Page:History of India Vol 6.djvu/36

2 dom for searching out new lines of approach to India. From that quest the history of modern commerce dates. The prize for which the European Powers contended during the next three hundred years was a magnificent one. It had been grasped at by the monarchies of antiquity and by the republics of the Middle Ages. As they in turn secured it they had risen to their highest point of prosperity; as they in turn lost it their prosperity declined. The command of the Asiatic trade-routes was sometimes, indeed, the expression rather than the cause of the aggrandizement of a nation. But to the princes who fitted forth Columbus to seek for India in the West, and sent out Vasco da Gama to find it in the East, one thing seemed clear. The possession of the Asiatic trade had in memorable examples marked high-water in the history of empire; its loss had marked the ebb of the tide.

The most ancient of the three routes was the middle one through Syria. Ships from India crept along the Asiatic shore to the Persian Gulf and sold their costly freights in the marts of Chaldæa or the lower Euphrates. The main caravan passed thence northward through Mesopotamia, edged round the wastes of Arabia Petræa, and struck west through the lesser desert to the oasis where, amid the Solitudo Palmyrena, the city of Tadmor eventually arose. Plunging again into the sands, the train of camels emerged at Damascus. There the Syrian trade-route parted into two main lines. The northern branched west to the ancient Tyre and Sidon and the medieval Acre and Ascalon. The