Ocean of Objects: People

People from different places, speaking different languages and following different religions have lived and worked side by side around the Indian Ocean. Winds and trade created cosmopolitan communities where sailors and merchants from many diverse places stayed in the same ports waiting for the right time to sail. Other people moved to set up new businesses, find work, flee persecution and poverty, to build new futures for them and their families. Not all crossed the ocean willingly. People were sold as slaves, transported as prisoners, or sold themselves to work in new countries.

Ancient Trade Between the World's First Cities

Square Seal from Mohenjo-daro, Pakistan
Round Seal from Babylon, Iraq
About 2500-2000 BCE
The British Museum,1947,0416.1, 1883,1116.1

Made of stone, these seals are more than 4,000 years old. Two small pictures of bulls are designed to make their mark. The round example, found many kilometres from home across the ocean in what is now Iraq. The square example was discovered in the land where it had been made, in modern day Pakistan. The seals would be pressed into clay to sign a letter or to indicate ownership.

The seals were made by people who lived in the first cities built in Pakistan and India, the Indus Civilisation. These cities were linked by business and trade with other cities in ancient Mesopotamia in the Middle East. Ships carried goods and people between both places. Could the round seals have been left behind in the ancient city of Babylon by a visiting trader?

On both seals there are strange symbols that today, no one knows how to read. The language used by the Indus people is still to be deciphered.

Cooking Away From Home

Cooking pot
Siraf, Iran, 600-900 CE
The British Museum, 2007,6001.9858

Over a thousand years old, this pot was used to cook food in a busy international port called Siraf, on the south coast of Iran. Not a local Iranian cooking pot, this was made in India or Pakistan. People from there stayed at Siraf, some waiting for monsoon winds to change to sail home, others staying for many years. Wanting to eat the foods they were used to, cooked in the right way, they brought traditional South Asian cooking pots with them.

Intact ancient cooking pots are hardly ever found by archaeologists. They were easily smashed. At Siraf, the broken pottery included many pieces of local pots, as well as South Asian cooking pots. Pieces from East African cooking pots were also found. Africans were also living in the port eating their foods cooked in the East African way.

Strangers on the Shore

Makassan Prau Captain statue
Mambur (Mick Maramber), Elcho Island
Berndt Collection, University of Western Australia, WU1832

Wooden Balanda statue. Dutchman at Port of Makassar
Munggeraui, Gumaidj mada, Raiung mala, Yirritja moiety, b.1907, Yirrkala
Berndt Collection, University of Western Australia, WU401

Makassan Headman statue
Munggeraui, Gumaidj mada, Raiung mala, Yirritja moiety, b.1907, Yirrkala
Berndt Collection, University of Western Australia, WU404

These painted figures called wuramu show individuals that Aboriginal people from northern Australia met when travelling to Makassar in South Suluwesi, Indonesia. One shows a Dutch customs officer, the second the captain of a Makassan boat and the third, a Makassan headman. The Dutch customs official is wearing a hat. He has a knife and pistol on his belt. The lines encircling his eyes are a pair of glasses. People from Makassar in Sulawesi visited northern Australia to collect sea cucumbers or trepang to sell to China. Aboriginal people sometimes returned with them to Makassar.

Made at Elcho Island in the Northern Territory, wuramu (crook man or collection man) sculptures can be of Makassans collectively or the custom officials at Makassar who collected levees on each catch of trepan. In some cases, they were said to take too much thus earning the name ‘crook’.

The Makassans visited the Northern Arnhem Land coast from at least the 17th century until the 1920s when they came to harvest trepang. They came in boats called praus and their exploits are remembered in Yirritja people’s designs as a triangular pattern found on most objects with contact associations.

Ocean of Objects: Goods

The container ships and car transporters arriving in Fremantle, bulk carriers leaving Port Hedland and oil tankers sailing past Singapore are part of a long history of maritime trade. Objects and raw materials of all kinds have been traded around and across the Indian Ocean for thousands of years.

In the past important cargoes included spices, cloth, gems and fine pottery; and slaves. Many becoming rare and expensive luxuries when they reached their final destinations after months at sea.

Spicing Up a Roman Feast

Pepper Pot
Hoxne, England, 400 CE
The British Museum, 1994,0408.34

A tiny ‘superhero’ fights a villain while waiting for a wealthy Roman to pick them up, open a small hatch underneath and sprinkle pepper on to their food. This is a small silver pepper pot, gilt with gold. Pepper or other spices were kept inside the hollow base. Pepper from India was traded across the ocean to the Roman Empire two thousand years ago. There, pepper and other spices like Indonesian cloves and Sri Lankan cinnamon were in great demand.

The clue as to who these two people on this pepper pot are is on the back. A wooden club is leaning against the leg of one figure. This is the hero Hercules. His opponent is a giant called Antaeus, who could never be defeated so long as his feet were touching the ground. Hercules is here winning by lifting the giant in the air.

This pepper pot was found in Britain, with three others buried in a chest of other treasures by a local farmer in 1992.

A Potted History

Saucer
c.1635 - 1645
Rijksmuseum, Netherlands, AK-RBK-15794

The pots in this case have all crossed the Indian Ocean, some more than once. They span 700 years of ceramic production in the Indian Ocean region.

Blue and white decorated porcelain was first made in China in the 1300s initially for the Persian market and was already being exported around the Indian Ocean, before Europeans first sailed around Africa to reach India and China. So popular was blue and white pottery, that it was copied and made in Vietnam and Thailand. When Portuguese traders reached China by sea in the 1520s, Chinese potters started to make blue and white porcelain for the European market. This kraak porcelain, named after the Portuguese ships or carracks that carried it, became very popular in Europe, including the Netherlands. Dutch potters started to copy the blue and white designs on Delftware using underglaze cobalt blue imported from Saxony in the 1700s. Blue and white patterns inspired by China became so popular with Europeans that local factories made their own and began to embellish and modify designs. This is the origin of the ‘Willow Pattern’ dinner services still made today.