In my previous articles, I wrote about a possible connection between ancient Kerala and pharaonic Egypt, dating perhaps farther back than current scholarship presumes. In this article, I explore how such a connection could have possibly come about.
The history of a people cannot be grasped to its fullest extent without a proper understanding of the land they inhabit. Kerala’s history is intimately tied to its geography. Its original settlement and its subsequent cultural evolution are inevitable offshoots of the ocean that embraces its shores, the mountains that guard its frontiers and the rivers that drench it with life.
Geographically, Kerala is a sliver of coastal plain sandwiched between the Indian Ocean along its western frontier and the Sahyadri mountains that run north to south along its eastern frontier. Geological evidence indicates that these mountains were formed when the supercontinent of Gondwana broke up around 150 million years ago. Some eleven million years ago, a large part of India’s western coastal plain, including Kerala, was under the sea. Around 5000 to 3000 years ago, this underwater seabed lifted out of the sea for reasons unclear. The resulting landform divided into three distinct elevations in Kerala — highland, midland, and lowland, the last one being located at or below sea-level.
Many parts of this lowland region are water-logged marshes sustained by the zig-zag topography of the coast and the western slopes of the Sahyadri mountains. The majority of these wetlands are brackish, although a few of them are freshwater marshes, formed through gradual regression of the sea over thousands of years. For many months in the year even today, these lower lying portions, particularly the region around Kerala’s backwaters, remain submerged under a layer of brackish or fresh water.
Today, this region comprises a labyrinthine network of lakes and lagoons connected by natural and man-made canals running along the coast. Fed by more than thirty-five rivers from the Sahyadri mountains, the watery network extends almost halfway across the entire state. To give an idea of the enormity of this aquatic system, a small portion, Vembanad Lake, is an inland brackish body of water covering an area of 785 square miles with a meandering network 60 miles long of coastal backwater, lagoons, marshes, and mangroves.
Besides towering mountains, plentiful rivers, and numerous natural springs, the Malabar coast boasted an enormous tropical forest once upon a time containing an abundance of incense-bearing trees, gums and resins, myrrh, ebony, cinnamon, black pepper, spices, and other natural treasures regarded as wonderous miracles by many a mighty kingdom in human history. Even today, parts of the ancient forest still stand, recognized as one of the world’s eight “hottest hotspots” of biological diversity. Although the land has been tamed considerably over the centuries by continuous human habitation, the southwest monsoons still bring with it an ever-present threat of the primeval wilderness reclaiming its own. In Arundhati Roy’s vivid description of this state of affairs, “The countryside turns an immodest green. Boundaries blur as tapioca fences take root and bloom. Brick walls turn mossgreen. Pepper vines snake up electric poles. Wild creepers burst through laterite banks and spill across the flooded roads.”
In the ancient past, when this menacing, intractable, narrow strip of water-logged, marshy coast was uninhabited and considerably wilder than it is today, who would have wanted to settle down on it? and why? It is, of course, impossible that a fully formed trading society would crop up on this land “as if by magic,” as Padmanabha Menon put it. It is also hardly likely that scattered groups of tribal hunter-gatherers, chancing upon this formidable, marshy, desolate wilderness would think of draining it to create an agrarian community, much less a trading nation. It is even less likely that merchant sailors from the deserts of Arabia would have the know-how to drain marshy land sodden with brackish water, or the initiative to do so just to sell wood and spices.
How about Vedic brahmin immigrants from the northern parts of the Indian subcontinent, as Kerala’s creationary legend claims? Much of India was heavily forested even as late as the mid-seventeenth century CE, with the forests teeming with dangerous wild animals. Although their number has decreased considerably due to hunting, poaching, and loss of habitat, many tigers, leopards, and wild elephants still find refuge in the wildlife sanctuaries of India today. If indeed the first settlers in Kerala were actually the brahmins, they would have had to trek through miles of this wild, forbidding forest to reach the southwestern coast from their homes in the north. Why would timid brahmin scholars engage in such an arduous trek, not knowing what to expect at the end of their perilous journey when, clearly, they were not traders or laborers and extremely ill-equipped in all ways to drain marshy land and establish a trading nation?
Kerala’s creationary legend as told in another version, the Kerala Mahatmyam, further claims that these earliest settlers in Kerala came from the banks of “four rivers in the north”: Narmada, Godavari, Krishna, and Kaveri. The northernmost Narmada is separated from the southernmost Kaveri by around 785 miles as the crow flies, no small distance in ancient times. The inhabited region between these four rivers was divided among numerous warring kingdoms throughout much of its history. It is hard to believe that discrete groups of scholarly brahmins belonging to such disparate kingdoms would band together under a common banner to emigrate with their families in tow from the placid fertile lands around these far-flung riverain districts to a desolate marshy littoral delta surrounded by dense forests and besieged by ferocious beasts, and for what? to sell cinnamon and pepper to Arabian merchants?
Clearly, the original immigrants were not Vedic brahmins. Indeed, it is unlikely they were from the Indian subcontinent at all. According to the Kerala myth, the original settlers, who came from a distant land, were unsuccessful in their initial attempts at colonization. The first wave of immigrants refused to stay on and build a community; instead, they returned home as soon as their work was done. Because colonization needed a broad community of administrators, soldiers, and spiritual advisors in addition to those who could exploit the natural resources of the land, the population of entire villages was persuaded to move all together to the new world. The idea was a success: the second wave of immigrants proved more compliant than earlier emigres. They planted crops, cultivated gardens, raised cattle, built temples, and carved a civilized society out of the wilderness. All this means, of course, that the land from where the first settlers came was agrarian and civilized, where people knew how to plant crops, cultivate gardens, raise cattle, and build temples. But more significantly, they were a people who wanted the natural resources of the Malabar coast — the spices, the incense, the gold, and the wood; wanted it with a thirst enough to motivate them to drain the formidable swamps of Malabar.
Among the three major civilizations that existed in very ancient times around the Indian Ocean and its two gulfs: the Harappan civilization around the Indus delta, the Sumerians around the Mesopotamian basin, and the Egyptians around the Nile delta, Egypt was closer to the black pepper trade than was Mesopotamia. Moreover, Egyptian civilization evolved around the longest river in the world — the Nile — with its predictable annual floods that were sometimes unpredictably too high. As icecaps melted after the end of the last glacial maximum around 6,000 years ago, steeply rising global sea levels inundated the coastal areas of deltas across the world including the Nile delta, making it as marshy as the wetlands of Kerala. Reliant thus on a single source of freshwater for the entirety of its agricultural needs, ancient Egypt developed into a hydraulic civilization, inventing a system of irrigation in the Nile delta primarily tailored to regulate high water levels.
Indeed, corroborating the possibility that the four riverain districts of the early Malabar settlers were situated in the Nile delta, which lies in north Egypt, radiocarbon dating and mapping reveal that the eastern arm of the Nile had four major delta lobes related to former distributary branches around 2550 BCE: Pelusiac, Mendesian, Tanitic, and Damietta, with the northernmost Damietta situated less than fifty miles from the southernmost Pelusiac. The regions around these riverbanks were low-lying marshes below sea level. Perhaps these rivers may have been the “four rivers in the north,” whose banks were the original homes of the earliest settlers in Kerala.
The Egyptians, living and hunting in the delta marshes of the Nile, learnt early on to control water flow from the sea and the Nile to their advantage. Even as early as 3100 BCE, during the reign of their first pharaoh Menes, they had the capability to drain swampy marshes and reclaim land, as demonstrated by their then capital city of Memphis, which was built thus on land reclaimed from the Nile. Even by 450 BCE, when the Greek historian Herodotus traveled through Egypt and recorded his observations, the delta was a “wide land, flat and watery and marshy” from the sea as far inland as Memphis.
Besides, the ancient Egyptians craved myrrh, ebony, and spices in profuse measure for personal, funerary, and religious rituals. In fact, because of high demand and relatively low supply, these commodities were considered items of luxury. That trade in these commodities existed since very ancient times is well-documented. Shipwrecks from the Bronze age suggest trade in pepper imported into the Mediterranean in the second millennium BCE. In fact, the earliest clear evidence of trade in spices from the Malabar coast dates to around 1213 BCE, when the mummy of Egyptian Pharaoh Ramesses II was embalmed with grains of Piper Nigrum (black pepper), which is indigenous to Malabar. That the black pepper used on the pharaoh was well-known at the time, possibly obtained through trade, should be undeniable; it would hardly be appropriate to embalm the body of a revered pharaoh with unknown, unproven materials.
For the Egyptians, or their Arabian merchants to have chartered trade across the sea to Kerala, not only the land itself, but trade routes too must have been well-known in those days. For trade routes to have been well known, they would have to be established even earlier. Indeed, the natives of Egypt, living around the marshy riverbanks of the eastern Nile delta certainly had the motivation, the economic justification, and the proximity to each other both physically and as a cohesive social group to emigrate to a comparable geographic region on the orders of their pharaoh when their land silted over. Possibly corroborating such an emigration en masse, a limestone stela in Egypt records in year 22 of the reign of Senusret I (ca. 1950 BCE), an oceanic expedition from Wadi Gawasis, a pharaonic port on the Red Sea: 50 administrators and 500 soldiers were part of the expedition, along with 3200 citizens.
Black pepper, cinnamon, ebony, cardamom, and other unique products of Kerala were in high demand in Egypt, mostly unavailable in other parts of the Indian Ocean littoral, and just one watery voyage across from Egypt. The economic justification for setting up a colony to monopolize the wonderous produce of the land right at its source is thus self-evident. Such a colony could be ruled remotely by the pharaoh in Egypt through a trustworthy governor, senior administrator, courtier, keeper of the pharaoh’s fortunes: per-al, ‘one belonging to the palace,’ a documented Egyptian title for just such an officer.
According to Kerala’s creationary legend, the people who initially populated the land were unable to govern themselves. They petitioned a king from a distant land to send them a governor whose term of office could not exceed twelve years. Twenty-two colonial governors ruled thus over a period of two hundred years. Some ruled the requisite dozen years; some ruled less and the last one ruled for slightly more. The tale meticulously records, down to the years and months, the reigns of these governors who thus ruled the land. Their common title, says the legend, was perumal.
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