Age of the Nandas and Mauryas c12.s3.19

c12.s3.19

We have reasons to believe that the ancient foreign trade of India, like its inland trade, benefited by the strong and efficient administration of the Mauryas. The wise policy of friendship with the Hellenistic powers started by Chandragupta Maurya after the repulse of Seleucus and maintained by his son and grandson, must have favoured the expansion of the Indian trade with West Asia and Egypt. It is interesting to learn from Greek classical sources that the main commerce between the early Seleucid Empire and India was borne partly by the land-route (the northern one passing through Bactria and the southern through Gedrosia and Carmania, Persis and Susiana) and partly by the sea-route (through Gerrha on the west coast of the Persian Gulf). Like the Indian route to Egypt stretching along the east shore of the Red Sea, the route through the Persian Gulf was controlled by powerful Arab tribes engaged in a highly developed trade¹. How valuable was this western trade to India will appear from the list of her exports into Egypt, which, according to Greek classical sources, consisted of ivory, tortoise-shell, pearls, pigments and dyes (specially indigo), nard, costum, malabathron and rare woods². It is probably in the light of this extensive commerce with western lands that we have to understand Aśoka's ambitious attempt to extend the benefits of his religious and humanitarian propaganda to the Hellenistic kingdoms almost to their furthest limits. To the mutual knowledge and understanding derived from long-continued commercial intercourse, again, we may probably attribute the success which attended Aśoka's mission to Ceylon and, if this can be taken to be authentic, the mission of Soṇa and Uttara to Suvaṇṇabhūmi (Further India).