28 FRONTIER WITH THE HOUSE OF GOLDvastness of terrains that need coverage and to the political realities that
have made inquisitive activities such as digs quixotic, to say the least.
Our textual evidence is no better. The sources are limited and scat-
tered, and scholars are prone to specializing in particular genres of
texts to the detriment of a comprehensive picture. As a result, there
are clusters of archaeological and epigraphic data that sometimes dove-
tail with anachronistic textual data but often do not, since scholars
are working with many silences. Still, taking up Green's suggestion,
an Indian Ocean-Middle East arena is precisely the arc of activity and
movement that constitute Sind as an Indian Ocean region, linking
Indus-valley coastal towns down to the Gujarat region as well as across
the Arabian Gulf to Muscat and Aden.
Such an understanding of this region has deep roots in antiquity.
Archaeological evidence for seafaring and exchange networks in the
Red Sea and Arabian Gulf begins as early as the fourth millennium
BCE. That network of trading vessels, relying on monsoon winds, sea
currents, and navigable straits, moved in nodes between the Harappan
and the Mesopotamian cities.^5 Those earliest contacts involved ex-
changes of ore, grains, and ceremonial artifacts.^6 Into the Hellenistic
period, a substantial trade "crossed the waters between Roman Egypt,
the eastern coast of Africa, the western and southern coasts of Arabia,
and the western coast of India."^7 This sea trade supplemented the land
routes via Petra to Palmyra in Syria, and it consisted mainly of "the
acquisition of elephants used by the Egyptian military and of gold to
facilitate Ptolemaic payment of mercenary troops and other related
military expenditures."^8 On their return, the ships carried oil and wine,
glassware, drinking vessels, tools, precious stones, and copper.^9 Roughly
stated, this pattern of merchandise originating in China, the Maldives,
East Africa, or Southern India and traveling via sea and land routes to
markets in Greater Syria, Egypt, and the Mediterranean world persisted
throughout the classical period.^10
The majority of classical Greek accounts of maritime activity
throughout the Red Sea, Arabia, and the coastal cities of India survive
in later histories and geographies such as those by Strabo (ca. 64 BCE
to 21 CE)" Pliny the Elder (ca. 77 CE), and Claudius Ptolemy (ca. 146-
170 CE). The most notable source on the trade between Rome and India
from the first century is the Periplus Maris Erythraei, a document