Gazetteer of the Bombay Presidency, Vol. I, Part I: History of Gujarat c20.s2: Strabo

c20.s2.1

who brought presents consisting of an armless man, snakes, a huge turtle and a large partridge, with a letter in Greek written on parchment offering free passage and traffic through his dominions to the emperor's subjects. With these envoys came a certain Zarmanokhēgas (Sramanācārya, Lassen) from Bargosē (Broach, the earliest mention of the name) who afterwards burnt himself at Athens, "according to the ancestral custom of the Indians." The fact that the embassy came from Broach and passed through Antioch shows that they took the route by the Persian Gulf, which long remained one of the chief lines of trade (Per. chap. 36). If the embassy was not a purely commercial speculation on the part of merchants of Broach, it is hard to see how king Poros, who had 600 under-kings, can be other than the Indo-Scythian Kozolakadaphes, who held Poros' old kingdom as well as much other territory in North-West India. This if correct would show that as early as the beginning of our era the Indo-Scythian power reached as far south as Broach. The fact that the embassy took the Persian Gulf route and that their object was to open commercial relations with the Roman empire seems to show that at this period there was no direct trade between Broach and the Egyptian ports of the Red Sea. Strabo however mentions that in his time Arabian and Indian wares were carried on camels from Myos Hormos (near Rās Abu Somer) on the Red Sea to Koptos on the Nile (XVII. i. 45 and XVI. iv. 24) and dilates upon the increase of the Indian trade since the days of the Ptolemies when not so many as twenty ships dared pass through the Red Sea "to peer out of the Straits," whereas, in his time whole fleets of as many as 120 vessels voyaged to India and the headlands of Ethiopia from Myos Hormos (II. v. 12 and XV. i. 13). It would seem that we have here to do with Pliny's second period of Indian trade, when Sigeras (probably Janjira) was the goal of the Egyptian shipmasters (see below). Strabo learnt these particulars during his stay in Egypt with Aelius Gallus, but they were unknown to his contemporary Diodoros who drew his account of India entirely from Megasthenes (Diod. II. 31-42) and had no knowledge of the East beyond the stories told by Jamboulos a person of uncertain date of an island in the Indian Archipelago (Bali, according to Lassen) (Diod. II. 57-60). Pomponius Mela (A.D. 43) also had no recent information as regards India.