egypt to India. It names Muziris and Nelcynda on the Malabar coast as the pepper ports, and Barygaza (Bharuch) in Gujarat as a major market.
- The Muziris papyrus, a 2nd-century AD loan contract, records a single ship's cargo from Muziris worth a very large sum, including great quantities of Gangetic nard, ivory and textiles.
- Excavations at Berenike have found black peppercorns, including a large quantity in an Indian-made storage jar, alongside Indian pottery, teak and coconut.
- Roman coins have been found in large hoards in southern India, and Roman pottery at the site of Arikamedu near Pondicherry.
- Tamil Sangam poetry describes Yavana (Greek or Roman) ships arriving with gold and leaving with pepper.
Southeast Asia and the clove trail¶
Cloves and nutmeg grew only in the Moluccas, in what is now eastern Indonesia, yet cloves were known in Han China and in Roman texts by the early centuries AD. They travelled through a chain of Austronesian, Malay and Indian traders across the Java Sea, the Strait of Malacca and the Bay of Bengal. Austronesian seafarers had also reached Madagascar by roughly the mid-1st millennium AD, showing the reach of these networks.
📌 A disputed find
A clove found at Terqa in Syria, in a context dated to around 1700 BC, has been widely cited as evidence of an astonishingly early Moluccan trade. The identification and dating have been questioned, and it is best treated as intriguing rather than proven.
Overland routes¶
The network of roads later called the Silk Road carried silk, horses, metals and religions between China, Central Asia, Persia and the Mediterranean. Spices such as cassia, ginger, saffron and rhubarb travelled overland too, but for Indian pepper the sea was cheaper. The overland routes mattered more for connecting China and Persia than for supplying Rome with spices.
Who ran the trade¶
It is tempting to tell this story from the Roman end, but Rome was one market among several. Indian, Arab, Persian, Axumite (Ethiopian) and Southeast Asian merchants carried most of the goods and set most of the terms. After the 3rd century AD Roman direct trade declined, and Persian and Axumite shippers took a larger share; after the 7th century Arab and Persian Muslim merchants dominated the western Indian Ocean. See the spice trade for what came next.