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 their attention in uncompromising wise that they completely grasped the proximity of Persia. Hecatæus of Miletus, who wrote between 520 and 500, is the first of the ancients to make mention of India and the Indus by name, and Megasthenes, who was in the service of the Syrian King, Seleucus Nicanor, during the third century , was the earliest writer to extend the western acquaintance with the East to the banks of the Ganges. He traversed the great peninsula from the Indus to the former river by means of what he describes as "the royal road"—probably the first of the grand trunk-roads of India—crossed successively the Sutlej and the Jumna, and descended the Ganges to Palibothra, a town at the mouth of the Sone which was the capital of a king called Sandracottus (Chandra-gupta). He brought back with him much detailed information concerning the country, its people and its products, and he speaks of cinnamon and other spices as being imported from the southern parts of India, which may possibly be an indication of the existence, even in his time, of the spice-trade of the Malayan Archipelago.

It was not, however, until after the beginning of our era that the first, faintest hint reached Europe concerning the existence of lands lying to the east of the Ganges. It is found in the writings of Pomponius Mela, whose date can be fixed from internal evidence at 43, which make mention of a headland named Tabis, described by the author as the most easterly extremity of Asia, and of another, apparently further to the south, called Tamus. Off the latter lay Chryse, or the Golden