Page:The Industrial Arts of India.djvu/270

 and Greece through Persia* Assyria* Syria, and Egypt was unbroken and intimate. Although interrupted at first, it again revived under the Saracens* and* under the Ottoman Turks, was finally suspended only after the Portuguese had obtained possession of Ormuz. Even then the Armenians continued, as they have to the present day, the local intercourse between India and Assyria and Western Asia ; going to India and purchasing goods on the spot, and returning with them to Bandar Abbas, Ispahan, Baghdad, Mosul, and Tabriz.

This is quite sufficient to account for the remarkable affinity between Assyrian and Indian decorative art* and the frequent identity of their ornamental details ; which, in turn, prove the continuity and intimacy of the commercial intercourse between India and Assyria. Of course the general affinity between Indian and Assyrian art may be in part due to the common Turanian substratum, and common Aryan inspiration of Indian and Assyrian civilisation. When the Ary as made their way through Afghanis- tan and Cashmere into the Pan jab, they found the plains of the Upper Indus already occupied by a Turanian race, which they indeed easily conquered, but which, as the caste regulations of the Code of Mann prove, was far superior to themselves in industrial civilisation. These aborigines already worked in metal and stone, and wove woollen, cotton, and linen stuffs, knew how to dye them* and to embellish their buildings with paintings : the descriptions of Megasthenes prove that, even at its highest development, Hindu civilisation was more Turanian than Aryan : and the pre-Aryan Turanian civilisation of India must have been similar to the pre-Semitic Turanian civilisation of Babylonia, Chaldaea, and Assyria, and probably preceded it. All that is monstrous in the decorative forms of Indian and Assyrian art* all that is obscene in Indian symbolism, is probably derived from common Turanian sources* anterior to direct commercial inter- course between India and Assyria. But, when we find highly artificial and complicated Indian decorative designs identical in