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TRADE RELATIONS OF INDIA WITH AFRICA
UPTO 14TH CENTURY A. D.*
Ravindranath Vaman Ramdas
Africa was indeed a dark continent for the Europeans who at first were not even aware of its existence, unlike the Indians. There are some who say that it was Indians, and not the Arabs, Phoenicians or Africans, who built those stone walls and temples, the ruins of which remain one of the mysteries of Zimbabwe. Who knows that ancient Indians might not have walked on the land that a Portuguese navigator two thousand years later sighted on a Christmas day and called Natal? ? From times immemorial India has established contacts with her West-shore neighbour, Africa. Teak-wood has been discovered in the ancient building of Yemen. It establishes the fact that India had trade links with the countries situated on her West Coast before Minacan inscriptions dating back to the 14th Century B. C2. The excavations at Ur dating back to the 7th and 6th centuries B. C. revealed Amazonite beads which could only come from the Nilgiri Hills of South India. It appears that the relations between Egypt and the coast of India were very intimate from the earliest times. The late Flinders Petrie, who discovered the portraits of Indian men and women at Memphis wrote : "These are the first remains of Indians on the Mediterranean. We seem now to have touched the Indian colony at Memphis". The cities of the Indus Valley civilization, had busy urban commercial contacts not only over a wide area in this country but also with maritime Egypt. A royal cemetery at Ur (dated about 2,500 B. C.) shows precious stones and metals which may have been brought there by the traders from the Indus Valley. That the Indus Valley had contact with Ur is also proved by the presence of Indus seals there. One Indus seal has a representation of a sailing boat with upturned bow and stern and another shows a mastless boat with a central cabin. All this evidence clearly indicates wide maritime contact of the Indus civilization*.
Dr. S. R. Rao maintains that the Harappan sailor must have studied regularity of South-West and North-East winds carefully almost two thousand years before
* Paper presented to the 'First International Conference on Marine Archaeology in the Indian Ocean Countries', at Chennai, on 22-23 February, 1997.
