Page:The Periplus of the Erythræan Sea.djvu/279

 269

north of the mountains to Tashkend, Bokhara and Merv. This did not become important until later.

The general topography of these Turkestan routes is shown by a passage from the Han Annals quoted by Richthofen {China, I, 460) from Stanislaus Julien {Notices sur les pays et les peuplcs et rangers, tir'ees des geographes et des historiens chinois, in Journal Asiatique, Ser. IV, Vol. VIII, 1846, pp. 228-252), as follows:

Hsi-yii is bounded on the east by the barriers of Yiimen-kwan and Yang-kwan, and on the west by the Tsung-ling (Pamirs). But the Tsung-ling is the trunk from which the great mountain-ranges branch out, which enclose the district on the north and the south, and these same ranges bound the districts of Nan-lu and P'ei-lu on the south and north. ” And again : * c The land along the Nan-shan ( Kuen-lun) is called Nan-tau, and that along the Pei-shan (Tian-shan) is called P'ei-tau. Both these provinces lie to the south of Pei-shan. . . . Hsi-yii extends 6000 li from east to west, and 1000 li from south to north. ”

That is, Tibet and Sungaria had no part in the transcontinental silk-trade in Roman times.

This Central Asian trade-route was first comprehensively de- scribed by Marinus of Tyre, some two generations later than the Periplus. His account is preserved by Ptolemy, and is said to be based on the notes of a Macedonian silk-merchant named Maes, whose Roman name was Titianus; who (fid not perform the whole journey, but repeats what he learned of Turkestan from his “agents” or trading associates whom he met at the Pamirs. The route, he says, began at the Bay of Issus in Cilicia, crossed Mesopotamia, As- syria and Media, to Ecbatana and the Caspian Pass; through Parthia and Hyrcania, to Antiochia Margiana (Merv); thence through Aria into Bactria. Thence the route passed through the mountainous country of the Comedi, and through the territory of the Sacae to the “Stone Tower, ” the station of those merchants who trade with the Seres ( Tashkurghan, in Sarikol, on the upper Yarkand River in the Chinese Pamirs; a fortified town built on a great rocky crag that rises from the Taghdumbash valley, at the convergence of routes from the Oxus, the Indus and the Yarkand. See Stein, op. cit., 67-8.) Thence to the Casii (Kashgar) and through the country of the Tha- guri, until after a seven-months’ journey from the “Stone Tower” the merchants arrived at “Sera Metropolis,” the “City called Thinas” of the Periplus.

By too literal an application of this “seven-months’ journey” both Marinus and Ptolemy were led into grave error as to the longi-