Intercourse between India and the Western World from the Earliest Times to the Fall of Rome c6.33

c6.33

In 606 B.C. came the overthrow of the Assyrian empire, and Babylon took the place of Nineveh as queen of western Asia. In the crowded marketplaces of that great city met the races of the world, —Ionian traders, Jewish captives, Phoenician merchants from distant Tarshish, and Indians from the Panjāb, who came to sell their wares. “At Babylon,” says Berosus, “there was a great resort of people of various races (πολὺ πλῆθος ἀνδρῶν ἀλλοεθνῶν), who inhabited Chaldaea and lived in a lawless fashion.” We have already referred to the Jātaka story of the Indian merchants who went to Babylon. A Babylonian colony may have sprung up on the borders of India, for Strabo tells us that the followers of Alexander found at Taxila a marriage-market conducted on the well-known Babylonian principle¹. The intercourse between India and the Semitic nations was, however, mostly carried on by sea. The journey from the defiles of the Hindu Kush to the Mediterranean ports was long and dangerous: the mountains, the deserts, and the many wild tribes which lay in the path, presented an almost insurmountable barrier. The old story of the invasion of India by Semiramis is, of course, a fable, and emanates from the notorious Ktesias². There is, however, abundant evidence that such a route existed from very early times. An axe-head of white jade, which could only have come from China, has been found in the second city of Troy³. "The most ancient part of Indian art," says a recent critic, "belongs to the common endowment of early Asiatic culture which once extended from the Mediterranean to China and as far south as Ceylon, where some of the most archaic motifs survive in the decoration of pottery. To this Mykenaean facies belong all the simpler arts of woodwork, weaving, metalwork, pottery, etc., together with a group of designs including many of a remarkably Mediterranean aspect, others more likely originating in western Asia. The wide extension and consistency of this culture throughout Asia in the second millennium B.C., throws important light on ancient trade intercourse at the time when the eastern Mediterranean formed the western boundary of the civilized world¹.” No doubt the caravans travelled from immemorial times to the great emporium of Baktra, where the roads from India, China, and the West converged: there the cargoes were shipped on to rafts and floated down the Oxus to the Caspian, and thence, partly by land and partly by river, to the Euxine. Or else, travelling entirely by land, the merchants followed the great road which still skirts the Karmanian Desert to the north, passes through the Caspian Gates, and crossing the Euphrates at Thapsacus, ends at Antioch and the Levantine ports².