The Greeks in Bactria and India c10.s7.99

c10.s7.99

Indian vessels were coasting along Gedrosia to Arabia and the Persian Gulf before the time of Alexander, for Nearchus got a guide in Gedrosia who knew the coast as far as the Gulf of Ormuz;¹ but from those points Arab peoples had a monopoly.² The chief Indian export for some time must have been spices, which Arabs distributed to the western world along with their own spices; the Arabs of Gerrha on the Persian Gulf supplied Seleuceia, so far as the trade did not come overland, and after the Ptolemies lost their Phoenician ports at the end of the third century they were thrown back for spices exclusively upon their Arab middlemen—Sabaeans, Minaeans, Lihyanites; Alexandria knew so little about the trade that even in the second century B.C. she believed that cinnamon came from Arabia or Somaliland. Egyptian records testify to the importance of the spice trade at this time, and when the Greek Eudoxus of Cyzicus made the first (Greek) through-voyage from Egypt to India c. 120 B.C. (p. 370) it was with spices and precious stones that he loaded his ship for the return journey;³ and Demetrius may for a time have held the spice-land of eastern Gedrosia (p. 94). But the wealth of Antiochus IV in Indian products shows not only that the Seleucids, after they acquired all Phoenicia, probably began to gain on the Ptolemies, but that there was now a large increase in the ivory trade: the 800 elephant tusks from India which that monarch exhibited in his triumph at Daphne were presumably meant to overtrump, in the eyes of the world, the 600 African tusks which had been carried in the triumph of Ptolemy II.⁴ The position in Menander’s reign has already been described (pp. 260 sq.): ships from the Greek ports in India were following Nearchus’ route along the Gedrosian coast to the Greek centre on the Gulf of Ormuz (App. 12), whence the goods went by water to Seleuceia; what is not known is when the Greek centre on that gulf began to compete with Gerrha as intermediary between India and Seleuceia,⁵ and how Gerrha, which was badly placed, stood the competition. This route, in which ships from Barygaza hugged the coast the whole way, calling at Demetrias-Patala, is the first of the four stages described by Pliny. It is now necessary to date those stages, for the second and third have usually, in defiance of Pliny’s own language, been put far too late; and as I shall need these stages to explain the Yavana merchants of the cave inscriptions, I must not at this point use those inscriptions.