Intercourse between India and the Western World from the Earliest Times to the Fall of Rome c7.1

c7.1

IN 538 B.C. the last of the great Semitic Empires of western Asia came to an end. Cyrus and his Iranians stormed the walls of Babylon, and the Persian monarch took the title of " Lord of Sumer, Akkad, Babel and the four quarters of the world." His successor, Darius, built up a great kingdom on the foundations thus prepared for him. His farsighted schemes, which gained for him the contemptuous epithet κάπηλος, The Pedlar, from his nobles, included the conquest of the remote Iranian tribes on the east of the Karmanian Desert. Darius, however, did not stop here. The wealth of the nations of the Indus valley had long been known to the Assyrians and Babylonians, and he determined to add this district to his domains. He probably, like Alexander, advanced upon India from Baktra, and reaching the river Indus at the town of Kaspapyrus (perhaps Kāśyapapura), "a frontier city of Gandhāra, on the Scythian borderland," says Hekataeus¹, sent an expedition under a Greek mercenary, Skylax of Karyanda, to explore the river down to its mouth, and when he reached the sea, to sail home, examining on the way the coastline and its chief features. Presumably Skylax had orders to find his way to the Red Sea, and not to return by the shorter Persian Gulf route, with which, probably, the Persians were already perfectly well acquainted. At any rate, he found his way, after an adventurous voyage of two and a half years' duration, to Arsinoe, the modern Suez, already used by the Egyptians for trade with the East¹. From the time he took, we may infer that Skylax proceeded in a leisurely fashion, probably enquiring his way from port to port and trading as he went. His road must have lain along the old trade route to Ophir, and from Ophir to Aden along the Arabian coast. To Skylax, as far as we know, belongs the double distinction of having been the first Greek to visit