Page:History of India Vol 6.djvu/58

 22 THE CLOSING OF THE OLD TRADE PATHS Ptolemy Philadelphus founded, on the headland near its mouth, My os Hormos (274 B. c.), whence the Indian wares were carried across the desert to the Nile Valley. To avoid still further the northerly head winds on the passage up the African coast, Ptolemy created the em- porium of Berenice at the southern extremity of Egypt on the Red Sea, and honoured it by his mother's name, Berenice, which this trading centre is said to have transmitted through the Italian form verenice to mod- ern commerce in the word varnish. A caravan journey of 285 Roman miles conveyed the eastern freights through wastes and mountains to Coptos on the Nile, with regular halting stations along the track. Some of these still dot the desert, and the proposed Assuan- Berenice railway, for which a survey has been made, would revive the old trade path from Ptolemy's har- bour to the Nile Valley by a shorter cut. Railway communication seems destined, indeed, to reopen the ancient paths of Indo-European commerce. The Rus- sian line to Bokhara represents, not too exactly, an old route from China by way of the Oxus; the long-pro- jected Euphrates Valley Railway would be the modern counterpart of the Syrian caravan track. The final development of the Indo-Egyptian route did not take place until three centuries after Ptolemy Philadelphus, when the pilot Hippalus discovered the monsoons, or more strictly speaking, worked out the regular passage by means of them (circ. 47 A. D.). These periodical winds blow from Africa to India for about six months, and from India to Africa during the