On the Camels of the Aorsi: Dioscorides and the Medicine Trade of the Bosporan Kingdom. Part II. Dioscorides on the Bosporan Kingdom: Beavers, Rhubarb and Indian Trade
Braund D.
This paper discusses the brief comments of Dioscorides about the Black Sea region, especially on the goods traded there from the Volga region and northern India. Three particular medical materials are at issue. First, beavers and their testicles, which were a favourite theme of Roman culture and were strongly associated with the Pontic regions from the fifth century BC onwards. Second, wild rhubarb from the Volga region, which was important in ancient medicine and was traded via the Bosporan kingdom. Third, cardamom from the Himalayas, brought via Central Asia as far as the Bosporan kingdom. In economic terms, we glimpse a network of exchange and movement which stretched from northern India to the Volga region and westwards to the Bosporan kingdom in the later first century AD, when Dioscorides was writing. These were light, high-value goods, which were part of a wider set of merchandise – carried by way of the northern steppe above the main Caucasus range, on the camels of the Aorsi, who derived wealth and power from these goods, as Strabo earlier indicates. This route was evidently far more important than the much riskier route that might have been tried through the centre of the mountains and Iberia into Colchis. While there has been much consideration of the markets of the Colchian coast, we must also consider the profits made in the Bosporan kingdom from the medical materials and other light items that were traded there.
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