Most of what we know about Rajendra Chola's 1025 naval expedition to Srivijaya we know from one inscription, in Tanjavur, that lists the cities he claimed to have sacked. The list is suspiciously long. The list is also suspiciously specific. Historians have spent a century arguing about which half of it to believe.
In 2019, a fisherman named Velu, working a strip of coast north of Nagapattinam, dragged up something his net was not meant to catch: a thirty-kilo ballast stone of a kind not local to the Coromandel. He kept it in his courtyard for two years before anyone in Chennai heard about it.
Trade routes are not lines on a map. They are habits — repeated, abandoned, half-remembered.
What the ballast tells us
Ballast stones, the dull cousins of cargo, are how old maritime archaeology gets done. The stones are heavy, cheap, and chosen close to a ship's port of origin. They are also almost impossible to fake.