CHAP. V.
Fluctuating State of the India Trade—Hurt by Military Expeditions of the Persians—Revives under the Ptolemies—Falls to Decay under the Romans.
The prosperous days of the commerce with the Elanitic Gulf seemed to be at this time nearly past; yet, after the revolt of the ten tribes, Edom remaining to the house of David, they still carried on a sort of trade from the Elanitic Gulf, though attended with many difficulties. This continued till the reign of Jehosaphat[292]; but, on Jehoram’s succeeding that prince, the Edomites[293] revolted and chose a king of their own, and were never after subject to the kings of Judah till the reign of Uzziah[294], who conquered Eloth, fortified it, and having peopled it with a colony of his own, revived the old traffic. This subsisted till the reign of Ahaz, when Rezin king of Damascus took Eloth[295], and expelled the Jews, planting in their stead a colony of Syrians. But he did not long enjoy this good fortune, for the year after, Rezin[296] was conquered by Tilgath-pileser; and one of the fruits of this victory was the taking of Eloth, which never after returned to the Jews, or was of any profit to Jerusalem.
The repeated wars and conquest to which the cities on the Elanitic Gulf had been subject, the extirpation of the Edomites, all the great events that immediately followed one another, of course disturbed the usual channel of trade by the Red Sea, whose ports were now consequently become unsafe by being in possession of strangers, robbers, and soldiers; it changed, therefore, to a place nearer the center of police and good government, than fortified and frontier towns could be supposed to be. The Indian and African merchants, by convention, met in Assyria, as they had done in Semiramis’s time; the one by the Persian Gulf and Euphrates, the other through Arabia. Assyria, therefore, became the mart of the India trade in the East.
The conquests of Nabopollaser, and his son Nebuchadnezzar, had brought a prodigious quantity of bullion, both silver and gold, to Babylon his capital. For he had plundered Tyre[297], and robbed Solomon’s Temple[298] of all the gold that had been brought from Ophir; and he had, besides, conquered Egypt and laid it waste, and cut off the communication of trade in all these places, by almost extirpating the people. Immense riches flowed to him, therefore, on all sides, and it was a circumstance particularly favourable to merchants in that country, that it was governed by written laws that screened their properties from any remarkable violence or injustice.
I suppose the phrase in scripture, “The law of the Medes and Persians, which altereth not[299],” must mean only written laws, by which those countries were governed, without being left to the discretion of the judge, as all the East was, and as it actually now is.
In this situation the country was at the birth of Cyrus, who, having taken Babylon[300] and slain Belshazzer[301], became master of the whole trade and riches of the East. Whatever character writers give of this great Prince, his conduct, with regard to the commerce of the country, shews him to have been a weak one: For, not content with the prodigious prosperity to which his dominions had arrived, by the misfortune of other nations, and perhaps by the good faith kept by his subjects to merchants, enforced by those written laws, he undertook the most absurd and disastrous project of molesting the traders themselves, and invading India, that all at once he might render himself master of their riches. He executed this scheme just as absurdly as he formed it; for, knowing that large caravans of merchants came into Persia and Assyria from India, through the Ariana, (the desert coast that runs all along the Indian Ocean to the Persian Gulf, almost entirely destitute of water, and very nearly as much so of provisions, both which caravans always carry with them), he attempted to enter India by the very same road with a large army, the very same way his predecessor Semiramis had projected 1300 years before; and as her army had perished, so did his to a man, without having ever had it in his power to take one pepper-corn by force from any part of India.
The same fortune attended his son and successor Cambyses, who, observing the quantity of gold brought from Ethiopia into Egypt, resolved to march to the source, and at once make himself master of those treasures by rapine, which he thought came too slowly through the medium of commerce.
Cambyses’s expedition into Africa is too well known for me to dwell upon it in this place. It hath obtained a celebrity by the absurdity of the project, by the enormous cruelty and havock that attended the course of it, and by the great and very just punishment that closed it in the end. It was one of those many monstrous extravagancies which made up the life of the greatest madman that ever disgraced the annals of antiquity. The basest mind is perhaps the most capable of avarice; and when this passion has taken possession of the human heart, it is strong enough to excite us to undertakings as great as any of those dictated by the noblest of our virtues.
Cambyses, amidst the commission of the most horrid excesses during the conquest of Egypt, was informed that, from the south of that country, there was constantly brought a quantity of pure gold, independent of what came from the top of the Arabic Gulf, which was now carried into Assyria, and circulated in the trade of his country. This supply of gold belonged properly and exclusively to Egypt; and a very lucrative, though not very extensive commerce, was, by its means, carried on with India. He found out that the people, possessing these treasures, were called Macrobii, which signifies long livers; and that they possessed a country divided from him by lakes, mountains, and deserts. But what still affected him most was, that in his way were a multitude of warlike Shepherds, with whom the reader is already sufficiently acquainted.