Page:The Periplus of the Erythræan Sea.djvu/223

 of the same thing in describing the trade between Malabar and Ceylon. "The navigation," he says (VI, 24), "was formerly confined to vessels made of rushes, rigged in the manner familiar on the Nile. The vessels of recent times are built with prows at either end so that there may be no need of turning around while sailing in these channels, which are extremely narrow. The tonnage of the vessels is 3,000 amphorae." (About 33 tons.)

By "double prows" Pliny probably means such build and rig as shown in the accompanying illustration, which is typical of the Indian Ocean generally. Mast and sail can be reversed at will, so that the craft can be sailed in either direction.

56. Pepper, black and white.—Piper nigrum, Linn., order Piperaceae. A perennial climber, wild in the forests of Travancore and Malabar, and extensively cultivated from very early times, in the hot, damp localities of southern India.

Lassen (I, 278), notes that the Greek word peperi, Latin piper, simply repeats the Indian name pippali.

The antiquity of the trade in pepper is not so easily shown as that in other spices. There is no certain mention of it in the Egyptian inscriptions. In the Hebrew scriptures it is unknown, nor has it a place among the "mint and anise and cummin" of the Gospels. Herodotus has no bit of folklore to attach to it. Theophrastus, indeed, in the 4th century B.C., knows it as a medicine, and Dioscorides distinguishes between black, white, and long pepper. The Sanscrit writers describe it as a medicine for fever and dyspepsia, used together with ginger and long pepper; these were their "three pungent substances." (Mahāvagga, VI, 19, 1; see also I-tsing, Record of Buddhist Practices [7th century A.D.], chap. xxviii; Takakusu's edition, p.135.) The Romans had it after their conquests in Asia Minor, Syria and Egypt, and at once provided the greatest market for it. Egypt knew it, probably, through the sea-trade of the Ptolemies; Syria through the caravan-trade to Tyre from the Persian Gulf. There is some reason for supposing that pepper was the sprice more especially in demand in Babylonia and the Persian Gulf trade generally, just as cinnamon was the more especially reserved for Egypt; and that the most active demand for it came with the extension of the Persian empire under Darius. The trade was by sea and not overland; Herodotus knows the Dravidians (III, 100) only as having "a complexion closely resembling the Aethiopians," and as being "situated very far from the Persians, toward the south, and never subject to Darius." It may also be surmised that a steady demand for pepper existed in China before it arose in Rome, and