PAST HISTORY'S PALM : MASTER GLOBAL ESSAY

 

IT WAS INDIA, not China, that was the greatest trading partner of the Roman Empire.It is also clear that sea travel was the fastest, most economical and safest way to move people and goods in the pre-modern world, costing about a fifth of the price of equivalent land transport.

Shipping routes that cut across political and topographical boundaries were always more important than the slow moving caravan trails, and the overland routes always carried much less trade than the sea roads : ships, after all, could carry vastly larger cargoes - often amounting to several hundred tons - and travel much more quickly than donkeys or camels.

They could also sail around wars, instability and ambushes.

The Golden Road of early East-West commerce, in other words, lay less overland, through a Persia often at war with Rome, and much more across the open oceans, via the choppy waters of the Red Sea and the Indian Ocean.

There is evidence of pioneering Indian merchants making remarkable prehistoric trading voyages as early as the seventh millennium BCE, when Afghan lapis first turns up in beads found in northern Syria.

Sumerian clay tablets of the late second millennium BCE are full of references to lapis, which is used as a simile to describe the colour of the sky and certain flowers, even the beards of men.

Etched carnelian heads from Gujarat of the same date also turns up in the Royal Tombs of Ur [ modern Iraq ].

Sumerian texts refer to a fabulously rich eastern trading city, an early Eidorado, named Aratta, which scholars have identified with one of the Indus valley cities; the same name also appears in early Sanskrit sources.

The Publishing of this Master Essay continues. The World Students Society thanks author William Dalrymple : '' The Golden Road : How Ancient India Transformed The World.''