Intercourse between India and the Western World from the Earliest Times to the Fall of Rome c6.4

c6.4

Trade between the Indus valley and the Euphrates is, no doubt, very ancient. The earliest trace of this intercourse is probably to be found in the cuneiform inscriptions of the Hittite kings of Mitanni in Cappadocia, belonging to the fourteenth or fifteenth century B.C. These kings bore Aryan names, and worshipped the Vedic gods, Indra, Mitra, Varuṇa, and the Aśvins, whom they call by their Vedic title Nāsatyā. They were evidently closely connected, though we cannot yet precisely determine how, with the Aryans of the Vedic Age, who were at that time dwelling in the Panjāb¹. It has been claimed that the word Sindhu, found in the library of Assurbanipal (668–626 B.C.), is used in the sense of “Indian cotton,” and the word is said to be much older, belonging in reality to the Akkadian tongue, where it is expressed by ideographs meaning “vegetable cloth¹.” Assurbanipal is known to have been a great cultivator, and to have sent for Indian plants, including the “wool-bearing trees” of India. At any rate, we know that the cotton trade of western India is of great antiquity. The Indians, when the Greeks first came into contact with them, were dressed in “wool grown on trees².” In the *Rig Veda*, Night and Dawn are compared to “two female weavers³.” We may perhaps trace to this source the Greek σινδών, the Arabic *satīn* (a covering), and the Hebrew *sadīn*⁴. Similarly the Hebrew *karpas* and the Greek *κάρπασος* come from the Sanskrit *karpāsa*. Logs of Indian teak have been found in the temple of the Moon at Mugheir (the “Ur of the Chaldees”) and in the palace of Nebuchadnezzar, both belonging to the sixth century B.C., and we know that the trade in teak, ebony, sandalwood and blackwood, between Barygaza and the Euphrates, was still flourishing in the second century A.D.⁵ In the swampy country at the mouth of the Euphrates, nothing but the cypress grows well.