Yes, I have travelled to Kerala and tried to find Muziris myself.

The work being carried out at Pattanam is of utmost international importance. Pliny even calls it the first port of India, so it was a very important place for all of Tamil Nadu and Kerala, where both gems and pepper came from, a really lucrative area. And apparently a collection point for places in North India as well. On my next visit in 2003, I was in touch with an archaeologist working in Kerala, Dr. V. Selvakumar, who introduced me to Dr. Shajan, who had discovered the site at Pattanam as part of his regional survey. Lo and behold, Shajan did have Roman amphorae in his collections and also local pottery with wiping marks. That was my most exciting moment, because a link could be established between the region where Pattanam is located and the Red Sea ports.

What were these particular pots used for?

Personally I think they belonged to Indians in Egypt, because we find them in large numbers in the trade ports there, covered in soot. So clearly, at some point, they were used for cooking.

So cooking utensils had been brought all the way to the Red Sea by South Indians?

Certainly there was contact between South India and Egypt. A lot of my work really is to look at tangible things and see how they fit into ideas of Indo-Roman trade. One does, for instance, find Tamil Brahmi inscriptions, very interestingly in one case, actually inscribed on a Roman amphora.

Tamil graffiti on an ancient Roman amphora? What did it say?

It was written after the pot had been fired, but it referred to a Tamil chieftain, possibly somebody who had possessed that pot.

When investigating a site, how do you go about making scientific discoveries?

My work begins with the pottery; looking at the material. Berenike and Myos Hormos were really the starting point for my thinking of Indo-Roman trade. From those assemblages of pottery, I could identify the Roman things that I was familiar with and then there were massive amounts of pottery that were definitely not Roman. I first tried to separate those into distinctive groups, and of course from historical sources I knew who the trading partners on the Red Sea might be. One of the main techniques I use is thin section analysis. You cut a piece of a pot and glue it on to a microscope slide, and grind it down to about 30 microns, until light comes through. Very, very thin. Then you look at it under a polarising microscope.

What you see then, is it something like the DNA of a clay pot?

We sometimes call it the fingerprint. For instance the most common amphora, basically for storing wine, found in India is quite interesting, because it belongs to a type made in the Campanian region of Italy, although amphorae of the same shape were made in almost every Roman province. But you can tell the province it was made in by analysing the clay. As further product identification it has very distinctive double handles, so in ancient times when people saw this amphora they knew it had wine in it. They may even have known that it was made from a certain type of grape. But I doubt that wine had a wide use in ancient India.”

What do you think these ancient harbours looked like?

“The cover picture of my book, with all those amphorae on the ground, basically shows the harbour at Quseir al-Qadim — it was very ad hoc, very much a harbour at the edge of the empire. At Berenike there’s evidence of more purpose-built structures, possibly a harbour wall.”

Do you think that Muziris may have had settlements with people from Africa and the Mediterranean?

I think it was a real hodgepodge of nationalities. Like in a modern port town, people would have come and gone, but there may have been some who had a permanent presence. I am sure those descriptions of Mangalore in medieval times in Amitav Ghosh’s In an Antique Land are similar to what Muziris was like in Roman times.

As I walk away, my head is spinning with images of Tamil chefs dishing out sambhar in Red Sea ports thousands of years ago and I realise how much I miss my masala dosa.