Ceylon, according to this traveller, has five large and navigable rivers, it rejoices in one perennial harvest, and the flowers and the ripe fruit hang together on the same branch. There are palm trees; both those that bear the great Indian nut, and the smaller aromatic one (the areka). The natives subsist on milk, rice, and fruit. The sheep produce no wool, but have long and silky hair, and linen being unknown, the inhabitants clothe themselves in skins, which are far from inelegantly worked.
Finding some Indian merchants there who had come in a small vessel to trade, the Theban attempted to go into the interior, and succeeded in getting sight of a tribe whom he calls Besadæ or Vesadæ, his description of whom is in singular conformity with the actual condition of the Veddahs in Ceylon at the present day. "They are," he says, "a feeble and diminutive race, dwelling in caves under the rocks, and early accustomed to ascend precipices, with which their country abounds, in order to gather pepper from the climbing plants. They are of low stature, with large heads and shaggy uncut hair."
The Theban proceeds to relate that being arrested by one of the chiefs, on the charge of having entered his territory without permission, he was forcibly detained there for six years, subsisting on a measure of food, issued to him daily by the royal authority. This again presents a curious coincidence with the detention and treatment of Knox and other captives by the kings of Kandy in modern times. He was at last released owing to the breaking out of hostilities between the chief who held him prisoner and another prince, who accused the former before the supreme sovereign of having unlawfully detained a Roman citizen, after which he was set at liberty, out of respect to the Roman name and authority.
This curious tract was first published by CAMERABIUS, but in 1665 Sir EDWARD BISSE, Baronet, and Clarenceux King-at-Arms, reproduced the Greek original, supposing it to be an unpublished manuscript, with a Latin translation. It is incorporated in one of the MSS. of the Pseudo-Callisthenes recently edited by MÜLLER, lib. iii. ch. vii. viii.; DIDOT. Script Groec. Bib., vol. xxvi. Paris, 1846.
With the increasing commercial intercourse between the West and the East, Ceylon, from its central position, half way between Arabia and China, had during the same period risen into signal importance as a great emporium for foreign trade. The transfer of the seat of empire from Rome to Constantinople served to revive the over-land traffic with India; and the Persians for the first time[1] vied with the Arabs and the merchants of Egypt, and sought to divert the Oriental trade from the Red Sea and Alexandria to the Euphrates and the Tigris.
1: GIBBON, ch. xl.; ROBERTSON'S India, b.i.
Already, between the first and fifth centuries, the course of that trade had undergone a considerable change. In its infancy, and so long as the navigation was confined to coasting adventures, the fleets of the Ptolemies sailed no further than to the ports of Arabia Felx[1], where they were met by Arabian vessels returning from the west coast of India, bringing thence the productions of China, shipped at the emporiums of Malabar. After the discovery of the monsoons, and the accomplishment of bolder voyages, the great entrepôt of commerce was removed farther south; first, from Muziris, the modern Mangalore, to Nelkynda, now Neliseram, and afterwards to Calicut and Coulam, or Quilon. In like manner the Chinese, who, whilst the navigation of the Arabs and Persians was in its infancy, had extended their voyages not only to Malabar but to the Persian Gulf, gradually contracted them as their correspondents ventured further south. HAMZA says, that in the fifth century the Euphrates was navigable as high as Hira, within a few miles of Babylon[2]; and MASSOUDI, in his Meadows of Gold, states that at that time the Chinese ships ascended the river and anchored in front of the houses there.[3] At a later period, their utmost limit was Syraf, in Farsistan[4]; they afterwards halted first at Muziris, next at Calicut[5], then at Coulam, now Quilon[6]; and eventually, in the fourth and fifth centuries, the Chinese vessels appear rarely to have sailed further west than Ceylon. Thither they came with their silks and other commodities, those destined for Europe being chiefly paid for in silver[7], and those intended for barter in India were trans-shipped into smaller craft, adapted to the Indian seas, by which they were distributed at the various ports east and west of Cape Comorin.[8]
1: Aden was a Roman emporium; [Greek: Rhomaikon emporion Adanên].—PHILOSTORGIUS, p. 28.
2: HAZMA ISPAHANENSIS, p. 102; REINAUD, Relation, &c., vol. i. p. 35.
3: MASSOUDI, Meadows of Gold, Transl. of SPRENGER, vol. i. p. 246.