COMMERCE OF INDIA. 



211 



plant was meant to denote the science contained in a book 

 deposited in the Royal Treasury. Barzuyeh demanded and 

 received a copy of the. precious work which he brought home 

 and translated into the Huzvaresh language. The book in 

 question was the Pancatantram. 



The commerce of the Greeks of the Byzantine empire 

 sustained a severe blow from the Arabs, to whose conquests 

 the Sassanides had succumbed still earlier. The sea road, via 

 Alexandria, was now blocked to the Greek merchants, who 

 received Indian goods mostly by the way along the Oxus and 

 through the Caucasus. Trapezunt profited by this dislocation 

 of the trade. 



Soon after Mahomet's death and four years previous to the 

 destruction of the Persian Empire, Khalif Omar with an 

 eye on the Indian sea trade, founded the harbour of Bassora, 

 but his expeditions from the coast of Oman to Thana, near 

 Bombay, and to the mouth of the Indus, were undertaken 

 rather more from political than from commerical reasons. 

 The intercourse between both nations remained then suspended 

 for some time, the wars in the West and internal dissensions 

 preventing the Arabs from devoting themselves much to the 

 peaceful pursuits of commerce, but the subjects of the 

 Khalif still continued their traffic with the Ceylonese. The 

 island of Ceylon was, as is well known, regarded by the 

 Mussulmans to have been the Garden of Eden, the earthly 

 paradise, in which Adam had resided, Muhammedam pilgrims 

 migrated every year to the mountain called Adam's Peak, in 

 order to worship the steps seen on the rock and ascribed to 

 the father of mankind. In fact the bad treatment which 

 an Arab ship, returning from Ceylon, experienced at the 

 western mouth of the Indus by the marauding inhabitants of 

 Dipal, induced Khalif Valid to despatch an army against the 

 king of Sindh, and in 712 this kingdom was conquered by the 

 Arabs. From that time the Indo-Arabian trade steadily 

 increased ; and as we are well informed by contemporaneous 



