Ingo STRAUCH
Institut für Kulturwissenschaften Ost- und Südasiens, Julius-Maximilians-Universität Würzburg
The Indian inscriptions from the cave Hoq on Socotra – new evidence for Indian intercontinental trade contacts in the first centuries A.D.
In the year 2000 a group of Belgian speleologists discovered in one of the huge underground caves on the island Socotra hundreds of ancient inscriptions. A first investigation showed that most of them were written by Indian sailors who visited the island between 100 and 400 AD. Another expedition, carried out in 2005, yielded nearly 200 Indian texts written in Brāhmī script, supplemented by numerous South Arabian and Ethiopian graffiti and even few Greek inscriptions. Almost all of them are graffiti representing just the names of the visitors, in some cases, however, added by other types of information such as the profession or origin of the respective person.
Thus the Hoq corpus provides impressive evidence for the multicultural mixture of visitors who frequented the island in this period of Indian Ocean trade. Moreover, it supports the literary data provided by the Periplus of the Erythraean Sea and introduces a completely new type of sources which was hitherto almost completely missing: personal inscriptions left by the Indian participants of the intercontinental trade networks which connected the Indian subcontinent with South Arabia and the Mediterranean world.
My paper will give a survey of the corpus of Hoq inscriptions and evaluate their position within the broader context of sources which are available for the Indian Ocean trade in the first centuries AD. It will summarize the results of my study of the Indian texts and discuss the geographical, historical, social and religious background of the Indian sailors who visited Socotra between 100 and 400 A.D.
