20

INDIA

From the scattered records of this period of Muhammadan
 occupation we gain a new conception of the
geographical position of India relatively to the West, which
has been strengthened by recent surveys and explorations
in the intermediate countries. The Muhammadan advance
is the one prominent instance of the successful invasion
of India by a land force which did not pass through
the narrow portals of the north-western mountains. It
exhibits the facility with which India may be approached
from the Persian border, provided only that the invader
has command of the sea ; for it must be remembered that
this first advance of the Muhammadan on India was supported
 by a naval contingent ; and it opens up an entirely
new vista of medieval geography, enabling us to collate
the evidence of a series of Arab writers (some of whom
were actual explorers who wrote of what they themselves
had seen) intelligently and readily.
Thus, with ever-shifting local expansion and contraction,
 the general political boundaries of the Indian frontier
and the land and sea connection between Northern India
and Europe remained almost unchanged for four or five
centuries. During this time a continued stream of commerce
 poured to and fro through the now desert wastes of
Makran, and across the great table-land of Persia to
Bagdad and the farther west, until at length the Crusaders
first broke the power of the Saracen, and then the Turk
and Moghul swarmed into Western Asia and for a time
shouldered both Crusader and Indian commerce into
the sea.
This indeed (about the middle of the fifteenth century)
was the commencement of the great international race of
the western powers for command of the Eastern Ocean.
For century after century a full knowledge of the commercial
 geography of the farther east had been the heritage
of the Arab. Arabia was first mistress of the seas, and to
Arabia we owe not only the early lines of our first ocean
sailing ships, but many of our modern nautical terms as
well. The complete history of the extraordinary diffusion
of Arab influence—Himyaritic, Sabaan, or Muhammadan