A History of the World in 100 Objects (52 page)

When I reached the three circular terraces on the top, I found that the teaching stops. There are no longer any reliefs telling stories, simply bell-shaped stupas with a seated Buddha inside each one. We have left behind and below us the illusory world of representation and reality; this is the world of formlessness. At the very summit of Borobudur, there is a huge bell-shaped stupa. Inside it there is nothing, the void – the ultimate goal of this spiritual journey.

It’s amazing what a few broken pots and plates can tell us. This chapter is about pottery – but it is not about the high ceramic art which usually survives only in treasuries or in ancient graves; it is about the crockery of everyday life, which as we all know usually survives only in fragments. It is striking that when a plate or a vase is whole it is alarmingly fragile; once it is smashed the pieces of pottery are almost indestructible. Broken bits of pot have told us more than almost anything else about the daily life of the distant past.

Pictured here is a handful of fragments that survived for about a thousand years on a beach in East Africa. An alert beachcomber picked them up in 1948 and presented them to the British Museum in 1974, realizing that these broken oddments, of no financial value at all, would open up not just life in East Africa a thousand years ago, but the whole world of the Indian Ocean.

For much of history, history itself has been landlocked. Most of us tend to think in terms of towns and cities, mountains and rivers, continents and countries. But if we stop thinking about, say, the Asian landmass or a history of India and instead put the oceans in the foreground, we have a completely different perspective on our past. I’ve been looking in recent chapters at the ways in which ideas, beliefs, religions and people travelled along the great trade routes across Europe and Asia between the ninth and fourteenth centuries; but the trade routes also crossed the high seas, sailing around the Indian Ocean. Africa and Indonesia are nearly 5,000 miles apart, yet they can communicate with each other easily, just as they can communicate with the Middle East, India and China, thanks to the Indian Ocean winds, which obligingly
blow north-easterly for one half of the year and south-westerly for the other. This means that traders can sail long distances knowing they will be able to come back. Merchant sailors have been criss-crossing these seas for thousands of years and they carried not just cargoes of goods, but plants and animals, people, languages and religions. It is no accident that the people of Madagascar speak an Indonesian language. The shores of the Indian Ocean, however diverse and however far apart, belong to one great community, a community whose extent and complexity can be glimpsed in our broken bits of pot.

The handful that I’ve picked out can tell us a great deal. The largest piece is about the size of a postcard, the smallest roughly half the size of a credit card. The pieces fall into three distinct groups. There are a couple of smooth, pale green pieces that look very like expensive modern china; there are other small pieces with blue patterning; and there is a third group of unglazed natural clay decorated in quite high relief. The pots of which these fragments were once part come from widely different parts of the world, but between 600 and 900 years ago they were thrown away in one place – on the same beach in East Africa. They were found at the bottom of a low crumbling cliff at Kilwa Kisiwani island.

Today Kilwa is a quiet Tanzanian island with a few small fishing villages, but around the year 1200 it was a thriving port city. You can still find the ruins of its great stone buildings and of the largest mosque of its time in sub-Saharan Africa. A later Portuguese visitor described the city as he found it in 1502:

The city comes down to the shore and is surrounded by a wall and towers, within which there may be 12,000 inhabitants … The streets are very narrow, as the houses are very high, of three and four storeys, and one can run along the tops of them upon the terraces, as the houses are very close together … and in the port are many ships.

Kilwa was the southernmost and the richest of a chain of towns and cities strung along the East African coast, running from Tanzania north through Mombasa, in modern Kenya, to Mogadishu in Somalia. These communities were always in touch with each other, sailing up and down the coast, and they also mixed constantly with traders coming across the ocean.

The evidence of all this trade – the broken crockery – is full of information. It is quite clear even to me that the pale green sherds are Chinese porcelain, fragments from beautiful luxury bowls or jars – Celadon ware, which the Chinese were manufacturing in industrial quantities and exporting not just to south-east Asia but across the Indian Ocean to the Middle East and Africa. The Tanzanian novelist Abdulrazak Gurnah remembers finding his own bits of Chinese pottery on the beach as a child:

We used to see these things, these bits of pottery, on the beaches. And sometimes older people would say to us, ‘That’s Chinese pottery.’ And we’d think ‘Yeah, yeah,’ we’d heard lots of stories of this kind of thing – flying carpets, princes lost, etc. – so we took it as just another one of those stories. It was only later on, when you begin to go in to museums or hear these persistent stories of great Chinese armadas that visited East Africa, that the object then becomes something valuable, something that is a signifier of something important – a connection. And then you see the object itself and you see its completeness, and its weight, and its beauty, and it makes inescapable this presence over centuries of a culture as far away as China.

As well as the Chinese porcelain, there are other bits of pot here that have clearly travelled a long way to get to Kilwa. A blue piece with black geometric patterning on it obviously comes from the Arab world; when you look at this fragment under the microscope, you can tell from the composition of the clay that it was made in Iraq or Syria. Other pieces come from Oman or different parts of the Gulf. These fragments alone would be enough to demonstrate the strength and the extent of Kilwa’s links with the Islamic Middle East.

The people of Kilwa clearly loved foreign pottery. They used it for dining and they also decorated their houses and mosques with bowls set into walls and arches. Pottery, of course, was only one element in the thriving import–export trade that made Kilwa’s fortune – but as it was the toughest and the most enduring product, it is the evidence that has survived. Also coming in were cottons from India – a trade that continues to this day – Chinese silks, glass, jewellery and cosmetics. Another Portuguese visitor conjured up the rich exchanges that took place at harbours like Kilwa:

They are great traders in cloth, gold, ivory and diverse other wares with the Moors and other heathens of India; and to their harbour come every year many ships with cargoes of merchandise, from which they get great stores of gold, ivory and wax.

Exports from Africa included iron ingots much in demand in India, timber used for building in the Gulf, rhino horn, turtle shell, leopard skin and, of course, gold and slaves. Many of these were brought over huge distances from inland Africa; gold, for instance, came from Zimbabwe far to the south. It was the trade through Kilwa that 800 years ago made Zimbabwe such a rich and powerful kingdom, capable of constructing as its capital city that supreme and mysterious monument, Great Zimbabwe.

All this trade made Kilwa very rich, but it changed it in more than material ways. Because the ocean winds blow north-east for one half of the year and south-west for the other, this was a trade with a distinct annual rhythm, and merchants from the Gulf and India usually had to spend months waiting for the wind home. In these months they inevitably mixed closely with the local African community – and transformed it. In due course, thanks to these Arab traders, the coastal towns were converted to Islam, and Arabic and Persian words were absorbed into the local Bantu language to create a new lingua franca – Swahili. The result was a remarkable cultural community running through the coastal cities from Somalia to Tanzania, from Mogadishu to Kilwa – a kind of Swahili strip, Islamic in faith and cosmopolitan in outlook. But the core of Swahili culture remains unquestionably African, as the historian Professor Bertram Mapunda explains:

We know that when these immigrants came to East Africa they came because one of the attractions was trade: it was because of these local people who had attracted them that the Swahili culture was later born. So it’s not true to say ‘This is something that was brought from outside,’ when we know that there were local people here who had contributed the starting point, and, from there, people from outside came and were interested.

The last piece of pottery makes this point very well. It’s a brown fragment of fired clay with bold raised decoration. It is pottery made for cooking and everyday use; the clay is local and the manufacture is distinctly African. It shows that the African inhabitants of Kilwa, while happily enjoying and collecting foreign pottery, continued, as people always do, to cook in their own traditional way with their own traditional pots. Pots like this one also tell us that the Africans themselves were sailing and trading across the Indian Ocean, because fragments like these have been found in ports across the Middle East. We know from other sources that African merchants traded to India and that cities of the Swahili strip were sending their own envoys to the Chinese court. Seas usually unite more than they separate the peoples who live on their shores. Like the Mediterranean, the Indian Ocean has created a huge interconnected world, where local history is always likely to be intercontinental.

In 1972 the world was gripped by one of the great battles of the Cold War. It was fought in Iceland and it was a chess match – between the American Bobby Fischer and the Russian Boris Spassky.

At the time, Fischer declared that ‘Chess is war on a board,’ and at that moment in history it certainly seemed like it. But then it always has; if all games are to some degree surrogates for violence and war, no game so closely compares to a set-piece battle as chess. Two opposing armies line up to march across the board, foot-soldier pawns in front, officers behind. Every chess-set shows a society at war; whether that society is Indian, Middle Eastern or European, the way the pieces are named and shaped tells us a great deal about how that society functions. So, if we want to visualize European society around the year 1200, we could hardly do better than look at how they played chess. No chess pieces offer richer insights than the seventy-eight mixed pieces found on the Hebridean island of Lewis in 1831, and known ever since as the Lewis Chessmen.