“The beautiful vessels, the masterpieces of the Greeks, stir white foam on the Periyar River … arriving with gold and departing with pepper.”
These lines from an ancient Tamil poem “The Lay of the Anklet”, believed to have been written around 200 CE, tell of Greek triremes and trade ships arriving and departing from the rivers of south India. However, it remains tantalizingly uncertain today whether these same Greek trade ships ever came that bit further west to trade directly with the west coast ports of the Malay Peninsula.
Certainly there is evidence the Greeks were well aware of the existence of the Malay Peninsula. The first known Greek reference to the peninsula is around 100 BCE, when it is referred to as “the Golden Khersonese”, which was a direct translation of “Suvarnabhumi” (Golden Island), the Indian name for the peninsula at the time.
The Greek geographer Strabo, writing around 20 BCE, tells us that most years a huge Greek trade fleet, numbering up to 120 ships, set off from the Red Sea to make the year-long trip to the Indies and because of this great trade, Strabo noted, “These regions have become better known to us today”.
The Greeks established a series of permanent trade colonies in India. One was at Arikamedu on India’s Coromandel (southeastern) coast just a couple of weeks’ sail across the Bay of Bengal from Phuket, and was probably also regularly visited by Malay trading prows crossing over from the peninsula.
Indeed Malay sailors may also have directly visited Greek and Roman ports such as Berenike on the Red Sea. The Romans used the word “Seres” for Chinese or Asians from further east than India. A report from the Roman historian Julius Flores as early as the reign of the first Roman emperor Augustus (27 BCE– 14 CE) describes some “Seres” visiting the city of Rome itself: “Even the nations of the world not subject to the imperial sway were sensible of its grandeur … Thus the Scythians sent envoys … nay the Seres came likewise, and the Indians, bringing with them presents of pearls and elephants.”
However, according to the Chinese annals, the first Chinese man ever to reach the West was Gan Ying and this was in 97 CE, over a century after Flores’s account. So who were these earlier Seres in Rome with their “gifts of pearls and elephants”? (Both were common export items from the Malay Peninsula.) They may well have been Malays from the western peninsula – the nearest part of eastern Asia to Rome.
Around 140 CE, the Greek geographer Claudius Ptolemy wrote his compendium Geographia, which was essentially a travel guide for Greek sailors heading east to trade. In the Geographia, some of the physical features of the western Malay peninsular coast are described (although all with the wrong longitudes and latitudes). Ptolemy was a scholar, not a sailor, and most probably gathered his information in Egypt from returning Arab and Greek or possibly visiting Asian sailors. Ptolemy did note that the main trade emporium on the western Malay peninsular coast was a port called “Takola”. Takola is presumed by many scholars today to have been Takuapa, in Phang Nga, a Roman gold embossed cape province, just north of Phuket.
Ptolemy also makes mention of an island on the west of the peninsula called “Saline” which may have derived from Phuket’s old name of “Salang” or “Salon”. He noted that “In this Island there are a large number of shellfish and the inhabitants are always naked.”
Pliny the Younger, referring to the vast amounts of money the Romans spent on merchandise from these areas,says that “India is brought near to us by [the Roman traders’] lust for gain.” It is therefore quite possible that, in order to try and cut out the probably voracious Indian middlemen, these profit-seeking Greco-Arab and Roman ship captains would have sailed their ships a couple of weeks further east from India, in order to reach the markets of the Malay Peninsula directly.
EDITED FROM: The Phuket News
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