Page:The Periplus of the Erythræan Sea.djvu/85

 native craft, large and small; they traded with Berbera, Arabia, and Western India, and were navigated by "Rajput" or Hindu pilots.

Burton (op. cit., pp.330–1) says again:

"I repeatedly heard at Zeila and at Harrar that traders had visited the far West, traversing for seven months a country of pagans wearing golden bracelets, till they reached the Salt Sea upon which Franks sail in ships. I once saw a traveler descending the Nile with a store of nuggets, bracelets and gold rings similar to those used as money by the ancient Egyptians. Mr. Krapf relates a tale current in Abyssinia, namely: that there is a remnant of the slave trade between Guineh (the Guinea coast) and Shoa. Connection between the east and west formerly existed; in the time of JoãoI, the Portuguese on the river Zaire in Congo learned the existence of the Abyssinian church. Travelers in Western Africa assert that Fakihs or priests, when performing the pilgrimage, pass from the Fellatah country through Abyssinia to the coast of the Red Sea. And it has lately been proved that a caravan line is open from the Zanzibar coast to Benguela."

The foregoing, written before modern discovery had altered the trade of Africa, indicates the same condition as that existing in ancient history: a well-established trade to Egypt and South Arabia, coming from tribe to tribe through the heart of Africa, from great distances West and South.

7. The "Far-side" coast.—According to Burton (op. cit. p.12) the Somali tribes called their country the Barr el Ajam, which he translates as "barbarian land," but goes on to explain that Ajam means all nations not Arab, just as among Egyptians and Greeks "barbarian" meant all nations not of their country.

The name seems to apply to the migration and trade from South Arabia, the tribes who had crossed the gulf at Aden at various periods of history being referred to by their countrymen as those "of the further side," which our author has rendered into Greek as peratikos (pera, beyond).

7. Juice of sour grapes.—The text is omphakion. Pliny says (XII, 60): "Omphacium is a kind of oil obtained from the olive and the vine—the former is produced by pressing the olive while still white; the latter from the Aminaean grape, when the size of a chick-pea, just before the rising of Dog-star. The verjuice is put into earthen vessels, and then stored in vessels of Cyprian copper. The best is reddish, acrid, and dry to the taste. Also the unripe grape is pounded in a mortar, dried in the sun, and then divided into lozenges."

The Aminaean grape he describes in XIV, 4: also a lanata or