FRONTIER WITH THE HOUSE OF GOLD 29written by an unknown sailor between 40 and 70 CE that survives in
a single manuscript from the early tenth century.^11 In these accounts,
there are some explicit mentions of ports on the Indus River. These
early sources seem to suggest that the trade encompassed only luxury
items-gold, pearls, gemstones, silk, etc. However, recent research
shows that the earliest trade between Rome and India had a much
heavier emphasis on staple and bulk goods: salt, sugar, pepper, ordinary
cloth, coir, timber, copper, and irorl.^12
I should note that the conceptions of "India" in these Greek or
Roman sources had affected later Arab historiography by constructing
fantastic visions of the wonders of India.^13 It is largely the region of Sind
(tagged as India) which emerged as a land of marvels from these ear-
liest Greek sources. These sources in turn influenced the bulk of future
accounts. The fifth-century BCE treatise on India by Ctesias of Cnidus
and the fourth-century BCE Indica by Megasthenes both fall into this
category. Ctesias was reported to have been a physician with the court
of Artaxerxes Mnel'non of Persia, while Megasthenes reportedly trav-
eled to India with Alexander the Great. These texts, compiled from
later accounts, provide geographical details peppered with fabulous
reports of a land populated with animals of great size (ants, scorpions,
and crabs), of people without heads and with eyes on their shoulders,
of men who have faces like dogs, and of other men who have no nos-
trils and a single eye in the forehead.^14 Megasthenes's marvels of India
were reproduced and augmented in Pliny's Historia Naturalis, finished
in 77 CE, and in Solinus's Collectanea Rerum Memorabilium, written
in the third century. India, in these accounts, retained its preeminence
as a land of great wealth and wonder. These collections of extraordi-
nary and marvelous stories defined India as frontier at the edge of the
known world, overflowing with riches and the supernatural.^15
The decline of the Roman presence in the Red Sea and beyond co-
incided with, or more likely was a result of, the rise of the Sassanian
and Chinese merchants and the development of multinodal trade
in the Indiln Ocean world: Madagascar and Indonesia, Somalia and
Aden, Quanzhou and Kerala, and above all, Sarandip. The paucity of
textual archives regarding trade in these locales during late antiquity
remai~s a problem. Thus, these local networks, with their ebbs and
flows, are Jargely hidden from history. From archaeological evidence as