The Cambridge History of India, Vol. I: Ancient India v1.c26.242

v1.c26.242

So far as the stock of knowledge handed down from the third century B.C. was increased at all during the following three centuries, it can only have been from the source of information just indicated, the source which might have been turned to so much richer account, had the curse of literary convention not rested upon classical culture—the first-hand practical knowledge possessed by Greek merchantmen who crossed the Indian ocean. Strabo had sufficient freedom of mind to take some notice of the Indian trade in his own day. From him we gather that, although a considerable amount of Indian merchandise had flowed into Europe by way of the Red Sea and Alexandria, when the Ptolemies ruled in Egypt very few Greek ships had gone further than South Arabia. Goods had been carried from India to South Arabia in Indian or Arabian bottoms. By the time however that Strabo was in Egypt (25 B.C.) a direct trade between Egypt and India had come into existence, and he was told that 120 vessels were sailing to India that season from Myos Hormos, the Egyptian port on the Red Sea¹. A few Greek merchantmen, but very few, sailed round the south of India to the mouth of the Ganges². The vessels that went to India apparently made the journey by coasting along Arabia, Persia, and the Makrān, for it was not till the middle of the first century A.D. that a Greek seaman, named Hippalus, discovered that the monsoon could be utilised to carry ships from the straits of Bab-el-Mandeb over the high seas to India³. It lies however outside the scope of this volume to survey the additions made by means of this commerce under the Roman Empire to the knowledge of India derived from the companions of Alexander and Megasthenes. The additions never equalled in substance or interest the older books. Far on into the Middle Ages Christian Europe still drew its conceptions of India mainly from books written before the middle of the third century B.C.