12 DR. BABASAHEB AMBEDKAR : WRITINGS AND SPEECHES
and the winds and currents ran over it in an unorganized way owing to the close by lands. The North-east and Southeast monsoons soon enabled the merchants to drag forth in the mid-ocean instead of hugging to the coast.
“From the dawn of history the northern Indian ocean was a thoroughfare. Alexander the Great’s rediscovery of the old sea route to the orient sounds like a modern event in relation to the gray ages behind it. Along this thoroughfare Indian colonists, traders and priests carried the elements of Indian civilization to the easternmost Sunda isles; and oriental wares, sciences and religions moved westward to the margin of Europe and Africa. The Indian ocean produced a civilization of its own, with which it coloured a vast semi-circle of land reaching from Java to Abyssinia, and more faintly, owing to the wider divergence of race, the further stretch from Abyssinia to Mozambique.” [1] The Hindus became the dominant commercial nation of the Indian ocean long before the great development of Arabian sea power, and later shared the trade of the East African coast with the merchants of Oman and Yemen. Today they form a considerable mercantile class in the ports of Mascat, Aden, Zanzibar, Pemba and Natal.” [2]
With this preliminary disquisition about the natural resources and the economic development of India we will trace her commercial intercourse from very early times with other countries of ancient civilization.
To begin with Egypt. At the outset it would be better to premise that the evidence of a commercial intercourse between India and other countries at the dim dawn of history is very flimsy and is embedded either in tradition or in articles excavated from early ruins: The evidence however ripens into positiveness with the advance of time.
Situated in the most rarely endowed location in the world the Egyptians were economically independent of the rest of the people—and it is even said that they prided economic self-sufficiency to such an extent that they tabooed foreign intercourse; but this is carrying things too far and though we have no positive records to disprove the statement, the foreign articles found in the process of excavation form a strong proof against it.
1 Ellen Churchill Semple—“ Influences of Geographic Environment”, p. 309.
2 Ibid, p. 268.