This page needs to be proofread.
navigation.[1] On this point Heeren remarks:[2] "In the Macedonian period, the productions of India and Bactra were carried down the Oxus to the Caspian Sea; then over this sea to the mouths of the Araxes and Cyrus; after that by land to the Phasis, where they were once again conveyed by water to the different cities on the coast of the Euxine Sea."[3]
By means such as these, the chief trade between the western shores of the Mediterranean, the Black Sea, and the East was carried on during the earliest periods of history. Babylon, Susa, and Nineveh, on the one hand, with David and Solomon on the other, having been the chief causes alike of its early success and of its vast extension.
- ↑ Herod. i. 203.
- ↑ Heeren's "Asiatic Nations," vol. ii. p. 32.
- ↑ There seems reason to doubt whether the Oxus ever flowed into the Caspian Sea—it now flows into the Aral. (See Alex. Burnes's "Journey to Bokhara," ii. p. 188.) On the other hand, Conolly believed he crossed the bed of the river which did formerly flow by one branch into the Caspian. ("Travels," i. p. 50.) Dr. Vincent goes so far as to express his belief that communication between the west and east, by one of the routes specified above, was even more ancient than that by the Red Sea. ("Commerce of the Euxine," p. 113.)
