Intercourse between India and the Western World from the Earliest Times to the Fall of Rome c11.34

c11.34

We now come to the most interesting part of the narrative—our author’s notes on the Indian ports which he visited. The first of these is the harbour called by the Greeks Barbarikon, whatever the Indian name may have been¹. It was on the middle mouth of the Indus, and the cargoes were disembarked here and sent in boats to Minnagara, the capital of Sind. This was probably Pātala. It was called Min-nagara (City of the Min or Śaka), as Sind was then in the possession of “Parthian Princes who were always driving one another out.” These were, no doubt, the Indo-Parthians, who had been turned out of the Panjāb by the Kushāns. When our author found them, the dynasty had evidently already relapsed into anarchy. The writer correctly notes that the natives called the Indus Sinthus (Sindhu)². The exports of Sind (which had not yet been eclipsed by the southern ports), were costus (Skt. kuṣṭha, Saussurea lappa) an aromatic plant from Kashmīr used for perfumes; lycium or berberry, a cosmetic fashionable in Rome; nard (citronella), gems, indigo, skins, and lastly silk from China. Silk was destined to become an immensely important article of commerce. The expeditions of the Baktrian monarchs, Demetrius and Menander¹, and of the Kushān kings, had opened out the great trade route which runs from Balkh to the historic “Stone Tower” of Sarikol. Some of the silk also found its way through Nepal to the Ganges and thence to the Malabar coast². Later on, it was taken straight from China to Rome, by the land-route from Sarikol to Balkh, Hekatompylus, Ekbatana, Ktesiphon, Hira, and Charax, and then by sea to Petra, Tyre, and the Levant³. Ptolemy tells us of the Macedonian merchant named Maes or Titianus, whose caravans went through the wild Bolor mountains to the Stone Tower, a frontier fort on a desolate crag. Here the Chinese, whose capital was “a seven months’ journey away,” met them with the silk⁴. Silk was the rage in Rome, and this extravagant habit is the occasion of one of Pliny’s homilies⁵. For a long time the origin of silk was a mystery to the Romans. The yarn was woven at places like Cos. It was popularly supposed to grow on trees, a belief which perhaps arose from travellers’ tales of the cocoons of the silkworms being attached to the mulberry leaves on which they feed. Hence Vergil’s