Free The Tiger Warrior by David Gibbins Page A

they had visited three days before, looking down over the ancient port and the Red Sea. “We know from a Roman coin embedded in the foundations that the archive room was built soon after 10 BC, and the whole house was abandoned about AD 20. Because these sherds hadn’t been swept out of the room, we’re guessing that the text dates from just before the abandonment, about the early years of the reign of the emperor Tiberius.”
    “You mean when the trade was beginning to decline?” Costas said. “What we were saying in Egypt a few days ago, about the emperor plugging up the bullion flow?”
    “Correct. But I don’t think that was why the house was abandoned. Everything points to this man being old, retired. Aysha?”
    She looked up. “Luckily, we’ve got a lot of scholarship to go on. Before this find, the earliest surviving text of the Periplus was a medieval copy dating from the tenth century AD, and it’s been studied in translation since the nineteenth century. What we’ve found confirms what many scholars have thought, but adds a fascinating new dimension. First of all, it’s clear from the vocabulary, the analogies, that he was Egyptian Greek. Second, there’s no doubt that he himself had sailed the routes described in the Periplus , as far down Africa as Zanzibar, then around Arabia to northwest India, and using the monsoon route to southern India. He’s done it enough times to know a lot about navigation, but it’s clear that he’s a merchant, not a sea captain. He’s mainly interested in naming the ports, telling how to get to them, and listing the goods to be traded there. In southern India it’s predominantly bullion, meaning gold and silver Roman coins that were exchanged for pepper and a fantastic range of other spices and exotica, some of it transshipped from far distant places.”
    “Any idea of his specialization?” Costas asked.
    “You remember the piece of silk we showed you at the excavation? We think that was it. He would have had contacts with the very farthest reaches of the trade, with traders who had come west through the Strait of Malacca from the South China Sea, and down through Bactria, modern Afghanistan, from central Asia. From the Silk Road.”
    “I think I’ve got you,” Costas said. “The book was a retirement project. He finished it, he croaked and the house went on the market, but there were no buyers.”
    “Eloquently put, as always.” Hiebermeyer pushed his little round glasses up his nose. “Unusually for an Erythraean Sea merchant, he didn’t retire to Alexandria or Rome, but seems to have stayed in the Egyptian port that had probably been his base all his working life. Perhaps he was given some sort of administrative role, maybe as duovir , prefect of the town, to supervise it during the off-season when it was largely deserted. But few wealthy men able to afford a villa actually wanted to live in Berenikê, and his house was impractical, especially with the high-value trade winding down.”
    “Maybe he didn’t die there.” Rebecca looked at Aysha, who nodded encouragingly. “Aysha thinks he had a wife, and she was Indian. One sherd had a female Indian name, Amrita. She showed me pictures of some of the stuff they found, other sherds with Tamil graffiti, fragments of Indian textile, pottery from southern India. Maybe the Periplus was his last say as a trader, and after finishing it he took his family and left on a final voyage to the east, never to return.”
    Costas rubbed his chin. “Nice thinking. Maybe after all that time trading in India, he went native.”
    Jack was absorbed in a cluster of small potsherds placed close together, clearly the remains of two large sherds which had been smashed. “Look at this,” he exclaimed. “Amazing. I can read the words Ptolemais Thêrôn , Ptolemy of the Hunts. That’s the elephant port on the Red Sea, Costas. And over here, Rebecca, on this other sherd, I can see Taprobanê . That’s what Sri Lanka was