The historical and archaeological evidence for East-West connectivity in antiquity has been a focus of research for the past two decades.[1] Muthukumaran’s book relates to the early beginnings of East-West connectivity from the fourth and third millennium BCE to the late centuries BCE (Persian and Hellenistic periods), providing a very significant contribution to this field of knowledge.
Based on an impressive collection of archaeological data and textual sources in many languages, Muthukumaran provide an inspiring voyage in space and time, looking both at widespread crops such as rice, cotton, citruses, and cucurbits, and at exotic ones like lotus, taro and sissoo trees, in their journey from tropical Asia to the Middle East. With this wide range of sources, he reconstructs the early connections across the Eurasian continent, providing a comprehensive and up-to-date discussion of crops as agents of cultural interaction.
The introduction and first chapter introduced the reader into the thematic and historical context (pp. 2-6), discussing the role of plant species and foodstuff as an intercultural agent in its widest context, from the domestication and diffusion of plants during the Neolithic Revolution to the “Columbian Exchange” of 1492.[2]
What follows (chapters 2-7) is a detailed discussion of several case-studies which represent the movement of plant species from east to west. Naturally, these species are part of a much wider phenomenon as other species, particularly spices (black pepper, ginger, cardamon, and cinnamon) have not been included. The movement of plant species such as wheat and barley in the opposite direction are only briefly mentioned, and this is explained by the poor documentation of the movement of cultivars from the Mediterranean and the Middle East to South Asia.
The detailed discussion on the development and growth of industrial use of cotton (chapter 2) provides an excellent example for the incorporation of botanical, archaeological, historical, and linguistic sources into a coherent and comprehensive reconstruction of the process of development and change in this substantial commodity. South Asian cotton penetrated the Middle East via Iran in the times of the Assyrian and Babylonian empires. It was then introduced into Arabia, Egypt and the Levant, Greece and Rome, first as a rare and costly material used for gifts of the elites, and only later as an industrial commodity. Particularly interesting is the mechanism of diffusion and penetration, and the slow and gradual replacement of the flax industries by cotton (pp. 94-98). The presence of subspecies of cotton in different parts of the world, including Egypt, Nubia, North Africa (Gossypium Herbaceum Africanum) on the one hand, and south Asia (Gossypium Arboreum) on the other, show the great diversity and the numerous tracks of penetration of cotton throughout history.
In contrast to cotton, Asiatic rice (Orza Sativa), discussed in chapter 3, is a native of tropical and subtropical Asia that has made the journey into the Middle East relatively late in history. Archaeological evidence provides a terminus ante quem of mid-first millennium BCE for rice cultivation in the Middle East, and it reached its full extent there only in Late Antiquity and early Islamic times. Recent research suggests that the earliest rice was brought into Mesopotamia by traders moving along the Iranian plateau routes. Later in the Roman period it was introduced further west into Egypt and the Red Sea ports, perhaps directly from India. It is interesting to note that South-Asian food processing techniques and culinary traditions did not migrate along the trade routes which first brought rice into the Middle East and beyond. Hebrew and Greek sources indicate that rice was consumed in the form of bread, porridge or cakes, similar to wheat and barley varieties (p. 120).
The wide varieties of citruses (chapter 4) present another interesting case of cultural diffusion. Oranges, lemons, and grapefruits are of tropical and subtropical origin, ranging from northwest India to southwestern China. Citron and lemon came to the Middle East and the Mediterranean in the second half of the first millennium BCE. Their westward spread has been associated with Persian elites that transplanted the trees, and thus the Greek name for citron was Persian apple. The contribution of recent archaeobotanical and pollen studies is particularly important for refining the dates of penetration into the Levant, Egypt, and southern Italy, and these finds are further complemented by artistic representation of citruses in Roman art. The detailed discussion, which combines archaeological, botanical, artistic and textual Greek, Latin, Persian and Hebrew sources, is an illuminating example of Muthukumaran’s interdisciplinary approach.
Cucurbits, particularly melons and cucumbers, are discussed in chapter 5, which emphasizes the difficulties in distinguishing between the two. While cucumbers arrived in the Mediterranean and the Middle East only in the second half of the first millennium CE, melons were introduced in the mid-third millennium BCE. The detailed discussion of both citruses and cucurbits in this chapter shows the great advance that has been made in the 50 years since the publication of Watson’s Agricultural Revolution. The incorporation of different sources and the introduction of microarchaeology and analytical sciences as a major tool in fieldwork provided these refined observations.
The last three chapters (6-8) on sacred ;otus, taro and sissoo offer three case-studies of less known species, each with different characteristics: the Indian lotus (Nelumbo nucifera) probably firstintroduced into Egypt, was widely cultivated there between the mid-first millennium BCE and the mid-first millennium CE, and became a central component in the Greco-Roman concept of Nilotic landscapes. The taro, a semi-aquatic herbaceous vegetable crop native to Southwest Asia, was introduced into the Nile Valley and adjacent regions in the first Millennium BCE as was the sissoo, a tree crop that travelled from South Asia and the Indo-Iranian borderlands to Mesopotamia and eastern Arabia.
In the concluding chapter Muthukumaran summarizes his interdisciplinary approach by defining four stages in the introduction of eastern tropical and subtropical crops to the Middle East and the Mediterranean: familiarization, experimentation, routinization, and indigenization.
The first stage involves the introduction and consumption of a plant or its associated storable botanical products and sometimes began unintentionally as a by-product of other commercial connections. The role of the elites is emphasized as the movers of the process along with their luxurious life, which led to expanding the repertoire of foods consumed in major cities. The second stage involves the experimental cultivation of foreign plants in new locations, when new crops represent the “innovative intensification” defined by Peregrine Horden and Nicholas Purcell for the Mediterranean.[3] This stage involved adaptation of crops to different climatic and environmental conditions. The third and fourth stages were marked by regularized and sustainable cultivation and by a wider spatial diffusion and nativization of the new crops, including their integration into local and regional trade networks.
A crucial point in this process is the mechanism of diffusion and transmission over large distances, and the routes and modes of transportation. These are summarized in the first chapter but deserve a much more thorough consideration, particularly in the relationship between land routes (the “Silk Roads”) and the extensive maritime transportation that developed between south Asia and the Persian Gulf, the Red Sea and eastern Africa. The domestication of two-humped Bactrian camels seems to be a major trigger that opened the road for the extensive trade over land routes that crossed the Eurasian continent.
To summarize, this original and innovative book provides a significant contribution to the growing literature on East-West connectivity in antiquity, as it addresses a unique aspect of ancient long-range connections in the framework of a proto-globalized world that ranged between Southeastern Asia and the Mediterranean. Fifty years ago, Andrew Watson analyzed the diffusion of plant species from the East between the eighth and eleventh centuries CE as the trigger for the “Islamic Agricultural Revolution” that profoundly changed the growing patterns and food production of the Near East and the Mediterranean.[4] Muthukumaran widens and expands the framework, emphasizing that the distribution of plants into new regions is not connected to a single historical event but is rather a longue durée process which involved the imperial powers of the ancient Near East, from the Mesopotamian empires of the third and second millennium BCE to the spread of Assyria and Babylon in the first millennium BCE and the expansion of Greek and Roman powers in later periods.
This contribution is particularly important to archaeologists and historians working on the ancient Near East, which only rarely address aspects of long-range Eurasian connectivity. The fact that cash crops travelled across long distances as early as the fourth and third millennium BCE is very significant to the wider evaluation of patterns of connectivity across Eurasia and the assessment of proto-globalization processes.
Notes
[1] The growing and expanding research on the so called “Silk Roads” is attracting large scholarly attention, with some comprehensive studies published recently on the land and sea routes that connected East Asia, the Middle East, and the Mediterranean. See for example P. Frankopan, The Silk Roads – a Modern History of the World, (London 2015). P. Beaujard, The Worlds of the Indian Ocean – a Global History (Cambridge 2019). B. Cunliffe, By Steppe, Desert and Ocean: the Birth of Eurasia (Oxford 2015).
[2] A.W. Crosby, The Columbian Exchange: Biological and cultural Consequences of 1492 (Westport CT 1972).
[3] P. Horden and N. Purcell, The Corrupting Sea: a Study of Mediterranean History (Oxford, 2000), 201-24.
[4] A. M. Watson, Agricultural Innovation in the Early Islamic world – the Diffusion of Crops and Farming Techniques 700-1100. (Cambridge 1983).