Muziris Lost and Found

And then,Muziris disappeared. Nobody knows how,but the most plausible theory is that the decline of the Roman Empire sometime in 4th century AD probably affected the Indian Ocean trade and Muziris lost in importance. It stayed in the classical texts and acquired an almost mythical air for centuries. But Muziris was too real to be forgotten,so the search for the lost port city continued.

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On a rainy day,the mud-and-gravel lanes of Pattanam,a village in Kerala’s central district of Ernakulam,tell you this story of Muziris. That is,if you sit hunched and look hard like 10-year-old Athira and her friends do after school hours. With every rain,the earth magically sprouts beads in a dizzying array of colours and shapes—white,black,green and yellow; octagonal,cylindrical,rectangular and square—and Athira adds them to her prized collection,stored in a discarded jewellery box and put away in the steel almirah of her shack.

The beads are a part of Pattanam’s lost history of seafarers and merchants,of a bead manufacturing and probably ship-making hub,of Romans and Arabs,of big ships gently bobbing at the mouth of the Periyar,of a planned,inland port town that was once a major trading centre.

Pattanam,it now emerges,is a crucial part of the Muziris story.

On NH-17,the highway to Ernakulam city,a plain-looking board tells you Pattanam is a half-kilometre stray to the right. Here,a team of researchers led by P J Cherian,director of the Kerala Council of Historical Research,has been conducting excavations and research since 2007—in collaboration with the Archaeological Survey of India and a host of institutions worldwide—to find those crucial links to Muziris. The excavations so far have thrown up some amazing finds,helping researchers piece together a complex riddle: what was Muziris or Pattanam like two thousand years ago?

Cherian is confident the excavations will throw up answers. It has already become the first ever site on the Kerala coast to yield enough archeological evidence to establish links with the Mediterranean,North African and West Asian regions since the early Historic period.

In the backyard of one of the houses in Pattanam are four trenches,each 7×4 metres and part of 19 such pits in Pattanam. Here,workers sit sorting pieces of pottery,marking them,leaving them out to dry and finally packing them into plastic bags to be sent to laboratories for scientific examination. At the end of the recently-concluded fourth season of excavation from February to June this year,Cherian and his team found an astonishing two million local pottery sherds,about 2,000 amphora sherds (amphora is used in ancient Rome and Greece to store wine and olive oil,among other things) and about 1,400 sherds of West Asian make (turquoise glazed pottery and torpedo jars). The excavators also found a pot sherd with Tamil Brahmi inscription,suggesting the people of Pattanam were literate.

“This is the largest recorded sample of Roman amphora sherds found outside the Roman world and gives us an insight into what the Romans traded with India,in addition to the coins which are better known,” says Roberta Tomber,visiting fellow,Department of Conservation and Scientific Research,British Museum. Tomber is an authority on Roman pottery and has visited Pattanam as part of her quest for sites connected with Egypt.

The most striking find yet in Pattanam is a wharf complex,with nine bollards to harbour boats and an adjacent warehouse and in the midst of this,a highly decayed canoe. Carbon dating revealed that the canoe belonged to at least the first century,making it the earliest watercraft excavated from an archeological context in India.

The researchers also found ornaments that suggest that the people of Muziris probably liked to wear their wealth—gold and copper ornaments,including a small gold axe with a loop on the handle,cameo blanks and those brilliant stone and glass beads. The presence of both finished and unpolished beads and waste products like flakes and chips suggest Pattanam could have been a bead-manufacturing hub.

Cherian feels that with every new find,Pattanam will bust a few myths—like the impression that rouletted ware,that fine kind of pottery,can only be European and that Indians weren’t capable of such fine work. Or that India’s commercial contacts started only with the Romans. “It’s not true. The stratigraphic distribution of Indian rouletted ware in Pattanam suggests this was a commercial site even before West Asians or Romans arrived here,” he says.

And the myth that Indians were bad sea-farers. Steven Sidebotham,professor of history at the University of Delaware,believes that it wasn’t a one-way trade to Muziris. Just as Roman and Arab ships travelled to Muziris,Indians set sail to the Egyptian ports. Sidebotham has worked in Bernike,a legendary Egyptian port city on the Red Sea coast that was a contemporary of Muziris and which,like Muziris,was lost to the world till Sidebotham and his team began excavations in 1994. “We found 7.55 kg of black peppercorns in an India-made jar,buried up to its neck in the courtyard of a temple dedicated to the Greek god Serapis that went back to the first century AD,” says Sidebotham. And the peppercorns could only have come from the Indian coast.

So did the traders follow a calendar? In a paper written for an international seminar on Muziris,Federico De Romanis,professor,University of Rome (Tor Vergata),Italy,writes: “Ships bound for Muziris sailed according to a fixed timetable…They left from Bernike around July 20; after a month they moored at Ocelis or Cane in South Arabia and crossed the ocean in 40 days. They remained in South India at least until November,return voyage starting between December and January 13,arrival in Egypt…scheduled in February/March.”

THE SEARCH FOR MUZIRIS

“Here lies the thriving town of Muchiri,where the beautiful large ships of the Yavana come,bringing gold,splashing the white foam on the waters of the Periyar and then return,laden with pepper.”

A tantalising description of Muziris in the Akananooru,an anthology of early Tamil poems in the Sangam collection. But where was Muziris and what led to its decline?

“There are many reasons for the decline of Muziris. Decline of the Roman Empire is one. Such settlements flourish only when there is demand for goods abroad,” says V Selvakumar,assistant professor of Epigraphy and Archaeology at Tamil University in Thanjavur.

There are other theories that have done the rounds,one of which is that a cataclysmic flood in the Periyar in 1341 silted the Muziris harbour,leaving it too narrow for ships.

But before anyone could answer why Muziris disappeared,Muziris had to be found. And for years,many thought Kodungalloor,a town on the north bank of the delta and seven km north of Pattanam,was Muziris.

The Malabar Manual of William Logan,Collector of Malabar during the British rule,assumed Kodungalloor,hub of the Chera dynasty and with its medieval forts and monuments,was Muziris. Besides,Kodungalloor’s status as the gateway to all three major religions in India—Christianity,Islam and Judaism—contributed to this belief. Sometime in the 7th century AD,the last of the Chera rulers,Cheraman Perumal,is said to have given up his kingdom,set off to Mecca and converted to Islam. Later,a dying Perumal sent a missionary group,headed by Malik Ibn Dinar,to spread the faith and build mosques in India. So that’s how the Cheraman masjid,said to be India’s first mosque,came to be in Kodungalloor.

Then,Christians believe it was here that St Thomas,one of the 12 Apostles of Jesus Christ,arrived in AD 52,bringing Christianity to the subcontinent. Jews claim that it was to Kodungalloor that their ancestors sailed sometime in the first century AD.

It’s not hard to see why this town thought of itself as Muziris. But a series of excavations in Kodungalloor,starting 1945,yielded nothing that went back to before the 13th century.

Things started moving in the 1990s when Shajan Paul,a research scholar now in London,and Selvakumar joined Cherian to teach archaeology at U C College in Aluva,Kerala. Paul was studying the evolution of Kerala’s coastline between 1993 and 1998 as part of his doctoral research. He realised that major geo-morphological changes had caused the Periyar to shift its course—to the northwest,he guessed. If that were so,Muziris wouldn’t be on the north bank of Periyar and near its mouth as the texts mentioned. So that meant the search for Muziris was still wide open.

“In 1998,Vinod,a resident of Pattanam,called me to say that he had seen a brick wall in his compound. Though I had surveyed the Kodungalloor-Paravur region before with my friend Selvakumar and Prof. Vimala Begley,an expert on Indo-Roman trade,we had had never looked at Pattanam,” says Paul.

So when he arrived at Pattanam to look at the brick wall,Paul found lots of pottery sherds,some of it not locally made,and he immediately knew this was an “archaeological mound” and could be connected to Muziris.

Paul and Selvakumar visited Pattanam and even went house to house,collecting whatever they thought was of importance. “Some of the residents even mistook us for street vendors and scrap collectors,” jokes Paul.

In 2003,Paul,Selvakumar,Cherian and Tomber put forward the hypothesis that Pattanam could be Muziris and after a trial dig in 2004,full-scale excavations began in 2007.

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On a muggy July afternoon,a group of lost tourists looking for a piece of forgotten history don’t count for much,so the autorickshaw drivers at Pattanam square look disinterested when you ask for directions to the excavation site,a few metres away. “Don’t know. I’ve never been there,” says one of them.

Muziris,it seems,is buried under layers of time.

But Cherian is determined. “Pattanam is going to rewrite the ancient history of south India,if not South Asia. One day,it may establish the role of the local community in the making of an urban culture and even tell the story of the role of India in the making of the Roman Empire,” says Cherian,straining to make himself heard as a sudden downpour drummed hard on the tarpaulin sheet under which he stood. As he said that,standing in the courtyard of the house where the fourth season of excavation was winding up,he almost sounded prophetic—the Muziris story isn’t over yet.