Page:The Periplus of the Erythræan Sea.djvu/99

 Guardafui and proceeding along the coast, some southward, but most westward; and that, according to §25, Ocelis, at the entrance to the Red Sea, was their terminus, the Arabs forbidding them to trade beyond. Between India and Cape Guardafui they apparently enjoyed the bulk of the trade, shared to some extent by Arabian shipping and quite recently by Greek ships from Egypt; on the Somali coast they shared the trade in an incidental way; and they received their return cargoes at Ocelis and shared non of the Red Sea trade, which in former times the Arabs of Yemen had monopolized, but in the days of the Ptolemies the Egyptians had largely taken over.

At the time of the Periplus, owing to the conquest of Egypt by the Romans, the establishment of the Axumite Kingdom, and a settled policy in Rome of cultivating direct communication with India, this commercial understanding, or alliance, between Arabia and India (which had existed certainly for 2000 years and probably much longer), is shown to be at the point of extinction; but still to be strong enough for the Romans to know the cinnamon-bark only as a product of the Arabian tributary, Somaliland, while the cinnamon-leaf, a later article of commerce, they knew (§§56, 65) under the name of malabathrum, as a product of India and Tibet.

14. Clarified butter.—The text is boutyron. Some of the commentators object to the word (Lassen and Fabricius especially) and Fabricius, in his notes (p.130) thinks it would be "very wrong to suppose that butter could have been brought from India, in this hot climate, to the eastern coast of Africa." Therefore they propose substitutes, as noted under §41.

The voyage from India to Africa by the N. E. monsoon may have averaged 30 to 40 days. As shown under §41, clarified butter will keep in the tropics not only for years, but for centuries; but the account given by Burton (First Footsteps, pp.136 and 247) shows that modern caravans take it for trips of six weeks and more, under the same hot climate of Somaliland; and Lieut. Cruttenden, in his description of the Berbera Fair, tells of modern Cambay ships laden with ghee in jars, bought in Somaliland for trade elsewhere; probably along the Arabian coast. That is, the Somali had learned the art of clarifying butter, and exported it in the 19th century by the same class of ships that had brought it to them from India in the 1st century.

Mungo Park found the same product entering into the commerce of the much more humid Senegal coast of West Africa:

"The Foulahs use the milk chiefly as an article of diet, and that not until it is sour. The cream which it affords is very thick, and is converted into butter by stirring it violently in a large calabash. This