Subscribe to download
Muziris, India, 1342AD

Muziris, India, 1342AD

Existence: 900 Years, From 400 BC to 500 AD
Abandoned: Economic Collapse and Natural Disaster


Around 2,000 years ago, Muziris was one of India’s most important trading ports. According to the Akananuru, a collection of Tamil poetry from the period, it was “the city where the beautiful vessels, the masterpieces of the Yavanas [Westerners], stir white foam on the Periyar river of Kerala, arriving with gold and departing with pepper.”

In the first century BC Muziris was one of India’s most important cities, built around a trading port whose exports – especially black pepper – kept even mighty Rome in debt. The Roman author Pliny, in his Natural History, called Muziris “the first emporium of India”. The city appears prominently on the Tabula Peutingeriana, a fifth-century map of the world as seen from Rome. But from thereon, the story of this great Indian port becomes hazy. As reports of its location grow more sporadic, it literally drops off the map.

Muziris was a centre of paramount importance for Roman trade. What made it absolutely unique was the considerable amounts of black pepper exported from Muziris, amounting to thousands of tons per year. In addition to pepper, exports included both local products – ivory, pearls, spices, semi-precious stones, silks etc.

In the other direction, ships arrived with gold, coral, fine glassware, amphorae of wine, olive oil and the fermented fish sauce called garum. But the value of this trade was lopsided: Pliny the Elder estimated Rome’s annual deficit caused by imbalanced trade with India at 50m sesterces (500,000 gold coins), with “Muziris representing the lion’s share of it”.

Muziris was entirely dependent on foreign, especially Roman, demand for pepper. So when the Roman empire’s economy began to struggle in the third century AD, the trade in pepper reconfigured itself, and Muziris lost its importance. Despite its economical collapse, Muziris did not disappear completely, however there are very few mentions of the city after the 5th century AD.

Eventually almost 1000 years after it had seen its last Roman, the area around Muziris was hit by the Great Floods of Peroyar. Muziris disappeared from every known map of antiquity, and without a trace, because of a cataclysmic event in 1341, a devastation of "cyclone and floods" in the Periyar that altered the geography of the region completely. What little ruins remained of the once great city disappeared beneath the mud and waves where they would remain for several centuries until rediscovered in the late 20th century.