Comments on Amazon

Although I have sold a few books and some Kindle downloads I am not getting many comments on Amazon yet. I put this down to the fact that there are a lot of pages to slog through and possibly that people are being too kind to tell me what they really think.

I have gleaned one 5* review from someone who will remain anonymous and who pointed out the perils of too much boring detail. Ah well!

It is hard to start marketing something which seems to have gone off on its own and doesn't want to belong to me any more. I wrote it because I wanted to and now telling the world about it is difficult and a little embarrassing.

Perhaps when the summer is over and I am shut up in my shed in the rain I will be a bit more energetic about telling the world. Until then my excuse is that without reviews I can't start to shout loudly to the world in general.

Muziris and the Borabadur connection.

For me the romance of the "Periplus of the Erythraen Sea," the sailors' handbook which listed the trade commodities, routes and ports from the Mediterranean to India is contained in the mystery of its language. Names have changed, as have the trade goods on which earlier civilisations depended. The loss of names and growth and death of ports is one reason why it has been so hard to find Muziris and why its location is still contentious with some.

"Muziris, Nelcynda and Bacare;
(to which large ships come for pepper and malabathrum).
Exports:
Pepper, produced in Cottonara
Fine pearls in great quantity
Ivory
Silk cloth
Spikenard from the Ganges
Malabathrum from the interior
Transparent stones of all kinds
Diamonds
Sapphires
Tortoise-shell, from Chryse and from near-by islands"

The goods listed in the export list show that these three ports on the West of present day Kerala were not only sending out native products, but were trading in commodities imported from elsewhere. The pepper was produced in the area around the Pamba River, named Cottonara by Pliny the Elder, and the malabathrum grew in Himalayas and had a long journey South, probably via Cape Cormorin, along with the spikenard.
The silk, pearls and precious stones probably came from present-day Sri Lanka and China and the tortoise shell from as far away as the Phillipines, which was known to the Greeks.

I found a clue as to how these goods travelled such enormous distances routinely on a visit to Java a couple of years ago. A panel in a huge frieze round one of the levels of the temple at Borabadur looked as though it had been sculpted far more recently than the 9th Century.

One Borabadur Ship

Borabadur ship by Michael J. Lowe

Archaeologists reconstructed this ship and its voyage to Madagascar and Africa in 2003. Less well known than the Chinese Junks which traded all over the Indian Ocean, these boats were trading half way across the world in the 8th Century.
The web of trade was vast and worth huge amounts of money. Muziris must have been a very rich place indeed.