Pliny the Elder complained of gold draining east: India, China and Arabia, he wrote, take a hundred million sesterces from the empire every year. 'That is what our luxuries and women cost us.'

77

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The event

• The Periplus of the Erythraean Seac. 50 · Adulis, Red Sea coast. Around the mid-1st century an anonymous Greek merchant from Egypt wrote a guide to the trade routes of the Red Sea and Indian Ocean. He described the port of Adulis, ruled by King Zoskales, and the southernmost market he knew, Rhapta on the coast of today's Tanzania. Ivory, tortoiseshell and rhino horn were shipped from there: East Africa was already part of ocean trade.

1st century

More amazing facts

• 75 · 79 Cuneiform was still being written shortly before Pompeii was buried.
• 79 · 200 A little over a century after Vesuvius buried Pompeii, across the ocean in Teotihuacan the Pyramid of the Sun rose — one of the largest pyramids in the world.
• 79 · 80 The Colosseum opened a year after Pompeii was buried, under the same emperor.
• 79 · 1752 The only library from antiquity to survive whole was saved by Vesuvius.
• 79 · 1592 · 1748 Pompeii was first struck in 1592, and tunnelled straight through.
• 79 · 600 The Americas have their own Pompeii, five centuries younger than Italy's. Vesuvius buried Pompeii in AD 79; volcanic ash buried the Maya village of Joya de Cerén in El Salvador around AD 600.

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