Intercourse between India and the Western World from the Earliest Times to the Fall of Rome c10.25

c10.25

“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.