The "Silk Road" connecting East, South, and Western Asia with the Mediterranean world is a lot older than the silk trade with China. It isn't even a road but a network of trading routes over land and sea. Ophir, for example, is a port made famous by being mentioned numerous times in sacred texts. Here are but two:
And they came to Ophir, and fetched from thence gold, four hundred and twenty talents, and brought [it] to king Solomon (1 Kings 9:28).
The network of routes from the Buddha's India west to ancient Greece
"And Huram sent him by the hands of his servants ships, and servants that had knowledge of the sea; and they went with the servants of Solomon to Ophir, and took thence four hundred and fifty talents of gold, and brought them to king Solomon" (2 Chronicles 8:18).
Josephus provides an indication as to its location: "Now Joctan, one of the sons of Heber, had these sons, Elmodad, Saleph, Asermoth, Jera, Adoram, Aizel, Decla, Ebal, Abimael, Sabeus, Ophir, Euilat, and Jobab. These inhabited from Cophen, an Indian river, and in part of Asia adjoining to it" (Antiquities of the Jews I:6).
It is likely that the ancient port for Ophir was Lothal.
WISDOM QUARTERLY: The Buddha laid down the rudiments of democracy and parliamentary procedures in the Vinaya rules for the monastic Order. He advocated for innate human rights and the equality (at least in potential) of individuals, rejecting the caste system people were born into. News from space (the worlds of devas) and the Pantheon of the Gods and demigods and their rambunctious activities was also elaborated by the Buddha. This included the idea of a Mt. Olympus and a Zeus, originally Mt. Sumeru and Sakra. At an atomic level, the Buddha described the kalapa, or a particle as the basis of materiality, which came before the "Greek" concept of the atom. Karma and rebirth (which were not universally accepted or well understood in India), developments in sanitation, cosmology, the heavens, the many types of (mythical) beings on Earth -- all of these things along with the liberating Dharma went West to Greece. Perhaps the most famous teaching to reach Greek royalty are preserved in the Questions of King-Menander (Milindapanha). And while the Buddha certainly did not invent it, he famously participated in the oral-transmission tradition. The entire Buddha-Dharma was heard, systematically re-ordered, memorized, and recited, a practice which continued even after it was written down in books centuries later. Greek history was similarly recited by minstrels (such as Homer) in epic poems like the Illiad and Odyssey.
Extent and major sites of the Indus Valley Civilization
Lothal
The site was discovered in the year 1957, followed by excavations done by the Archaeological Survey of India. It was concluded from the excavations that the ruins of the settlement belonged to the Harappan Era, dating back to the 2nd millennium B.C.E.
Ancient Lothal as envisaged by the Archaeological Survey of India (Harappa.com)
Lothal's dock -- the world's earliest known -- connected the city to an ancient course of the Sabarmati river on the trade route between Harappan cities in Sindh and the peninsula of Saurashtra, when the surrounding Kutch desert of today was a part of the Arabian Sea.
An intensive trade network gave the inhabitants great prosperity; it stretched across the frontiers to Egypt, Bahrain, and Sumer [Sumerian civilization]. One piece of the evidence for trade in Lothal is the discovery of typical Persian gulf seals, a circular button seal.
Gandhara [Afghanistan, once part of India]
Kurt Behrendt in South Asian International Trade and the Indian Ocean, 100 B.C.E.-300 C.E. sketches a picture of international trade networks between the Red Sea, Gujarat [India], and Gandhara. The key connecting point of this trade was west India in a region called Gujarat.
Archaeological sites there, at Junagadh and Sopara and particularly Barygaza, bear out the trans-Arabian Sea exchange. They traded silk, ivory, onyx, agat, cloth, and powder from India to the Red Sea system in return for gold, silver, iron, and women.
Berhendt notes that by 200 C.E., there is good archaeological evidence of trade coming into Gandhara through the Gujarati peninsula.
The major Indian demand on the Roman trading system was gold. Roman gold coins were imported throughout the period, 1 C.E. to 300 C.E. But the coins were progressively debased. In Gandhara, the coins were usually melted into bullion.
Remains in amphora (two-handled vases) turn up in Gujarati sites, such as Arkemedu, containing Roman products such as wine and olive oil. Yet no amphora turn up in Gandhara, likely because leather skins were instead used for transporting imported materials.
Going the other way, Berhendt comments that the appearance of the Indian goddess Lakshmi on a table leg found in Pompeii during the second century C.E, is strikingly similar to a figure found at Bhokardan in the Deccan Plateau. This suggests the range of the India-Roman world trading network extended even beyond the Red Sea, Gujarat, and Gandhara during the second century C.E. Behrendt concludes by noting that Gandhara dies as a trading center by 400 C.E.
Trade alone was therefore sufficient to move goods, people, and ideas between East and West by both conquests and settlements.
Persian Egypt
The last pharaoh of the Twenty-Sixth Dynasty, Psamtik III, was defeated by Cambyses II of Persia in the battle of Pelusium in the eastern Nile delta in 525 B.C.E. Egypt was then joined with Cyprus and Phoenicia in the sixth satrapy of the Achaemenid Empire. This began the first period of Persian rule over Egypt (also known as the 27th Dynasty), which ended around 402 B.C.E.
Egypt as part of Achaemenid (Persian) Empire, 6th-5th century
Gandhara, the Levant, and Egypt were joined during those centuries. Then came Alexander in 332 B.C.E.
Ptolemaic Kingdom
The Ptolemaic Kingdom was founded when Ptolemy I Soter declared himself Pharaoh of Egypt, creating a powerful Hellenistic state stretching from southern Syria to Cyrene and south to Nubia. Alexandria became the capital and a center of Greek culture and trade.
In the centuries following Alexander, "India" did not refer to the subcontinent. It referred only to the Greek states to the north and northwest, today's Pakistan, Kashmir, and Afghanistan.
Asia in 200 B.C.E. showing the Greco-Bactrian Kingdom and its neighbors
Greek influence was pervasive in this region right through the first centuries of this era. Goods, people, and ideas continued to move between East and West. Roman trade grew to enormous proportions by land and sea.
"Greco-India" included Egypt and the Greco-Roman world as well as Judea.
Trading posts along the Silk Road and ports along the Incense Route, where Jewish merchants were particularly active, reveal that the history of antiquity is bigger than Europe. And it includes more than the Middle East. It must include Greco-India -- its visitors, settlers, and the impact it had on the West.
Much that we customarily see as Western and European is, in fact, a fusion of East and West. The same may be said of much of what we regard as Indian and Asian.
We are flattering ourselves when we say the world is shrinking as a result of modern travel and communications: It is a matter of historical record that we have always travelled -- often with surprising ease and usually for a profit -- between Europe, Asia, and India.
AUDIO: The History of India (qwiki.com)
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