granary of the whole Orient.[1] Dardania and Dalmatia were rich in cheese,[2] Rhodes[3] exported raisins and figs, Phoenicia[4] dates, and the capital itself had a large trade in preserved tunnies.[5]
China was always topographically unknown to the ancients, and about the sixth century only did they begin to discern clearly that an ocean existed beyond it.[6] The country was regarded as unapproachable by the Greek and Roman merchants,[7] but nevertheless became recognized at a very early period as the source of silk. Fully four hundred years before the Christian era the cocoons were carried westward, and the art of unwinding them was discovered by Pamphile of Cos, one of the women engaged in weaving the diaphanous textiles for which that island was celebrated.[8] Owing to the comparative vicinity of the Persian and Chinese frontiers, the silk exported by the Celestial Empire always tended to accumulate in Persia, so that the merchants of that nation
- ↑ Totius Orb. Descript. (Müller, Geog. Graec. Min., Paris, 1861) 36; Procopius, De Aedific., v, 1.
- ↑ Tot. Orb. Descr., 51, 53. This tract from a Greek original (c. 350) summarizes the productions of the whole Empire, and for the most part confirms the continuance of the industries adverted to by the earlier and more copious writers.
- ↑ Athenaeus, i, 49.
- ↑ Ibid.
- ↑ Strabo, VII, vi, 2; Pliny, ix, 17, et seq.
- ↑ Cosmas, op. cit., ii.
- ↑ Several "embassies" from Rome are mentioned in the Chinese annals, but nothing seems to have been known of them in the West. Stray merchants sometimes penetrated very far; Strabo, XV, i, 4. At first Rome is disguised as Ta-thsin, but later (643) the Byzantine power figures as Fou-lin; see Pauthier, Relat. polit. de la Chine avec les puiss. occid., 1859; cf. Hirth, op. cit., who was without books to pursue the inquiry; Florus, iv, 12, etc.
- ↑ Aristotle, Hist. Animal., v, 19; Pliny, op. cit., xi, 26; Pausanias, vi, 26.
