Babylon flourished for a couple of centuries, being mainly Dravidian but partly Aryan, and leading to the settlement of Indian traders in Arabia, East Africa, Babylonia and China. He minimizes the importance of the early Egyptian trading-voyages, considering them purely local, while the numerous references to articles and routes of early trade in the Hebrew scriptures he passes by with the assertion that they are due to the revision following the return of Ezra.
But whatever may have been Ezra's revision of the Hebrew books, substantially the same articles of trade are described in the records of Egypt at corresponding dates, and they indicate a trade in articles of Indian origin to the Somali coast and overland to the Nile, centuries before Ezra's day. (See also under §§ 6, 10, 11, and 12.
Such opinions presume a continuous trading-journey without exchange of cargoes at common meeting-points. But primitive trade passes from tribe to tribe and port to port. At the time of the Periplus cargoes changed hands at Malacca, Malabar, Somaliland, South Arabia, Adulis and Berenice. The custom is stated in detail in the Deir el Bahri reliefs describing Queen Hatshepsut's expedition of 1500 B. C., where Amon-Re tells the queen,
"No one trode the incense-terraces, which the people knew not; they were heard of from mouth to mouth by hearsay of the ancestors. The marvels brought thence under thy fathers, the Kings of Lower Egypt, were brought from one to another, and since the time of the ancestors of the Kings of Upper Egypt, who were of old, as a return for many payments." (Breasted, Ancient Records, II, 287).
It was the particular achievement of the Egyptian Punt expeditions that they traced the treasured articles to their source and freed the land from th heavy charge of those "many payments." Likewise Hippalus must be remembered, not for a discovery new to the world, but for freeing the Roman Empire from the Arabian monopoly of the Eastern trade by tracing it to its source. Beyond India no lasting discovery was made. Ptolemy, indeed, know of Cattigara through the account given by Marinus of Tyre; but such voyages were exceptional, and the majority of the Chinese ships stopped at Malacca, while the Malay colandia carried the trade to Malabar. It remained for the Arabs to complete the "through line" by opening direct communication under the Bagdad Caliphate, between the ends of the earth, Lisbon and Canton.
Prof. T. W. Rhys Davids, in the Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, 1899, p. 432, quotes an interesting Buddhist passage referring to early sea-trade as follows:
