The Greeks in Bactria and India c24.15

c24.15

I have pointed out (p. 261) the need in the second century B.C. for some trading intermediary between India and Babylonia on the Iranian coast (Gerrha being on the wrong side of the Persian Gulf), as the southern Arabs formed a trading intermediary between India and Egypt; for this was the time when trading vessels from Barygaza still hugged the Gedrosian and Carmanian coasts.² The natural point for such an intermediary, as it was in the Middle Ages, would be the Gulf of Ormuz, and the Periplus, which can be used here, describes the trade activity at Omana (36); there was a regular ferry to Arabia run by hand-sewn native coracles, and in exchange for Indian wares they shipped to India spices brought from Arabia, gold,³ and various other products; the place was also a centre of the pearl trade. Whoever ruled there may well have ruled on both sides of the strait. Probably too in Hellenistic times Indian goods came overland to Omana as well as by sea. Though Strabo thrice mentions a road from Babylonia and Susa by Persepolis to ‘the middle of’ Carmania,⁴ he never carries it on to Seistan; probably therefore most of the caravan trade from India by the southern route through Seistan did not in Hellenistic times go overland to Babylonia by Persepolis but came to sea at the Gulf of Ormuz, again as in the Middle Ages. This was perhaps the return route taken by the Hyrcanian envoys to Nero in A.D. 59, who had to avoid Vologases of Parthia and who started somewhere on the Persian Gulf;⁵ it would have been far shorter for them to go by Ormuz to Seistan than to go round by Patala and the Indus. The Peutinger Table, some items of which in the East may go back to the Seleucid survey, appears to know this route between Seistan and Ormuz and names as a half-way house a place Arciotis in the Juruft basin, possibly Marco Polo’s Camadi, whose ruins have furnished some Hellenistic seals.⁶