The Personality of India: Pre- and Proto-historic Foundation of India and Pakistan c15.s4: Maritime contacts
The Personality of India: Pre- and Proto-historic Foundation of India and Pakistan c15.s4
- Language
- English
Maritime contacts
c15.s4.1
The next important factor is India's long coast line with its convenient anchorages. This has played no mean role in the interchange of cultures, as it has kept a window open to the great civilization of Western Asia and the Mediterranean region. The earliest evidence of such contact has been recently demonstrated by the excavations at Bahrein. We already know the links between the Indus basin and Mesopotamia. In the excavations conducted by P. V. Glob, seals with designs almost identical with those of the Indus valley were found at this great cemetery site identified with Dilmun of the Mesopotamian records. With the evidence of Harappan and Late Harappan sites in Kathiawad and on the Gulf of Cambay, it may not be unreasonable to postulate a maritime contact. The nature and intensity of this contact remains vague and obscure and calls for an intensive investigation. In spite of the vague references in literature, Indian and foreign, at the present stage of our knowledge, we have no material evidence of maritime trade and other contacts till we come to the early centuries of the Christian era. A great era of maritime activity was inaugurated by the discovery of the monsoons by Hippalus a little before the beginning of the Christian era.¹ This tremendously accentuated the quantity of trade possible by small scale [Figure: CONSOLIDATION OF UNITY EARLY CHRISTIAN ERA ▲ RED POLISHED AND ALLIED WARES ● ROMAN COINS ◎ CLAY BULLAE AMRELI BARODA coastal movements within the territorial waters. The Parthian Empire and its interruption of Chinese trade, as a result of hostilities with Rome, also seems to have been responsible for the quantity of commercial and cultural contacts between the Roman Empire and India, remarkably shown by Sir Mortimer Wheeler.¹ (Fig. 41)
c15.s4.2
¹ For a slightly different view: "As the Greeks were not the first to sail in the Arabian Sea, the knowledge of the monsoon winds—at least the obvious aspects of certainty, regularity and periodicity of the winds and their timely use in navigation—would have been probably diffused to them by the seafaring activities of the indigenous sailors inhabiting the littoral regions of the Arabian Sea.........." Hariharan, K. V. "Problem of the Discovery of Monsoon Winds" Journal of the Bombay University XXV, Pt. 4, Jan. 1957, pp. 9-16.
c15.s4.3
¹ WHEELER, R. E. M., *Rome Beyond the Imperial Frontiers*, London, 1954.