Page:The Periplus of the Erythræan Sea.djvu/17

 Sassanids was able to conquer every passage to the East, including even the proud Arab states which had not yielded submission to Hammurabi or Esarhaddon, Nebuchadrezzar or Darius the Great. Egypt, no longer in the highway of commerce, became a mere granary for Constantinople, and Abyssinia, driven from its hard-won footholds east of the Red Sea, could offer the Byzantine emperors no effective aid in checking the revival of Eastern power. And the whirlwind of activity let loose by Mohammed welded the Eastern World as no force had yet done, and brought the West for another millennium to its feet. Not until the coming of those vast changes in industry and transportation which marked the nineteenth century did the Western nations find commodities of which the East stood in need, and laying them down in Eastern market on their own terms, turn back the channels of trade from their ancient direction.

The records of the pioneers, who strove during the ages to stem this irresistible current, are of enduring interest in the story of human endeavor; and among them all, one of the most fascinating is this Periplus of the Erythraean Sea—this plain and painstaking log of a Greek in Egypt, a Roman subject, who steered his vessel into the waters of the great ocean and brought back the first detailed record of the imports and exports of its markets, and of the conditions and alliances of its peoples. It is the only record for centuries that speaks with authority on this trade in its entirety, and the gloom which it briefly lighted was not lifted until the wider activities of Islam broke the time-honored custom of Arab secrecy in trading, and by grafting Arab discovery on Greek theory, laid the foundations of modern geography. Not Strabo or Pliny or Ptolemy, however great the store of knowledge they gathered together, can equal in human interest this unknown merchant who wrote merely of the things he dealt in and the peoples he met—those peoples of whom our civilization still knows so little and to whom it owes so much; who brought to the restless West the surplus from the ordered and industrious East, and in so doing ruled the waters of the "Erythraean Sea."

 

The manuscript copies of the Periplus at Heidelberg and London do not enable us to fix either date or authorship. The Heidelberg manuscript attributes the work to Arrian, apparently because in that manuscript this Periplus follows a report of a voyage around the Black Sea made by the historian Arrian, who was governor of Cappadocia about 131 A. D. This is manifestly a mistake, and the London manuscript does not contain that reference.