Page:The Periplus of the Erythræan Sea.djvu/81

 Salmasius notes a Greek chemical treatise "On the tempering of Indian steel."

Edrisi says "The Hindus excel in the manufacture of iron. They have also workshops wherein are forged the most famous sabres in the world. It is impossible to find anything to surpass the edge that you get from Indian steel."

6. Cotton.—Sanscrit, karpāsa; Hebrew, carpas; Greek karpasos; Latin, carbasus—the seed-fibers of Gossypium herbaceum and G. arboreum (order, Malvaceae) native in India, and woven into cloth by the natives of that country before the dawn of history. The facts concerning it have been admirably stated by Mr. R.B. Handy in The Cotton Plant, a report of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, issued in 1896. Cotton thread and cloth are repeatedly mentioned in the laws of Manu, 800 B. C. Professor A.H. Sayce in his Hibbert Lectures shows ground for the belief that it was exported by sea to the head of the Persian Gulf in the 4th millennium B.C.; and it found its way very early to Egypt. Herodotus describes it as a wool, better than that of sheep, the fruit of trees growing wild in India.

The manufacture of cotton cloth was at its best in India until very recent times, and the fine Indian muslins were in great demand and commanded high prices, both in the Roman Empire and in Mediaeval Europe. The industry was one of the main facotrs in the wealth of ancient India, and the transfer of that industry to England and the United States, and the cheapening of the process by mechnical ginning, spinning and weaving, is perhaps the greatest single factor in the economic history of our own time.

Pliny and Pollux state that cotton was grown in Egypt in their time (1st and 2nd centuries A. D.), how extensively is unknown. It was also grown in the island of Tylos in the Persian Gulf, and according to Theophrastus, in Arabia; and the Periplus confirms this by mentioning it as an article of export from Ommana.

Cotton seems also to have been grown in Syria, Cilicia and Palestine; and the fiber was known to Josephus as chedôn, Hebrew, ketonet; Arabic, kut'n, (the same sound appears in Phoenician, Syrian and Chaldee), was perhaps cotton. Movers states that the inhabitants of Palestine before the Hebrew migration made use of cotton, and that the Phoenicians exported Syrian cotton cloth to Sabaea.

Pausanias describes cotton as growing in Elis, in Achaea, and says that it was made into cloth by the women of Patrae; but this could not have been an extensive industry. It was quite certainly not produced or woven in Italy during Roman days.

Any generalizations based on the Arabic kut'n or the Greek