Alexander's conquest of India... 326 BC // year 47
We had stopped at the beginnings of the future Suez Canal, 500 years BC, which would have made it possible to avoid the long route taken by Ismaili merchants to Egypt.
Alexander the Great entered India from the north-west in 326 B.C. in a bitter battle (as was often the case in those days) and decided to open up two other routes by which he could bring the spices from that country. The first was to take the Red Sea overland to Alexandria and then across the Mediterranean to Greece, while the other was to take the Persian Gulf to the Empire's Asian provinces. Unfortunately, Alexander the Great died before he could organize these routes, and it was Ptolemy, King of Egypt, who around 250 BC took up the project of the Maritime Canal - the Pharaohs' Canal - and continued it as far as the Bitter Lakes.
For all the geographical problems encountered by Sesostris III and Darius at the time, the project was abandoned several times, but ships continued to sail between India and Berenice Epidires on the Ethiopian coast, more than a hundred times a year. The journey lasted 2 years.
Alexandria became the great center of spice traffic, so much so that one of its gates was called the Pepper Gate. Rome also became the center of enormous spice consumption, and huge warehouses were built to house cinnamon and peppers to prevent them from going mouldy.
Funeral rites were big consumers of spices, and during the funeral of Poppea (Nero's wife) all the cinnamon imported from Ceylon in one year was burnt on the altars. The Persian poet wrote
It's true that your heir, furious at seeing his inheritance eroded in this way, will skimp on the meal at your funeral; putting your poorly embalmed bones in the urn, he'll care little whether the cinnamon (Camphor in those days) is sufficiently fragrant, whether the cinnamon isn't adulterated with a mixture of cherry bark.
The importance of the sin trade in these times is clearly demonstrated by the detailed description of the city of Babylon in St John's Apocalypse...
...the merchants of the earth were enriched by the abundance of its luxury... their cargoes of gold, silver, precious stones, pearls, fine linen, purple, silk, scarlet, all kinds of scented wood, all kinds of ivory objects, all kinds of objects made of very precious wood, bronze, iron and marble, cinnamon, spices, perfumes, myrrh, incense... The great city, where all those who had ships on the sea were enriched by their opulence... Chapter 18
At this time, a great change was taking place in the way spices arrived from India and Ceylon (modern-day Sri Lanka) to Alexandria. In 47 CE, a Greek captain by the name of Hippalus made an unprecedented discovery. At the time, sailors feared the high seas and followed the coastline, but Hippalus made the crossing through the Strait of Bab-el-Mandeb to the Indian coast in record time! Knowledge of the East and West monsoons changed everything. The monsoon now bore his name, Hippalus.
