At one time two great lines of caravans started from Yemen. The one proceeded from Hadra maut by Oman, and took the line of the Persian Gulf ; the other came by the Hejaz along the coast of the Red Sea, and arrived at Petra, and from hence bifurcated off into two roads, the one going to Gaza and the other to Darnaacus. From Yemen to Petra the time of the caravan march was seventy days ; and the stations of the present day are the same as those described by Athenodorns, and were probably the EarBC in the days of Ishmael and Abraham. The Nfaadite tribes found in this traffic an immense field of employment. Some let their camels for hire, some acted as guides, some secured protection in return for payments of money, some engaged themselves in traffic. Sotne revolution interrupted this caravan trade ; the vast cities which maintained their enormous prosperity by the passage of caravans fell into decay ; but re mains of colonnades, temples, and amphitheatres excite the traveller's admiration and surprise, amid the sands of the Hauran and the deserts east of the Dead Sea and the Lake of Tiberias. Pal myra, Philadelphia, and the cities of the Decapolis were the northern stations or termini of the great caravan road from Petra to Damascus. But the position of Petra was peculiarly adapted to ad vance it to that incredible degree of opulence which won the admiration of visitore in the days of Greece and Rome, which was described by Athenodorus the Stoic, and which, after having been forgotten in the desert for centuries, still exists, within its rock ramparts and its richly chiselled and stately pillars and edifices, to astonish and instruct the modern traveller. l'etra, in fact, was one of the chief points of junction of the great caravan traffic, and it was here that the cargo of the caravan changed hands from the carriers of the southern to those of the northern merchants.
With the fall of the mighty Roman empire, the routes by the Red Sea and Arabia seem to have been abandoned ; and centuries afterwards, when the Genoese engaged in commerce and navigation, a former trade route had been reopened up be tween India and Europe. The merchandise from the western part of India was now carried up the river Indus as far as it was navigable, and then across country, through Sarnarcand, to the river Oxus, clown which it WM shipped to the Caspian Sea. In like manner the merchandise from China and the Moluccas was shipped across the Bay of Bengal, and up the rivers Ganges and Jumna, and then carried overland to the Oxus. Samarcand was then a great emporium, and the merchants of India, Turkey, and Persia. met there t,o exchange their wares. The ships sailed across the Caspian to the port of Astracan, at the mouth of the Volga. Thence the goods were carried up the river to the city of Novgorod, in the province of Reizan (a city that must have been considerably to the south of the famous Nijni Novgorod of to-day), then overland for some miles to the river Don, where they were loaded in barks and carried down stream to the Sea of Azof, and on to the port of Caffa or Theodosia, in the Crimea. Caffa belonged at that
time to the Genoese, and they came there in their galliasses to fetch Indian commodities, which they distributed throughout Europe. In. the reign of Commodita, emperon.of Armenia,. a better route was followed, by the merchandise being transported from the Caspian Sea through Georgia to the city of Trebizond on the Black Sea, whence it was shipped to all parts of Europe. This was doubt less the origin of the connection of the Armenians with the trade of India. So highly was this route approved of, that another Armenian emperor is said to .have actually begun to cut a canal, 120 miles in length, from the Caspian to the Black Sea, for the greater convenience of the trade, but the author of this scheme was slain and the enter prise fell through.
After a time the Venetians came upon the scene, and took up a new and much shorter trade route to India, that down the river Euphrates,—a route which even at the present day is believed by some to be the best that could be selected for communi cation between India and Europe. The Venetian merchants sailed from Venice to Tripoli ; thence their goods were carried in caravans to Aleppo, which was a famous mart, and whose reputation Shakespeare did not fail to notice. From Aleppo the caravans made their way to Bir on the banks of the Euphrates. Here the merchandise was transferred to boats, and conveyed down the river to a point near Baghdad on the Tigris. Baghdad being reached, the merchandise was then trans ferred to boats on the Tigris, and carried down to Bassora and the island of Ormua in the Persian Gulf. In those days Ormuz was the greatest emporium in the south of Asia. Here all the velvets, cloths, and manufactures of the Weit were exchanged for the spices, drugs, and precious stones of the East.
The wealth acquired by the merchants of Venice in their trade with the East excited the envy of the whole of Europe. The Portuguese especially spared no expense in their endeavours to discover a new route to India, and in the latter part of the 15th century they found their way to Calicut by the Cape of Good Hope ; and the cheapest route between Europe and India was the high sea. But after making use of the Cape sea route for 400 years, the world has returned to that by the Red Sea, which was followed by the ships of king Solomon and Hiram king of Tyre.
Along the eastern coast of Africa, merchants from Great Britain, France, Portugal, and Ger many are now settled, but Asiatics form a connect ing link between the Europeans and the African races. Arabs, and Hindus from Sind and from Cutch, have from time immemorial traded on that coast, and the Arab dynasties of Johanna and of neighbouring places gave accounts of their arrival on the coast, which was long prior to that of the Portuguese, having been far back in the middle ages, and there appears to have been settlements on the coast of powerful Arab and Persian emi grants in the early centuries of the Christian era.