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A holiday and a history lesson
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Radhika Praveen takes an archaeological journey to the Roman ruins of Pompeii and discovers it has much in common with her native town Pattanam in Kerala
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STRIKING CULTURAL SIMILARITIES The different faces of Pompeii hold a special appeal for globetrotting tourists from India
More than 2000 years ago, a mountain roared to life. And what an angry life it was. For three days and three nights, it spewed fire and ash, burying all evidence of a city that rested barely some kilometres away from its feet.
Eighteen busy centuries later, Austrian rulers, the King of Spain, English and German scholars and artists, all flocked to Italy to unearth history. In 1860, the new king of Italy put the young archaeologist Giuseppe Fiorelli in charge of the excavations. Fiorelli, observing that the volcanic ash had solidified around the bodies and clothes of humans and animals so far excavated, poured liquid plaster into cavities until they were full...
My distaste for history is legendary in my family. Be it concerning India or the British, I find it pointless to remember dates and events that happened to people who died years and centuries ago. But one cold evening in London, a BBC television documentary about a forgotten city made me put the place on my must-visit wish list.
Two years later, my husband and I skipped the customary London-Mumbai-Cochin-London winter trips to our families, and set out for the ruins of Pompeii in southern Italy. What I had not expected though, was how I was going to be pulled into a historical chapter that would bring me closer home in ways that I had never imagined.
The ruins at Pompeii
From Naples — which hit us like Mumbai on a cold winter afternoon, with its packed buses, colourful buildings and balconies, fearless children running across wide roads, and the cursing vehicle drivers — we took the Circumvesuviana (towards Sorrento) for Pompeii Scavi.
For the next 40 minutes, we chugged alongside a rather dull and harmless-looking mountain that was not sure if it should be guilty yet. I am assured that Vesuvius has sobered down since 1944 at least, yet the sight of a thousand houses around it makes me uncomfortable.
At Pompeii, 146 years after archaeologist Guiseppe Fiorelli's excavations, as I walk past the man who tried to stop getting ash into his eyes and mouth, a slave who tried to protect himself with a tile over his head, a dog chained to its post, I find it hard to imagine a death more perfectly preserved.
Of the 160 acres in Pompeii, about 47 were still being excavated. Only 20 acres were open for public viewing, these being the basilica or the court, the market places, the temples of Apollo and Jupiter, the many villas and the 83 takeaway centres. But it was when we entered one of the houses, or what remained of it, that I had a startling realisation. Like I had been there before.
Thrusting the bulky camera in my husband's hands, I explored the house excited, and then every other villa for the next five hours, intuitively familiar with their architecture: the atrium in the centre and the courtyard or peristyle behind, with an altar for the gods. Why, they all resembled the traditional `nalukettu' homes in Kerala, my hometown in southern India!
Not connected to history in any form, I turned to my husband for an answer. "Maybe trade links...," he replied. It had to be the only answer.
Roman port town
My first clue appeared, quite by chance, on a weblog. J. K. Nair's Varnam, mentioned an old Roman port in Kerala called Muziris. The port was located in Cranganore (now Kodungallur), a small town on the banks of the Periyar river.
A Google search then led me to news reports about fragments of Roman wine amphoras and gold Chera coins, excavated 12 kilometres from the port town at Pattanam.
Archaeologists back in Rome also found caskets containing black pepper and ivory tusks from India — evidence of trade between the two countries dating back to the first and second century BCE. As the
Arabian sea regressed about two kilometres inland and westwards in another 1,000 years, the Periyar river changed its course. The port town gradually moved to Cochin, and is still in active use.
P. K. Gopi, registrar of Kerala's Centre for Heritage Society, had not travelled to Pompeii. But he found it interesting that the houses there should have a similar architecture to the nalukettu homes. "This might have been of later origin in Kerala, probably from the 15th Century CE," Gopi emailed. "The influence for the construction of nalukettu would have been our [Kerala's] own gradual development, but yes, some sort of similarity in the roofing has been seen," he said.
Not researched
Dr. Alexandra Villing, Curator at London's British Museum, (Greek and Roman Antiquities), admitted that research had not looked at the houses in Pompeii and Kerala. "I am not sure whether Romans actually ever settled at the port or whether they just visited. It seems that normally Romans did not establish `live-in' trading ports." So it was really difficult to decide who would have influenced whom and when.
"Then again, building houses with an atrium was presumably not just a Roman idea but would have seemed sensible in warm to hot climates, and the development of a central courtyard may just have appeared independently in various places," she reasoned.
Gopi explained that the trade relationship between Rome and India would definitely have influenced every walk of life — the making of jewellery, household utensils, etc.
For example, the kashumala (or the cash garland), a popular ornament in Kerala designed to look like gold coins attached to a string, has its origin in what Roman traders exchanged for Indian spices and textiles.
E. H. Warmington's book on commerce between the Roman Empire and India mentions similar such coins found in the South Indian state — of Emperors who ruled during the time. Augustus, from 27 BCE to 14 CE, and his adopted son Tiberius, from 14 CE to 37 CE.
More similarities were to come.
Pompeiites used huge stone containers to grind wheat in, for baking breads.
In Kerala, stone containers (ural) of the same shape, only smaller, are still used in many homes to pound rice and other grains. Pompeii's temples of Apollo and Jupiter were built very much like Hindu temples — with the altar in the centre and ample space to walk around the deity (pradakshina) as part of worship.
Just the beginning
While archaeology experts today in Europe and India continue to unearth more Roman and Indian artefacts from both the cities of Pompeii and Pattanam, I think my own history lessons have just begun. About one city destroyed by a volcano that buried it for 18 centuries. And another — where traditional nalukettu homes are fast being replaced by gleaming mosaic-tiled one and two-storeyed houses — a victim of the natural progress of civilisation.
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