Iranianate and Syriac Christianity in Late Antiquity and Early Islamic Period, pp. 123-148, 2021/12/21
In my prior scholarship, I examined the social pathways and connected bodies that brought Christianity from the Roman Mediterranean to India. In this article, I focus in particular on Iranian Christianity’s movement from Sasanian Persian territory to south India and its establishment in the Kerala coast in the period preceding the 7th century. In the general absence of explicit, reliable evidence for this phenomenon, the article formulates how the standard dispositions of commercial networks in antiquity enabled Chris-tianity to travel from the world of Iran and into the Indian Ocean. It also attributes the origins of Christianity in south India to the accelerated move-ment, and settlement in overseas locations, of Persian commercial players active in the Indian Ocean during the 5th and 6th centuries.
