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Translator's Introduction In India, Pattala—the modern Thattha on the river Indus in Sindh, was in early times a place of great importance—the point where all the caravan routes in India, and leading into India, converged. It was near to this spot that Alexander crossed the Indus, and here also the different lines from China, through the Kashmir valley, and from Sarmatia (now Russia), Media and Mesopotamia, through-the Bamian and Khaiber passes first entered India. Sindh was, therefore, the place where a caravan of foreign merchants would first halt in India*. This confirms the statement in the Buddhist manuscript of the life of Jesus that He first went to Sindh.
Besides the caravan route, there were two other routes - the Persian Gulf route and the Red Sea route. The Bible is full of references to the trade by these routes also. Jerusalem was in early times an important place of commerce and the rivalary between Jerusalem and Edom finds a striking expression in the Bible throughout the whole period of prophetic development among the Hebrews, as in Isaiah xxxiv, 5-6; Jeremiah xlix. 1322; Ezekiel xxv. 13-14, and xxxv. 15; and Amos I, 10-12
The crowning proof of the Indian trade with the countries on the shores of the Mediterranean and the Red Seas before the birth of Jesus, is offered from the fact that during the reign of Ptolemy (B.C. 145-116), a Hindu was found on the Egyptian coast of the Red Sea in a boat by himself, speaking a language unknown to the people of that country, and whose ship had been wrecked there. The prominent headland on the south-east coast of Arabia is named Ras-el-Kabir-Hindi “The Cape of the Hindu's Grave"from the fact that navigation was considered dangerous in those times by the Arabs. The castaway Hindu, however, on being taken to Alexandria, offered : to pilot an Egyptian ship back to India by the voyage he had himself made, and Euxodus was sent on this
* I am indebted for much of this information to Sir George Bird Wood.
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