The seasonal arrival of the southwest Monsoon rains frequently brings misery to the denizens of the great cities of Chittagong and Dhaka.
Even the beaches of Cox Bazar offer little respite providing not the prospect of pleasure, but a deserted aspect for room trapped visitors, and empty pockets for local traders. Traffic may clog the roads, but developers have clogged the drainage systems and so water rules the streets, as it has for millen-nia.
The rains were ever thus, as for thousands of years, the season has brought drenching downpours to the lands of Bangladesh, around the delta of three of Asia’s greatest rivers, the Brahmaputra, Ganges and Meghna.
Over the years, great trade and wealth has come with these rivers attracting a rich diversity of travellers and merchants from across the known world, such that the tourism industry of Bangladesh today can only dream of their variety. It is not hard to imagine how the arrival of their ships, driven by the winds of monsoon, gladdened ancient hearts.
The melt waters of the Himalayas may bring to today’s citizens of these deltaic lands their own form of misery by eroding river banks but the annual flooding is largely a blessing to a thriving agricultural industry, with the annual deposit of fresh and rich soils, despite the regular wrecking of village life.
And those waters also bore the travellers and merchants of the Ganges basin, from the mountain kingdoms of Assam, Bhutan, Sikkim and Tibet, not to mention the empire of the “middle Kingdom,” now returning to its heyday of social, cultural and economic ascendancy, China.
These travellers from the hinterland brought with them gemstones, gold, silver, muslins, fine fabrics and silks, musk and other fragrances, and even ideas, philosophies and learning accompanied the arrival of their “monsoon fleets.”
Such travellers and the peoples of this deltaic land themselves, in cities such as that being slowly unearthed on the ancient banks of the Old Brahmaputra, at Wari Bateshwar, awaited eagerly the arrival of other travellers from the west, from Egypt, Arabia, and from at least the 1st millennium BCE, the Mediterranean civilisations of Greece and Rome, bringing with them their own burgeoning wealth of commerce and thought.
A mid 1st century CE/AD “merchant’s guide” to trade in the Indian Ocean and the Arabian Seas, “The Periplus of the Erythraean Sea,” describes for its readers the approach to the Ganges Delta:
“Sailing with the ocean to the right and the shore remaining beyond to the left, the Ganges comes into view, and near it the very last land towards the east, Chryse. There is a river near it called the Ganges, and it rises and falls in the same way as the Nile (with seasonal floods). On its banks is a market town which has the same name as the river, Ganges. Through this place are brought malabathrum and Gangetic spices and pearls, and muslin of the finest sorts, which are called Gangetic. It is said there are gold mines near these places.”
Writing about a hundred years later, the great Greek cartographer, Ptolemy, names the main channels of the delta as Kambyson, Mega, Kamberikhon, Pseudostomon and the Antibole.
It is Ptolemy’s famous map of the Ganges delta that alerts us to the fact that, whilst, “the last lands towards the east, Chryse,” may be interpreted as lands unknown, a place of “here be dragons,” in fact, routes of trade, even in his day, moved east of what may well be the first Silk Road.
If we accept the ancient nostrum that waters were the highway of the ancient world, this route may well have been via the Brahmaputra to northern Assam, traversing the famous Ledo Road across My-anmar, into Yunnan Province, and thence down the Yangtze River to the great cities of China.
Ptolemy’s map marks clearly, and in the correct location, the market town of Ramu. If, in fact, Ramu was an access point for these western merchants to trade with the Chinese and Burmese hinterlands, it surely took their cargoes north to the fabled city of Mandalay, and thence to Yunnan, as an alterna-tive to the Brahmaputra route, perhaps to avoid the heavy tolls no doubt extracted by the greater cities of the delta.
Despite the power of the melt waters to speed the southbound journeys of central Asian traders, and the southwest monsoon to speed the voyages of the western merchants, there is no seasonal reverse of flow on such rivers as the Brahmaputra and Ganges, so it may well be that land routes also formed a part of return journeys on such routes. That western travellers seldom ventured inland further, which seems likely, at least until the early centuries CE.
Another of the intriguing aspects of Ptolemy’s map is his clear marking of the divergence of Ganges and Brahmaputra rivers, with the course of the latter marked as passing through the Himalayan mountain range and turning west to origins in Tibet.
How could Ptolemy, based in ancient Greece and relying for his unusually accurate mapping on Phoenician sailors from today’s Lebanon, possibly have known all that in about 150 CE if his informants had not travelled the routes?
One hundred and fifty years earlier than Ptolemy, his equally famous predecessor, Strabo who was arguably the original geographer and a close associate of the first Roman Emperor, Augustus, also wrote of trade with the Ganges:
“Regarding these merchants who now sail from Egypt ... as far as the Ganges, they are only private citizens and they are of no use regarding the history of the places they have seen.” Leaving aside the academic snobbery and lofty ignorance in this history, it confirms an early familiarity of such trade in the higher echelons of Greco Roman society.
Indeed, so familiar were the Romans with the silks traded from the region that it became the fabric of choice of Roman society. The imports reached such an extent that the Emperor Augustus passed one of the first “Sumptuary” laws in recorded history, forbidding the wearing of silks in order to reduce the passing of gold and silver to the markets of the Ganges delta. Not unlike the impact on contemporary western economies caused by imports from China today!
The wealth accumulated in these deltaic lands was probably vast, and financed an army large enough to deter that of Alexander the Great, and strong enough to become a mercenary army for Rome.
Little wonder then that, as the rains of ancient times lashed such great cities as those at Wari Bateshwar, Munshiganj, Egarosindur, perhaps Mahasthangarh, and certainly, by the middle of the first millennium CE/AD, Bhitagarh, as well as, quite possibly, others, including Barisal and Chittagong, the people welcomed with growing anticipation the arrival of weather stained sails of Greco Roman mer-chant ships and Arab dhows, their sails billowing in the driving wind, soaked by the driving rains.
They came bearing the wealth of growing western civilisations to exchange for the manufactured goods of the east, the gems and minerals of Southeast Asia, and the spices of the East Indies which monsoon winds also brought to these lands of Bangladesh, one of the world’s earliest, and greatest, ancient centres of international trade, commerce, and philosophical exchange.
Viewed from the lengthy sands of the overgrown shambles that is Cox’s Bazar today, these tiny, ancient vessels would have brought much pleasure to local watchers, as they slowly made their way to-wards the mouth of the river upon whose banks stands ancient Ramu. The visitors would have helped the ancient denizens of the old, long forgotten, cities of the delta overcome by the miseries of down-pours of the annual southwest Monsoon.
