Intercourse between India and the Western World from the Earliest Times to the Fall of Rome c10: Chapter V. The Ptolemies
Intercourse between India and the Western World from the Earliest Times to the Fall of Rome c10
- Language
- English
Contents
- c10.4 — 3 parts
- c10.31 — 3 parts
- c10.t1 The Seleucids — 1 part
Chapter V. The Ptolemies
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WE now turn to another aspect of Indian intercourse with the West—the trade with Egypt. The Hellenization of Egypt was one of the most important results of Alexander's conquests, for Egypt became the true centre of Greek culture in the Hellenistic world, after Athens had dwindled into insignificance. The port of Alexandria was admirably chosen as the site of a great town. Not only does it tap the vast resources of the opulent country which lies along the banks of that great waterway, the Nile, but it enjoys an almost ideal situation as an emporium for trade between Europe and the East. It is on the Mediterranean, yet within easy distance of the head of the Red Sea. Alexandria is still an undying monument to the imperial genius of the great Macedonian whose name it bears. Like Constantinople, Baktra, and some other towns, it stands at the meeting-place of nations, in a spot destined by the nature of things to play a great part in the history of the world.
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Many circumstances concurred, in the two centuries before Christ, to make the Red Sea route the most popular trade-route with the East. The anarchy reigning in Syria, and the growth of the hostile empire of Parthia, diverted the commerce from the more northerly routes. These were rendered still more unsafe by the irruption of the Scythian tribes from beyond the Oxus into Baktria. Another circumstance which tended to make Alexandria the metropolis of the Eastern Mediterranean, and which had effectually crippled her only possible rival, was the sack by Alexander of the great city of Tyre.
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The ancient port of Naukratis had been comparatively neglected in favour of Tyre by the Oriental traders, owing to the long and perilous desert-journey between the Nile and the Red Sea. For the greater part of the year it was so intensely hot that the caravans had to move at night, guiding themselves across the trackless sands by means of stars, and carrying their own water-supply, like mariners, says Strabo¹. Early attempts to remedy this by means of a canal between the two waterways had been made from time to time. The first attempt of this kind was due to a Sesostris of the twentieth century B.C. Pharaoh Necho and Darius the Great², and finally Ptolemy Philadelphus (285-246 B.C.), revived the idea. The latter built a large port at Arsinoe, the modern Suez, for the purpose. Owing, however, to the dangerous nature of the navigation of the Heroopolite Gulf, with its shoals and treacherous winds and currents, the scheme had finally to be abandoned¹, and it was left to the genius of De Lesseps in our own times to carry it into effect. Merchants preferred to take their goods to Aelana², the ancient Ezion Geber, whence they were transported to the great emporium of Petra, and thence to the Levantine ports. Ptolemy now reverted to the old idea of a port on the Egyptian coast of the Red Sea, connected with the Nile by a desert-road furnished with convenient oases.
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The spot chosen had a fine natural harbour, and was two hundred and fifty-eight miles from the trading station of Koptos (Koft), on the bend of the river³. Merchandise was to be conveyed overland to Koft, and floated down-stream to Alexandria. The port which was built at the chosen site was named Berenike⁴, after the king's mother. A desert-road, furnished with eight *Hydreumata* or watering-places, connected Koft and Berenike. The first, says Pliny⁵, was twenty-two miles from Koptos; the next, a day's journey (about twenty miles) ; the third, ninety-five miles from the base; the fourth, on a hill, at an uncertain distance; the fifth (the Apollo Hydreuma) one hundred and eighty-four miles; the sixth, on a mountain; the seventh, the New Hydreuma, was two hundred and thirty miles from the base; the last, seven miles further on, had a caravanserai, for two thousand persons and a guard. A single day’s journey from here brought the merchant to the sea. The journey took eleven or twelve days, even under the most favourable conditions. In 274 B.C., a further improvement was made. Philadelphus built another port at Myos Hormos¹, (Mussel Harbour) one hundred and eighty miles north of Berenike, and five days nearer Koptos. Myos Hormos, situated in the bay of Ras abn Somer, near the Jifātin Islands, is a much safer harbour than Berenike, which had awkward shoals and was exposed to the wind².
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Myos Hormos was thus almost an ideal port and became the great trading centre for the East Indian trade, quickly eclipsing all its rivals³. Further down the coast were Adulis (the modern Massowa) and Ptolemais Epitherōn (Ptolemais of the Hunts), a great rendezvous of the elephant-hunters from Nubia. Besides the value of their ivory, elephants had been in great requisition for military purposes, ever since the five hundred presented by Chandragupta to Seleukus Nikator had taken a prominent part in the battle of Ipsus¹. They had been employed by Porus against Alexander and were later used by Pyrrhus and Hannibal against the Romans. The tactical value of these unwieldy beasts against well-disciplined troops is not great, and they quickly fell into disrepute in European warfare. They continued, however, to form one of the four traditional “arms” of the Indian army and were freely used as late as the days of the Moghal Empire. Ptolemais of the Hunts was probably not far from Port Sudan, and may then, as now, have been linked with the Nile by a road running to Berbera. The port of Adulis was chiefly famous for the inscription, preserved for us by Kosmas Indikopleustes², which recites the conquests of Ptolemy Euergetes (247–233 B.C.). It was the natural port for Abyssinia and the Sudan.
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¹ Geog. XVII. I. 45.
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² Herod. II. 158.
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¹ Strabo, *Geog.* XVI. 4. 6.
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² Or rather, to Leuke Kome, further down the coast and safer for ships. From Leuke Kome goods went through Petra to Rhinocolura ( El Arish), a penal settlement on the Egyptian border of Palestine, and thence to Egypt. Strabo, *Geog.* XVI. 4. 24.
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³ Koft (Lat. 26° N.) is now a mile from the river bank.
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⁴ 23° 55' N. 35° 34' E. The remains of the town may still be seen.
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⁵ *N.H.* VI. 26.
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¹ 27° 12′ N. 33° 55′ E.
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² Strabo, Geog. xvi. 4. 6.
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³ Ibid. 24.
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¹ Antiochus III was given one hundred and fifty by Subhāgasena. Polybius, XI. 34. Dittenberger, *Orientis Graeci Inscriptiones Selectae*, 54.
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² Bunbury, *Anc. Geog.* II, 609.
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The knowledge possessed about India by the Alexandrian Greeks was chiefly due to Eratosthenes, the learned President of the Library from 240–196 B.C., though some facts must have been made known before this by Dionysius, who had been sent to India, says Pliny, in the reign of Philadelphus on an embassy, and published details about the forces of the Indian nations on his return. His account of India, contained in the third book of his *Geography*, was considered by Strabo¹ to be of the greatest value, superior to that of Megasthenes. Eratosthenes depended for his information upon the data supplied by Patrokles, an officer who held an important command over the eastern provinces of the Syrian Empire under Seleukus Nikator and Antiochus I. He appears to have used the opportunities he thus enjoyed in an admirable manner, and to have collected much invaluable information. Eratosthenes goes a good deal further than his contemporaries in his knowledge of the general configuration of India, which he describes as a rhomboid, its four sides being composed of the Indus, the Himālayas, and the shores of the Eastern and Southern Oceans respectively². He knows of the Royal Road to Pāṭaliputra and of the mouth of the Ganges. He has heard of the “summer rains,” brought by the Etesian winds, and watering the flax, rice, millet, and other crops. He calls the people of Southern India the Koniaki (a reminiscence of Cape Kory), and he has heard of Ceylon and its numerous elephants³.
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¹ Strabo, Geog. xv. 10.
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² Strabo, I. I. 22 and xv. 11. Arrian, Indika, III. See Cunningham, Anc. Geog. of India, p. 1.
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³ Strabo, xv. 14.
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At this time, however, there was little *direct* trade with India. Athenaeus tells us that in the processions of Ptolemy Philadelphus were to be seen Indian women, Indian hunting dogs, and Indian cows, among other strange sights; also Indian spices carried on camels. The same authority tells us that Ptolemy Philopator’s yacht had a saloon lined with Indian stone¹. Agatharchides, the learned tutor of Ptolemy Soter II (116 B.C.) writes enthusiastically of the commercial enterprise of the Egyptian monarchs, and the wealth and number of the Red Sea ports. But his knowledge ends there. He speaks of Sokotra as “recently discovered,” as if Alexandrian sailors had only just ventured outside the Straits of Bab-el-Mandeb, and then not far. In more than one place he indicates that merchandise was not brought direct from India, but carried to an intermediate port and there bought and shipped by the Alexandrian traders. For instance, in speaking of the great riches of Arabia Felix, he says it was partly due to the Indian traders who came in great numbers from Potana, the port founded by Alexander on the Indus. Potana is of course Pātala²: the very mistake shews how ignorant Agatharchides is of Indian matters. Evidently Indian goods were taken to Muza³ or Aden, two ports at the mouth of the Red Sea, and there transhipped. Aden, called, from the country in which it lay, Arabia Felix or Eudaemon, was the great clearing-house of the East, just as Port Said is to-day. The author of the *Periplus*, writing of the early history of Aden, states this very clearly.
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¹ *Deipnosophistes*, IV. 4-6, and v. 25, 39. And compare Q. Curtius, VIII. 9.
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² Bunbury, *Ancient Geography*, II. 59.
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³ Mocha, 13° 20′ N. 48° 20′ E. The neighbouring village is still called Mauza.
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“It was called Eudaemon,” says this writer, “because, in the early days of the city, when the direct voyage from India to Egypt was never made, and no one dared to sail from Egypt all the way to the ports on the other side of the Indian Ocean, the various nations met here, and it received cargoes from both, just as Alexandria is the emporium for traffic from Egypt and abroad to-day¹.” The port of Muza was “crowded with Arab ship-masters and sailors, and heaped with bales of merchandise; for these Arabs carry on a trade with Barygaza, sending their own ships there².” Obviously, then, the trade between Alexandria and India in the days of the Ptolemies was mostly, if not entirely, indirect³, and the Alexandrian Greeks knew little or nothing of the country from which the goods originally came. The information collected by Eratosthenes, for instance, was all second-hand; it had been acquired from a Syrian officer and not from Egyptian traders. Eratosthenes had nothing to say of the voyage to India or of the intermediate ports on the Red Sea and Arabian coasts. There were, of course, important exceptions to this rule. Dionysius had found his way to India, and centuries ago the voyage had been accomplished by Skylax of Karyanda. Strabo’s statement¹ that in the days of the Ptolemies “*very few accomplished the voyage to India and brought home merchandise,*” seems to imply that *some* did. One of these, the famous explorer Eudoxus, actually made the voyage twice, and fortunately a brief account of his adventures² is preserved in a chapter of Strabo, taken, we are told, from the lost work of the Stoic philosopher Poseidonius.
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¹ *Periplus Maris Erythraei*, § 26.
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² *Ibid.* § 21.
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³ The only evidence to the contrary consists in two mentions in Inscriptions (Dittenberger 186 and 190), of the office of Στρατηγὸς τῆς Ἰνδικῆς καὶ Ἐρυθρᾶς θαλάσσης. But nothing is known of his duties, which may have merely been those of a port-officer at the mouth of the Red Sea.
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¹ Πρότερον ἐπὶ τῶν Πτολεμαικῶν βασιλέων, ὀλίγων παντάπασι θαῤῥούντων πλεῖν καὶ τὸν Ἰνδικὸν ἐμπορεύεσθαι φόρτον. Strabo, Geog. II. 5. 12.
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² Ibid. II. 3. 4.
c10.31.1
Eudoxus was a native of Cyzicus. Having acquired a certain reputation as a geographer and ethnologist, he was sent by the authorities of his native city to undertake the exploration of the Nile. While in Egypt, however, his attention was diverted by a romantic incident. The coast-guards from the Red Sea brought to Alexandria an Indian whom they had found drifting in a boat, half dead with hunger and thirst. After he had learnt a little Greek, the Indian explained that he had set out from India with a ship’s company; they had lost their bearings and drifted for months, till his companions had perished, one by one, of hunger; and at last, at the point of death, he had been picked up off the entrance to the Red Sea. He offered, if the government would provide a ship to take him back, to shew them the way to India. The offer was gladly accepted by the monarch, Euergetes II¹, and Eudoxus accompanied the expedition. They took a supply of goods, reached India, and after exchanging their wares for Indian spices and gems, sailed home. Instead of rewarding them, Euergetes basely confiscated their cargo! He died, however, in 117 B.C. and the indomitable sailor obtained permission to try again, this time with a richer cargo. Again he reached the coast of India, but on his return voyage he was caught in a storm, and missing the entrance to the Red Sea, reached the African coast somewhere considerably south of Cape Gardafui.
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Here he conciliated the natives by presents, and received much kindness from them in return, for they gave him water and pilots for the homeward journey. He wrote down, like the scholar he was, several words of their language. But the strangest thing that happened there was the discovery of a ship’s prow carved in the form of a horse. The natives declared that it belonged to a strange ship which came from the west². Eudoxus took the prow back to Alexandria. Here he was again basely robbed³, on the plea that he had misappropriated the ship’s cargo. But some sailors declared that the prow was that of a Cadiz ship, and one even asserted that it was the actual prow of a vessel which had sailed away “beyond the river Lixus in Mauretania” and had never been heard of again. Eudoxus now shook the dust of Alexandria from off his feet, and sailed home. The information he had acquired presented two fascinating problems. Had the mysterious vessel whose prow he had found, really rounded Africa? And if so, was it possible to reach India by following this course? Eudoxus determined to try. Having realised his whole fortune, he fitted out a ship, with which he sailed to Italy, Marseilles, and Cadiz, collecting subscriptions for the great undertaking. Everywhere the project was hailed with enthusiasm, and Eudoxus was able to fit out at Cadiz a large vessel with two light boats for exploring the coast.
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Embarking doctors, artizans, bales of goods, and, strangely enough, “a supply of Spanish dancing girls,” the expedition “set sail for India.” Passing Gibraltar, they at first kept well out to sea; but the sailors grew frightened, and Eudoxus, against his better judgment, stood in shore. As he had feared, the large vessel ran aground, and had to be dismantled, a smaller boat being constructed out of her timbers. They went on and reached an Ethiopian tribe who, he thought, spoke a dialect similar to that which he had studied in East Africa. He was now compelled, owing to want of provisions, to return; but shortly afterwards he fitted out yet another expedition, and this time he intended to winter at one of the large, uninhabited and fertile islands he had observed on the way, probably the Canary Isles or Madeira¹, and sail on when the weather and wind permitted. For this purpose he took seeds and agricultural implements, so as to grow a fresh stock of provisions. Of the end of this brave mariner, who twice reached India and anticipated, in design at least, the projects of Vasco da Gama, we hear no more. From the silence which history observes with regard to his end, we may gather that he never reached home after rounding the Cape. The noteworthy thing about his career is the fact that he twice reached India and that he conceived the project of a voyage to that land by way of South Africa to be a feasible thing.
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¹ 146–117 B.C.
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² This strange story of course is open to grave doubts. But it may be true.
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³ By Ptolemy Lathyrus, who was now reigning in place of his mother Cleopatra who had sent out the expedition (112 B.C.). Apparently the Indian treasures proved too much for the cupidity of the “Graeculus esuriens.”
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¹ Like the "Fortunate Isles" to which Sertorius wanted to sail away, according to Plutarch's story (ch. 8, Life of Sertorius).
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Of the intercourse between India and the Egypt of the Ptolemies, traces are few, because the trade between the two countries was mostly indirect. A unique inscription on the ruins of a shrine between Edfū and the ancient Berenike, records the visit of an Indian named Sophon².
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² Leipsius, *Denkmäler*, vol. VI, p. 81. It runs as follows : Πανὶ Εὐόδῳ καὶ Ὑπηκόῳ Σόφων Ἰνδὸς ὑπὲρ αὐτοῦ.
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Dr Hultzch speaks of finding a solitary silver coin of the days of Ptolemy Soter in the Bangalore bazaar¹. The love-story, the progenitor of the modern novel, introduced to the West by Chares of Mitylene, may be perhaps considered an indirect product of Alexandrian influence, as it appears first in Alexandrian literature.
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¹ J.R.A.S. 1904, p. 403.
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| Ptolemy Soter I | ........ | 321 B.C. |
| ,, Philadelphus | .... | 285 ,, |
| ,, Euergetes I | ..... | 246 ,, |
| ,, Philopator | ...... | 221 ,, |
| ,, Epiphanes | ....... | 204 ,, |
| ,, Philometor | ...... | 181 ,, |
| ,, Euergetes II | .... | 146 ,, |
| ,, Soter II | ....... | 117 ,, |
| ,, Auletes | ........ | 80 ,, |
| Cleopatra | . . . . . | 51-30 B.C. |
The Seleucids
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| Seleukus I | . . . . . | 312 B.C. |
| Antiochus I (Soter) | ....... | 281 ,, |
| Antiochus II (Theos) | ..... | 260 ,, |
| Seleukus II (Kallinikus) | .. | 246 ,, |
| Seleukus III (Soter) | ..... | 227 ,, |
| Antiochus III (Megas) | .... | 222 ,, |
| Seleukus IV (Philopator) | .. | 187 ,, |
| Antiochus IV (Epiphanes) | . | 175 ,, |
| Antiochus V (Eupator) | .... | 165 ,, |
| Demetrius (Soter) | ........ | 163-150 B.C. |
Linked texts (3)
- Historiae Alexandri Magni — Q. Curtius Rufus, Latin
- Ἰνδική — Λούκιος Φλάουιος Ἀρριανός, Ancient Greek
- Inscription (EC 9 Bn 108) — Tamil