EARLY INDIA

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decline of it has marked the ebb of their greatness. And
from the very beginning that trade has been in Semitic
hands. When Israel was yet a consolidated nationality,
the trade routes from India by the Persian Gulf and
Euphrates, or by the Red Sea, and the time-worn track
still followed by the pilgrims of Mecca, were well-known
commercial channels. Egypt, Assyria, Babylon, Persia,
Macedonia, and Rome made supreme and successful efforts
to secure the command of them. Ptolemy Philadelphus
was only deterred by fear of inundations from constructing
 the Suez Canal two centuries and a half before our
era; and by the first century A.D. Hippalus had discovered
 how to make use of the monsoon winds to cross
the Arabian Sea; whilst Egyptian craft carried merchandise
along the coast-lines, where scattered remnants of the
ancient trade (chiefly debris of glass utensils and ornaments)
 are {o be found to this present day. With the
decline of Rome in the sixth century A.D. the Saracen
Arabs took the field, and Bagdad and Basra claimed preeminence
 as commercial centres. The Kalifs were greater
than Solomon—more magnificent in their dispensations,
more splendid in the display of their wealth.
But whilst the sea routes undoubtedly formed the
chief commercial connection between East and West for
more centuries than we can count, the land routes also
were constantly traversed, and they shared with the Red
Sea and the Persian Gulf the position of main arteries
of commercial intercourse in the hands of the Arabs,
until Turk and Moghul finally blocked the way about
the beginning of the fifteenth century A.D. Of these land
routes much has been written and said about those which
connected Northern India with the Oxus, and then striking
into the great trans-Asian line of the silk trade from China,
reached Europe either by way of the Caspian or Black
Sea. All High Asia is traversed by a network of ancient
Arab routes, and many are the indications of the past
wealth and magnificence of the medieval cities of the
Oxus basin that were traced by the Russo - Afghan
Boundary Commission in 1883-85. But not much has

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