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the Cape of Good Hope. One quotation will be suffi- 
cient to prove that the products of the East reached 
Egypt by land-carriage in very remote antiquity. " In 
the 37th chapter of Genesis, it is related that the 
brethren of Joseph, when about to leave him to perish, 
saw a company of Ishmaelites, ' or Midianite merchants 
approach, to whom they resolved to sell their brother as 
a slave. Here Dr. Vincent well remarks : " upon opening 
the oldest history in the world, we find the Ishmaelites 
from Gilead conducting: a caravan of camels loaded with 
the spices of India, the balsam and myrrh of Hadramaut, 
and in the regular course of their traffic, proceeding 
to Egypt for a market. The date of this transaction 
is more than seventeen centuries prior to the Christian 
era ; and notwithstanding its antiquity, it has all the 
genuine features of a caravan crossing the desert at the 
present hour. (Prelim. Disq. to Transl. of Arrian's Periplus 
of the Erythraean Sea). 
Some of the above routes terminating on the sea-coast, 
and at places formerly considered to produce articles, which 
we now know could only be obtained from India; clearly indi- 
cate that they must themselves have had communication by 
sea with that country. Of this, we have, unfortunately, 
but few accounts in early times ; but how little do we know 
even now of what is very extensive; that is, the commercial 
relations of the Arabians with Africa and India. It has 
been observed by Dr. Vincent, that though there was 
extensive communication between Egypt and India, yet 
that neither the Hindoos nor the Egyptians were navigators 
enough to leave, though they made much use of, their own 
■nagnificent rivers. The Chinese seem to have been confined 
to their own seas and the East-India islands, and the 
Malays to between these and the coasts of the Continent of 
India; so that the carrying trade between India and Egypt 
