Even now it is possible for the knowledgeable shopper to buy around 2,000 year old beads of precious and semiprecious stones in antique shops around Bangladesh.
The beads, of which archaeologists working in Wari Bateshwar have recovered, “tens of thousands,” often sell for little more than Tk100.
There are, in the jars of miscellaneous beads to be found in many of the shops, containing an assortment that varies from modern plastic, through twentieth century porcelain and glass and nineteenth century beads in a variety of materials, some that retailers know to be ancient, especially those larger beads in clay and stone. For them, the buyer may be asked a hundred dollars, or more. Over the past year, however, I have acquired, as presents for my womenfolk, beads of admittedly rather poor quality pink ruby, pale green jade and cloudy sapphires, amongst other semi precious stones, at an average price of less than Tk200.
It is these beads, recovered, in all probability, in large numbers from such ancient sites as Paharpur, Mahastangarh, Egarosindhur, and especially Wari Bateshwar, which underline some of the traditions of merchandise of these ancient centres of trade around the great rivers of Bangladesh.
At Wari Bateshwar, especially, the private collection, made over nearly a century by two generations of the Pathan family, includes some fascinating pieces. The clay model of a tiger, perhaps a child’s toy; the necklaces of carefully graded beads; the bronze bangles, and baubles, bangles and beads that lead us back more than two thousand years in the rich history of Bangladesh, through which we now know from many sources, ran perhaps the earliest of the Silk Roads.
Also at Wari Bateshwar, millennia old tools for cutting precious and semi precious gemstones have been recovered, together with the large pieces of such stone that were clearly the stock of working jewellers.
North India, especially the foothills of the Himalayas of course, were famous for the gemstones recovered there, on the fringes of the Ganges Basin, where one of the world’s earliest manufacturing civilisations developed, it is believed, about four or five thousand years ago. And, of course, since manufacturing, especially such esoteric merchandise as jewellery, requires a market, the trade routes will have developed early along the Ganges to the delta, where together with the other two great rivers, the Brahmaputra and the Meghna, it reached the Indian Ocean in the Bay of Bengal, a gateway, from earliest times, to a market that extended across the entire known world.
The delta also offered, especially along the Brahmaputra, access to central Asian markets, both for selling the manufactured jewellery and, no doubt, for acquiring further sources of gemstones.
Southeast Asia, we know, also traded their rich resources of stones into the international markets in the delta.
Even today, one of the most valuable exports of modern India is gemstones, although these days the best are certainly flown to Amsterdam for cutting, and the Ganges Delta is no longer a major centre of such trade.
The famous, 105 metric carat, Kohinoor Diamond, today mounted in the State Crown of Britain, originated in northeast India, as did its sister diamond, the Daria-i Noor, variously claimed to be in Iran, in the collection of Imperial gems, and in the vaults of Sonali Bank in Dhaka, part of the Nawab of Dhaka’s inheritance.
What there is no doubt about is that jewellery manufacture and gemstone cutting was a craft that flourished in the ancient centre of trade in the Ganges delta at least two and a half millennia ago.
Amongst the treasures of Wari Bateshwar, a distinctive bead of Roman glass catches the attention. Trade was, clearly, not exactly one way. But the beads of many shapes, sizes and materials that lie stored from excavations in Bangladesh and are indeed still being found, represent a whole culture of art and craftsmanship, from ancient times.
Just glancing at a small selection of such beads reveals an enormous diversity of carnelian, agates, chalcedonies and indeed a geologist’s paradise of stones. Patterned glass, with a number of layers, and even the kind of banded stones that can be found, even today, as shaped chakra stones in many places in Bangladesh, are all there in these massive troves of dug and surface finds.
However, at Wari, as at other ancient sites in Bangladesh, the proliferation of silver punch-marked coins identifies a probable stage in the development of trade in the middle of the first millennium BCE.
Early trade was, like early trade across the world, whether local or international, likely to have been in barter, raw materials or manufactured goods for manufactured goods and other raw materials. However, it appears, from the number of punch-marked coins, or merchant tokens, punched with their own distinctive mark, that the early barter trade had been surpassed, and required tokens of debt.
It is perhaps unsurprising. By the time of the Common Era, The Roman Emperor Augustus passed “Sumptuary Laws” forbidding the wearing of silk, to protect the Roman economy, since so much silver, over and above such manufactured goods as the glass bead, were needed to pay for the cargoes that flowed from China, down the Brahmaputra, and out into the world; especially the cargoes of silk that travelled the ancient trade routes, so many of which terminated in the lands that are now Bangladesh.
The somewhat worn bronze bangles, probably dating from centuries before the Common Era, such as those in the Pathan collection at Wari, have more recent echoes. In the silver bangles described, in the early 1580s, by Ralph Fitch, the London merchant who, in a Barisal of 500 years ago, wrote of observing: “Women wear a great store of silver hoops about their necks and arms, their legs are ringed with silver and copper, and rings made from elephant’s teeth.”
Such torques, necklaces and bangles have been observed and found in archaeological sites across the world, thousands of years old, so we should not be surprised that, in lands as wealthy as these of ancient Bangladesh, they should be commonplace.
Exploring today, the myriad markets around Bangladesh, it is not hard to find that the tradition of both male and female decoration, remains unchanged.
To the holiday makers at Cox’s Bazar or Patenga, the many stalls covered in low cost pieces of personal adornment, and ornamentation, may seem to promise much. Few of the many customers however, I suspect, see the traders as being in a tradition that goes back millennia, and once made these lands, affluent beyond modern dreams.
The produce sold by ancient traders may now, as it certainly is, when properly identified, be worth a great deal of money; but once, no doubt, the merchants and their crews, who travelled thousands of miles to shop, hereabouts, reacted much as today’s visitors, spoilt for choice, at affordable prices.
The lands don’t just sing about the baubles, the bangles, the beads and the rest; for millennia, they have been making, trading, and wearing them!
