The Historians' History of the World 01

Strabo has preserved to us from Eratosthenes a knowledge of the roads by which the commodities of the Indian districts, bordering on the Persian Empire, were conveyed to its principal cities, and especially to Babylon. The usual high-road, through populous and cultivated regions, first ran in a northerly direction, in order to avoid the predatory tribes which infested the desert between Persia and Media. It continued along the southern part of this desert, as far as one of the most celebrated defiles in Asia, called the Caspian gates, through which it proceeded to Hyrcania and Aria. In this latter country, taking its course along the foot of the high and woody Hyrcanian and Parthian Mountains, the road thence turned northward towards Bactra. This is the same which Alexander followed in his expedition against the Bactrians; and though he left it occasionally to attack the inhabitants of the neighbouring mountains, he always returned to it. In Arrian it bears the name of the great military road.

The great commercial route to India was the same as this as far as Aria. Here, however, it took a different, that is to say, an easterly direction, while the other proceeded northward towards Bactra. Thence it ran to Prophthasia, Arachotus, and Ortospana, where it divided itself into three branches. One of these went due east to the borders of India; perhaps the second had a similar direction, with a little inclination to the south; and the third turned northward towards Bactria and formed the great road through which India had communication with this country and its capital, Bactra. The city must then be regarded as the commercial staple of eastern Asia. Its name belongs to a people who never cease to afford matter for historical details from the time they are first mentioned.

We cannot entertain any doubt as to the persons through whose hands the commodities of India came to Bactra. It is evident, from what has been said before, that the natives of the countries bordering on Little Thibet and others, or the northern Indians of Herodotus and Ctesias, formed the caravans which travelled into the gold desert, and that it was the same people from whom western Asia obtained ingredients for dyeing, and also the finest wool.

“The country where gold is found, and which the griffins infest,” says Ctesias, “is exceedingly desolate. The Bactrians, who dwell in the neighbourhood of the Indians, assert that the griffins watch over the gold, though the Indians themselves deny that they do anything of the kind, as they have no need of the metal; but (say they) the griffins are only apprehensive on account of their young, and these are the objects of their protection. The Indians go armed into the desert, in troops of a thousand or two thousand men. But we are assured that they do not return from these expeditions till the third or fourth year.”

It is clear, from the foregoing statement, that the Indians here mentioned were no other than the natives of northern India; and by the desert where they found gold, must be understood the sandy desert of Cobi, bounding Tangut on the west and China on the north. With regard, however, to the account of Ctesias, that caravans of a thousand or two thousand men travelled into this desert, and returned after three or four years laden with gold—what other direction could this journey have had than to the rich countries in the most remote and eastern part of Asia? I willingly leave it to the reader to judge what degree of probability there is to support this conjecture. This distant obscurity indeed prevents our having a clear view, yet this very obscurity possesses a certain charm.

We are indebted to Strabo for an account of the road by which the wares of Babylon were conveyed to the shores of the Mediterranean. It ran in a due northern direction through the midst of Mesopotamia, and reached the Euphrates near Anthemusia, five and twenty days’ journey distant, where it turned off towards the west to the Mediterranean. This could have been only a caravan road, because a numerous company of merchants would be necessary for mutual defence against the predatory nomad tribes, the Scenites, who infested the desert; or indeed for procuring a safe passage by the payment of a ransom. I cannot advance it as certain that this road was generally used under the Persian dynasty; yet it appears in the highest degree probable from the circumstance that roads were seldom or never altered by the ancients.