The Curse of Muziris is a novel. The lost port is real, and nobody can find it.

In 2024 Pan Macmillan India published The Curse of Muziris, a thriller by Hamish Morjaria. It has two stories. In AD 72, a trader from Muziris called Jayesh hides a relic that brought disaster to India. In the present day, an archaeologist in the Kerala State Archaeology Department, Dr Harveen Gill, tries to find the lost port. Amish Tripathi compared it to The Da Vinci Code.

The curse is fiction. No ancient source mentions one. But the port is not fiction. Muziris was real, and for about five hundred years it was one of the most important harbours in the trade between Rome and India. Then it went out of the record. Today archaeologists still argue about where it stood.

Rome came for pepper

Roman writers knew Muziris well. Pliny the Elder wrote his Natural History in the 70s AD. He says that ships crossed the open sea from Arabia with the monsoon wind and got to Muziris in 40 days. He calls it the first market of India. He also gives a warning: it was not a good place to land, because pirates lived nearby, at a place called Nitrias.

The main product was black pepper, which grows on vines in the hills of Kerala. Pliny gives the price in Rome as 4 denarii a pound for black pepper. White pepper cost 7, and long pepper cost 15. He did not understand why people wanted it. Other spices please by taste or smell, he says, but pepper pleases only because it is bitter.

He was also angry about the cost. In one passage he says that India takes at least 50 million sesterces from the empire every year, for goods that sell in Rome at a hundred times their price. In another, he puts the bill for India, China and Arabia together at 100 million sesterces a year. "That is what our luxuries and our women cost us," he writes.

A Greek sailing guide from the first century, the Periplus of the Erythraean Sea, agrees. It says that Muziris "abounds in ships sent there with cargoes from Arabia, and by the Greeks". Big ships went to this coast, it says, because there was so much pepper to carry. The ships brought a great quantity of coin to pay for it.

The Tamil poets saw the same ships

The trade is not only in Roman books. Old Tamil poetry from the Sangam period describes it from the other side. The poets called the port Muciri. Poem 149 of the Akananuru describes the ships of the Yavanas, the Tamil name for Greeks and Romans. They come with gold and go away with pepper. As they come in, they churn white foam on the Culli, the great river of the Cheras. Today we call that river the Periyar.

A single cargo worth a fortune

In 1980 the Austrian National Library in Vienna bought a damaged Greek papyrus from the middle of the second century AD. Scholars now call it the Muziris papyrus. One side has part of a loan contract for a trading trip to Muziris. The other side lists the value of a cargo that came back to Egypt on a ship called the Hermapollon.

The list covers three quarters of the cargo. The fourth quarter probably went to pay a tax. Those three quarters were worth 1,154 talents and 2,852 drachmas, in one translation. For the whole cargo, that is about 9 million sesterces. A Roman legionary of the time earned about 1,200 sesterces a year. One ship carried the pay of about 7,500 soldiers.

Most of that value was probably pepper. The scholar Federico De Romanis worked through the numbers and thinks that the pepper on that one ship weighed more than 500 tonnes. Other scholars read the prices differently, so treat that figure as an estimate.

Then the name goes quiet

The Roman sources tell us that Muziris was on a river, near the sea, in the kingdom of the Cheras. They do not tell us exactly where. The Tabula Peutingeriana puts it next to a large lake, with a temple of Augustus nearby. Many historians read the temple as a sign that Roman traders lived there for months while they waited for the wind.

After the Roman period, the name drops out of the record. Something similar comes back later. A copper plate grant from about AD 1000 names a place called Muyirikkodu. Most historians connect that name with Kodungallur, the old Chera port town near the mouth of the Periyar. For a long time, people simply assumed that Muziris was Kodungallur.

The problem is that the ground at Kodungallur does not agree. Excavations there since 1945 have found nothing older than the 13th century. And the modern town stands on top of any older layers, so a large dig is almost impossible.

What came out of the ground at Pattanam

In 2006, the archaeologists K. P. Shajan and V. Selvakumar looked at a village called Pattanam, a little south of Kodungallur. They suggested that Muziris could be there. From 2007 to 2015, the Kerala Council for Historical Research (KCHR) dug the site for nine seasons, led by P. J. Cherian.

They opened 61 trenches and recorded more than 1.29 lakh objects. They found pieces of Roman amphorae, the clay jars that carried wine and oil. These were the first found on the Kerala coast. They found torpedo jars from Mesopotamia, turquoise glazed pottery from southern Iran, beads of stone and glass, and a small gold ornament. They also found a brick wharf, teak posts for tying up boats, and a dugout canoe 6 metres long. Most of the finds date from about the 3rd century BCE to the 5th century CE.

That is strong evidence for a busy port that traded with the Roman world, at exactly the right time. The excavators said that they had found Muziris.

Why the question is still open

Pattanam has never produced the one thing that would end the argument: an inscription or a document that names the town. Without it, the identification is an inference.

Several senior historians said publicly that the case was not proved, among them M. G. S. Narayanan, K. N. Panikkar and R. Nagaswamy. The historian Rajan Gurukkal supported the link in part, but he argued that the site looks more like a merchant settlement than the great market of the Roman texts. That leaves three possibilities. Pattanam is Muziris. Or Pattanam was one part of a larger Muziris, with its centre under Kodungallur. Or "Muziris" was a name for a stretch of coast with several landing places.

The dig itself also became a fight. In 2015 the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI), whose permission is needed for any excavation in India, suspended KCHR's licence over claims of unscientific methods. The complaint came from Bharatheeya Vichara Kendram, a group linked to the RSS, which called the project propaganda. Cherian retired in 2016 and set up his own institute, PAMA. The ASI gave it permits in 2019 and cancelled them in 2021. The Delhi High Court set that cancellation aside. The ASI is reported to have taken over the work, and it has shared little with the press.

The flood of 1341

Every story about Muziris ends with a flood. In the usual version, the Periyar flooded in 1341, choked the old harbour with silt, and changed its course. The same flood opened a new harbour at Kochi and made the island of Vypin. Kochi then grew into the main port of the coast.

Geology supports large changes along this coast, and the Periyar has carried huge amounts of silt. But no record from 1341 describes the flood. The date comes from later tradition. Also, the Roman trade had faded many centuries before 1341, so the flood cannot explain why Roman Muziris went quiet. It explains, at most, the end of the old Kodungallur harbour. Whether that end came in one night or over a long, slow century is not settled.

What we know, and what we do not

We know that Muziris was real. Roman writers, a Greek sailing guide, a Roman map, a Vienna papyrus and Tamil poems all describe it. We know that it sold pepper to Rome in huge amounts. We know that a port at Pattanam traded with the Mediterranean, Mesopotamia and Iran at the right time.

We do not know if Pattanam was Muziris, or only a part of it. We do not know how the port ended. About one per cent of the best candidate has been dug, and the other main candidate is under a modern town.

The novel needed a curse to make the port hard to find. The real Muziris did not need one.