Intercourse between India and the Western World from the Earliest Times to the Fall of Rome c12.38

c12.38

One of the most curious relics of the trade between Egypt and India was unearthed recently at Oxyrhynchus³. It is a papyrus of a Greek farce of the second century A.D. and contains the story of a Greek lady named Charition who has been shipwrecked on the Kanarese coast. The locality is identified by the fact that the king of the country addresses his retinue as ’Ινδῶν πρόμοι, and also by the discovery of the learned Dr Hultzsch⁴, that the barbarous jargon in which they address one another is actually Kanarese! The identification of the dialect is made possible by one of the characters, who interprets some of the words into Greek¹.