The Golden Road: Read an exclusive excerpt from William Dalrymple’s new book

Why are parts of the country still dotted with Roman coin hordes? See how ancient trade led to India being called the ‘sink of the world’s precious metals’.

A single papyrus, now in Vienna and believed by some scholars to have originated in the rubbish dumps at Oxyrhynchus, turned out to be a fragmentary loan contract and customs assessment that followed the standard template used by Alexandrian importers for such orders. It was taken out by an Alexandria-based Egypto-Roman entrepreneur for the purchase of goods from an Indian merchant in faraway Muziris on the coast of Kerala. It gave precise details of one cargo that had been sent to Berenike all the way from India aboard a ship called the Hermapollon. What caught the attention of historians was the jaw-dropping value of the goods in question. It seems that everything that came out of India at the period was unusually expensive by the time it reached the Roman world.

The exports included nearly four tons of ivory worth seven million sesterces at a time when a soldier in the Roman army would have earned about 800 sesterces annually, and a would-be senator from the cream of the Roman aristocracy had to demonstrate assets of one million sesterces to stand for office. The consignment also included a valuable shipment of eighty boxes of aromatic nard, the precious and much prized aromatic oil of the Himalayan spikenard plant, used in the manufacture of perfume, which makes a brief appearance in the Gospel of John when Lazarus’ sister Martha uses it to anoint the feet of Jesus before wiping them with her hair. There was, in addition, a consignment of tortoiseshell and 790 pounds of Indian textiles, probably cotton, then considered a luxury product as valuable as silk. The total value of the 150-ton shipment was calculated at 131 talents, ‘enough to purchase 2,400 acres of the best farmland in Egypt’ or ‘a premium estate in central Italy’.

A single trading ship such as the Hermapollon could possibly carry several such consignments, each worth a small fortune. No wonder then that Pliny the Elder (23–79 ce), the plain-speaking naval commander from northern Italy, mentions that cohorts of archers were carried on board the ships sailing to India to offer protection against pirates, and that the Muziris Papyrus carefully factors in the costs of such private security. One successful shipment of this value could turn the merchants behind it into some of the richest men in the Empire.

That was not all. According to the papyrus, the import tax paid on the cargo worth almost nine million sesterces was over two million sesterces. Working up from these figures and other customs receipts from the period, scholars have estimated that by the first century ce Indian imports into Egypt were worth over a billion sesterces per annum, from which the tax authorities of the R were creaming off no less than 270 million. These revenues surpassed those of entire subject countries: Julius Caesar imposed tribute of forty million sesterces after his conquests in Gaul while the Rhineland frontier was defended by eight legions at an annual cost of eighty-eight million.

The sea trade along the Golden Road between Rome and India was clearly an immense operation, dangerous and complex, but highly profitable both to the shippers who operated the trade and to the Roman state that taxed it. The implications of the unprecedented scale of the sea trade between India and Rome from the first century onwards are enormous. It is now clear that historians have been looking at entirely the wrong place when they thought about ancient trade routes.

(Excerpted with permission from The Golden Road by William Dalrymple, published by Bloomsbury; 2024)