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merchants who went to Babylon went also farther inland, from Babylon to the west; or that they continued their voyages as far as Yemen; or that they reached Babylon overland, by way of the passes, across Afghanistan.
There is still much to be done in the working out of the details of each of these three lines of evidence. No one of them is yet conclusive by itself. But the consensus of all three lends confirmation to each. And it may now be accepted as a working hypothesis that:
1. Sea-going merchants, availing themselves of the monsoons, were in the habit, at the beginning of the seventh (and perhaps at the end of the eighth) century B.C., of trading from ports on the south-west coast of India (Sovīra at first, afterwards Suppāraka and Bharukaccha) to Babylon, then a great mercantile emporium,
2. These merchants were mostly Dravidians, not Aryans. Such Indian names of the goods imported as were adopted in the west (Solomon's ivory, apes, and peacocks, for instance, and the word "rice") were adaptations, not of Sanskrit or Pāli, but of Tamil words.
3. These merchants there became acquainted with an alphabetic writing derived from that first invented and used by the white pre-Semitic race now called Akkadians.
4. That alphabet had previously been carried, by wandering Semitic tribes, from Babylon to the west, both north-west and south-west. Some of the particular letters learnt by the Indian merchants
Shree Sudharmaswami Gyanbhandar-Umara, Surat
www.umaragyanbhandar.com
