A History of South India from Prehistoric Times to the Fall of Vijayanagar c9.27

c9.27

The queen of Sheba visited Solomon at Jerusalem ‘with a very great train, with camels that bare spices, and very much gold, and precious stones’. Again, the navy of Hiram ‘that brought gold from Ophir, brought in from Ophir great plenty of almug trees, and precious stones’. King Solomon made ‘a great throne of ivory, and overlaid it with the best gold’. Lastly, ‘the king had at sea a navy of Tharshish with the navy of Hiram: once in three years came the navy of Tharshish, bringing gold, and silver, ivory, and apes, and peacocks’. Hiram was the Phoenician king of Tyre and Solomon’s alliance with him was an essential element in the prosperity of Jerusalem in his time. Hiram used Solomon’s kingdom as a high road to the Red Sea where he built shipping which greatly promoted trade and led to an accumulation of great wealth in Jerusalem. Ophir may well be the Ābhira country, and its twin Tharshish may also be sought there. The peacocks and sandalwood (almug) Solomon obtained are both South Indian in name as well as in origin. Though silver was not an Indian product some of the ivory might have been, especially as the Hebrew, Egyptian and Greek names for the elephant are derived ultimately from the Sanskrit ibha. Ebony was another Indian article conveyed to Palestine in this period by the merchants of Dedan on the south shore of the Persian Gulf. The Assyrian and Babylonian empires traded with India by sea from their ports on the Persian Gulf and continued to receive gold, spices and fragrant woods from India. It has been pointed out rightly that ‘rice, peacocks, sandalwood, every unknown article which we find imported by sea into Babylon before the fifth century B.C., brought with it a Dravidian, not a Sanskrit, designation’. In the seventh century B.C. traders from the west introduced into southern China a system of inscribed coinage based on a Babylonian standard, and a sea-trade between Babylon and China necessarily includes India. A beam of Indian cedar found in the palace of Nebuchadnezzar (604—562 B.C.), the teak logs found in the temple of the Moon-god at Ur at levels belonging to about the same age or a little later, and the Bāveru Jātaka which relates the adventures of certain Indian merchants who took the first peacock by sea to Babylon, all confirm the existence of active maritime intercourse between South India and its western neighbours. In the seventh and sixth centuries B.C., Babylon was at the height of its splendour, the greatest commercial mart of the world; men of many nations, frequented its bazaars, and we may well assume that among them were merchants from South India. When Babylon fell, the trade passed into the hands of the Arab merchants of Mouza, Aden and Kane. The author of the Periplus says that the voyage to India was made along the shore and in small ships until Hippalus discovered the monsoon; but the normal trade route from the Persian Gulf to India can never have lain along the inhospitable shores of Gedrosia, and ‘the exploring expeditions despatched by Darius in 512 B.C. from the mouth of the Indus, and nearly two centuries later by Alexander the Great, show the difficulties and dangers of the route, the time it occupied, and the ignorance of the pilots’. The knowledge of the monsoons must have been very common among the sailors of India, Arabia and Persia from early times, and the mariners who reached China in the seventh century B.C. could not have feared sailing on the open seas. Hippalus' discovery (c. A.D. 45), if it was a fact, must have been of value to the Roman and Greek traders of his time.