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The Ancient Precursor To IMEC – Analysis

By Sifra Lentin The India-Middle East-Europe Economic Corridor (IMEC), first announced by Prime Minister Modi on 9 September 2023 on the sidelines of India’s G20, will accelerate under the new Trump Presidency and the likely resolution of the Israel-Hamas war, a prelude to which is the latest 45-day ceasefire between the warring parties. The vision for this corridor[1] is based on the Abraham Accords brokered by Trump during his first presidency, which normalized Israel’s ties with the UAE and Bahrain on 15 September 2020 and is hopeful of doing the same for its relationship with Saudi Arabia once they both sign. Eight countries will participate in the IMEC – India, UAE, Saudi Arabia, the U.S., Germany, France, Italy and the EU – which will connect India to the Gulf, and via Jordan and Israel, connect the Gulf to the Mediterranean. (See Map 1) India is the originator country, and it’s appropriate. For though IMEC appears to be the latest corridor in the dozens being envisaged and built around the world, ever since China’s Belt & Road Initiative (BRI) began in 2014, it is in fact, not a new passageway, but a revival of an ancient route which carried a thriving trade between these same countries. The India-Middle East-Europe Economic Corridor (IMEC). Source: Lowy Institute What was the original corridor and what does history tell us of its political and economic sustainability? This trade route began to be used 2300 years ago, well before the well-known 1 BCE to 4 CE trade between the Romans and the contemporaneous Mauryan and then Gupta empires on the Subcontinent. Archaeological finds of Harappan seals in Mesopotamia and Mesopotamian seals in Harappan sites have established that trade between the two seas, Arabian and Mediterranean, was established via the Persian Gulf ports and not the Red Sea channel which is used today. [2] [3] Although the main corridor to the Mediterranean then was via the riverine cities on the Tigris and Euphrates rivers in present day Iraq, a recent steatite seal[4] discovery in the Harappan site of Lothal near the head of the Gulf of Khambhat (in India’s Gujarat state), points to a network of merchant interlocutors from the eastern littoral regions of the Arabian Peninsula that include present-day Oman, UAE, Bahrain and Saudi Arabia – quite specifically, the IMEC corridor region. The steatite seal found in Lothal[5] is believed to belong to the region of Dilmun, which archaeologists have linked to excavated sites in Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, and Qatar. The trade between this network of Gulf ports and caravan routes in their hinterlands, are linked not just to high value goods from the Indian subcontinent like pepper, cotton piece goods, ivory, but specific goods from this region itself, and which find mention in the Judaic and Christian traditions of the region. The Arabian Peninsula was famous for its incenses like Frankincense and Myrrh, copper and diorite, gold, and crystalline semi-precious stones like carnelian. The expansion of trade between the Mesopotamian (also known as Sumerian) and Harappan civilisations was expanded by the Sumerian King Sargon after he integrated the independent southern cities into his kingdom. Sargon’s cuneiform from 2300 BCE shows the presence of Meluhhans, i.e. merchants, mariners and migrants from the Harappan civilisation, who settled there. Sargon expanded trade greatly between the Harappans and his region and westward to the east Mediterranean coast, although his focus always remained on the thriving Indian Ocean. [6] Interesting from the IMEC lens is that the interlocutors of trade with Sargon’s kingdom were the traders of Magan – today’s modern-day UAE, Oman and possibly the Makran Coast – who supplied copper and diorite to Mesopotamia[7]. There were also merchants from Dilmun – today’s Saudi Arabia, Bahrain and Qatar – who traded actively with southern Mesopotamian cities. Sargon’s territorial expansion enabled merchants to travel in safety from the Persian Gulf to the Mediterranean.[8] They reached the Mediterranean Sea by the rivers Tigris and Euphrates. It is likely that overland caravan routes in West Asia were also active corridors for transporting goods. There is another indicator of the importance of this Persian Gulf route: Alexander the Great’s search for an alternative to it. After turning his army back from the Beas River (in present-day Punjab) to begin his march home, Alexander undertook a sea voyage from the Indus, along the Makran Coast, to reach the Persian Gulf. He had tasked two small groups of his soldiers to explore the Persian Gulf and one group to sail down the Red Sea to the south coast of Yemen.[9] Before he could realise his dream of discovering the feasibility of a Red Sea route to the Gulf, he died in Babylon in 323 BCE. The Red Sea route was only made viable a century later by descendants of his Macedonian General Ptolemy I Soter, who went on to rule Egypt. After the 1st century CE, the older Persian Gulf ports and their hinterland of caravan routes and caravanserai like Palmyra (Syria) and Petra (Jordan) and network of ports on the Mediterranean coast, coexisted alongside Red Sea ports like Berenice, from where caravans carried goods to the river Nile. Reed sailing boats known as Feluccas, then voyaged downriver to the former Ptolemaic capital of Alexandria on the Mediterranean coast. Both routes to the Mediterranean from the Indian Ocean were active even after the discovery by the Portuguese of a direct sea route from Europe round the Cape of Good Hope to India.[10] The old overland routes from Persian Gulf ports, particularly the popular Basra-Baghdad corridor, continued, with Indian merchants sending caravans as large as 25-30,000 camels till the late 17th century, each camel carrying 400-500 pounds of cloth, across West Asia to reach the Ottoman Empire, North Africa, and Europe. [11] Traders from West Asia like Arabs, Jews, Armenians, Persians were known to travel for trade to India’s west coast. A few families made India their home thereby creating a transnational network for the exchange of goods, information, credit, and to facilitate the mobility of people. From the Indian subcontinent, the Jain and Kutchi Bhatia communities were early pioneers in the maritime Persian Gulf trade. They were followed by Memons, Bohra, Khoja, Lohanas, and Sindhis. It was the inauguration of the Suez Canal in 1869 that made the Red Sea route dominant, and this was because it is the shortest and most economical passage between the Indian Ocean and the Mediterranean Sea. The attacks on shipping by the Houthis have discredited this route and accelerated the pursuit for alternatives like IMEC. The history of trade between the Western Indian Ocean and the Mediterranean Sea shows that trade like water, it seeks its own level. Economic corridors like the IMEC will be successful if they ensure ease and speed of transit, security, and higher profits than competing routes, much as its ancient predecessors did. About the author: Sifra Lentin is Fellow, Bombay History, Gateway House. Source" This article was written for Gateway House: Indian Council on Global Relations. References [1] This multi-tiered economic corridor will use climate-sustainable infrastructure in constructing physical (ports, rail, road), digital, and energy corridors. [2] Red Sea ports like Socotra (an island in the Gulf of Aden), Berenice, and Myos Hormuz (both in Egypt) were developed and popularised by Ptolemaic (Greek) Egypt’s King Antiochus the Great and his successors about 300 BCE, who developed this route as an alternative to the older Persian Gulf ports and their hinterlands that connected to the Mediterranean. Ptolemaic Egypt was a Greek polity founded in 305 BCE by the Macedonian General Ptolemy I Soter, and ruled by his dynasty till the death of Cleopatra VII in 30 BCE. [3] Egypt came under Roman rule beginning with Octavius Caesar, and its ports became popular conduits for trade between the Ancient Roman Empire and the Indian Subcontinent. [4] See this excerpt on the Lothal Seal https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/antiquity/article/abs/persian-gulf-seal-from-lothal/719ED5EFE163A8B363481514EBD9593B [5] Harappan civilisation sites have been discovered as far north as Afghanistan and as far south as Daimabad in Maharashtra. Gujarat (India) has the expansive Harappan port city of Lothal located near the head of the Gulf of Khambhat. [6]Paine, Lincoln, The Sea & Civilisation: A Maritime History of the World (Great Britain, Atlantic Books Ltd. 2014), p. 148 [7] Paine, Lincoln, The Sea & Civilisation: A Maritime History of the World (Great Britain, Atlantic Books Ltd. 2014), p. 148. [8] Ibid, p. 148. [9] Ibid, p. 271. [10] The Portuguese quest to find a direct sea route from Europe to India was a result of the Arab-Venetian monopoly on the spice trade from India and Southeast Asia. See by this author https://www.gatewayhouse.in/portuguese-string-of-ports/ [11] Historian Sushil Chaudhury points out in his paper Overland Trade Vis-à-vis Overseas Commerce: Which Enjoyed Primacy? (2018-2019), that Indians carried out a voluminous caravan trade as late as the 17th C with Europe via Persia and Istanbul, with each camel carrying 400-500 pounds of cloth whose length would be 5500 to 7,200 yards (taking 14-15 yards per pound). If there was a caravan of 25,000 to 30,000 camels this will be about 200 million yards of cloth exported from India to Turan, Russia, Persia, Ottoman Empire, North Africa and Europe. Chaudhury, Sushil, Overland Trade Vis-à-vis Overseas Commerce: Which Enjoyed Primacy? (Delhi, Proceedings of the Indian History Congress Vol. 79, 2018-19)