Such being the general spirit and economy of the ancient nations of the East of which we have historic records, it may be more easily conceived how dense populations might grow up on the great plain of Hindustan and the still greater plain of China; have their own wars, revolutions, and social changes; develop much wealth and varied riches, much art and science, much literary and philosophical refinement; have much internal traffic, with little or no commerce beyond their own widely-extended and impassable frontiers; and yet be so unknown to the rest of the world that the Persians, even in the days of Xerxes, appear to have had scarce a conjecture that there was such an empire as China in existence; that Alexander, on conquering Persia and watering his horses in the Indus, should dream that he was master of all Asia—“weep,” as the romantic version runs, that there was no more world to conquer;” and that, in short, over the growth of these ancient civilizations of Eastern Asia, surviving to the present day and embracing about a half of the human race, the curtain of history should drop as blankly as if they belonged to another planet, or could be seen only through a haze of fable and mystical tradition.
There are three conditions as essential to extensive international traffic as diversity of natural resources, division of labour, accumulation of stock, or any other primal element—(1) means of transport, (2) freedom of labour and exchange, and (3) security; and in all these conditions the ancient world was signally deficient.
The great rivers, which became the first seats of population and empire, must have been of much utility as channels of transport, and hence the course of human power of which they are the geographical delineation, and probably the idolatry with which they were sometimes honoured. Nor were the ancient rulers insensible of the importance of opening roads through their dominions, and establishing posts and lines of communication, which, though primarily for official and military purposes, must have been useful to traffickers and to the general population. But the free navigable area of great rivers is limited, and when diversion of traffic had to be made to roads and tracks through deserts, there remained the slow and costly carriage of beasts of burden, by which only articles of small bulk and the rarest value could be conveyed with any hope of profit. Corn, though of the first necessity, could only be thus transported in famines, when beyond price to those who were in want, and under this extreme pressure could only be drawn from within a narrow sphere, and in quantity sufficient to the sustenance of but a small number of people. The routes of ancient commerce were thus interrupted and cut asunder by barriers of transport, and the farther they were extended became the more impassable to any considerable quantity or weight of commodities. As long as navigation was confined to rivers and the shores of inland gulfs and seas, the oceans were a terra incognita, contributing nothing to the facility or security of transport from one part of the world to another, and leaving even one populous part of Asia as unapproachable from another as if they had been in different hemispheres. The various routes of trade from Europe and North-Western Asia to India, which have been often referred to, are to be regarded more as speculations of future development than as realities of ancient history. It is not improbable that the ancient traffic of the Red Sea may have been extended along the shores of the Arabian Sea to some parts of Hindustan, but that vessels braved the Indian Ocean and passed round Cape Comorin into the Bay of Bengal, 2000 or even 1000 years before mariners had learned to double the Cape of Good Hope, is scarcely to be believed. The route by the Euxine and the Caspian Sea has probably never in any age reached India. That by the Euphrates and the Persian Gulf is shorter, and was besides the more likely from passing through tracts of country which in the most remote times were seats of great population. There may have been merchants many, who traded on all these various routes, but that commodities were passed in bulk over great distances is inconceivable. It may be doubted whether in the ante-Christian ages there was any heavy transport over even 500 miles, save for warlike or other purposes, which engaged the public resources of imperial states, and in which the idea of commerce, as now understood, is in a great measure lost.
