of problems from restoring male sexual potency to serving as an antitoxin for
snake bites. Other wild animal products included tortoise shell, coming from
both tortoises and turtles, which was used for large items such as veneering
furniture and doors and for small items such as boxes, plaques, combs, rings,
and other jewelry. Tortoise shell was imported into Mesopotamia as early as
the Old Babylonian period by the Dilmunites, along with turtle meat and
eggs to be eaten in religious rituals, while the eggshells were used in medi-
cines. In some areas of bountiful harvest, these unfortunate creatures were
totally exterminated. From the seas of the Indian Ocean also came pearls,
which arrived in Greece by thefifth centuryBCE. Pliny plays the moralist
here, devoting a large discussion to pearls and condemning their use as
representing unbridled luxury smacking of moral decadence. The Roman
populace, however, paid little attention to his railings and instead imported
substantial numbers of them from the Persian Gulf, India, and Ceylon.
Diving for pearls, according to thePeriplus, was another job reserved for
convicts.
Sometime in thefirst millenniumCE, spices and related products were
overtaken as India’s most important export, although not as early as the
period of Roman trade. Cotton textiles had been produced in India on a
large scale as early as the Harappan period, and in thefirst millenniumBCE
cotton products from the Deccan, the interior of peninsular India, were
being exported in significant quantities through the port of Barygaza.
Garments from the region of Bengal in the northeast were considered to be
especiallyfine, but most exports were of the coarser, mass-produced variety
intended for common, everyday use and shipped to other ports in the Indian
Ocean. This market had significant growth potential, which the Indians
would ultimately realize, although not in the Western trade where Egyptian
linen and European wool would hold their own for the foreseeable future.
Another Indian product that would have a significant impact on the textile
industry was indigo (literally“Indian black”), which Pliny informs his read-
ers came from“slime adhering to foam on the reeds.”At this time it may
have been used more as a drug and a coloring in cosmetics, particularly eye
shadow, than as a textile dye.
The textile that Westerners wanted most from India did not originate
there but much farther afield at the far side of the Eurasian world. For many
centuries China was the world’s only producer of silk even though the
Chinese themselves did not realize this. Silk came by caravan to Central Asia,
where some of it was diverted southward through the high mountains and
down the Indus Valley to ports on the Arabian Sea or eastward across the
Ganges Valley to the Bay of Bengal and hence to southern India by sea. In
thefirst century this route was made secure by the Kushan Empire, which
extended from the border of northwestern China through Central Asia and
down into northwestern India. The ancestors of the people who ruled
Kushana were old trading partners of the Chinese and remained potential
94 When India was the center of the world