gems, glyptic, engraved gems, agate, cameo, intaglio, Early trade, ancient trade, commerce, Roman empire, oikoumene

There are two periods in Greco-Roman history during which connections between India and the Mediterranean world gained particular significance. Through Alexander’s campaign and the diplomatic activity of the Diadochi, India truly entered the consciousness of the West, and the literary reflection triggered by this “discovery”—especially in the Alexander narratives and the account of Megasthenes—shaped the Western image of India well into the Middle Ages. The close commercial ties that existed for about two centuries during the early and high Roman Empire between Greco-Roman Egypt and the Indian subcontinent left only faint traces in Western literary tradition, yet they provided India and, beyond it, Buddhist Asia with many stimuli. The conditions for the earliest introduction of Christianity to the Indian subcontinent also belong to this context of trade relations. It need not be debated here whether the Indo-Central Asian “Hellenism”—testified to particularly by the visual arts of several Asian countries into the second half of the first millennium—was more influenced by Roman India’s maritime trade in the first two centuries CE or by the Greek settlements that had existed in eastern Iran and northwestern India in the final centuries BCE. Archaeological exploration of those regions is still in its infancy, and one must be cautious in judgment. But it can be regarded as certain that the frequency of trade between the Roman Empire and India, as it developed along the monsoon route during the first two centuries CE, has no parallel in the rest of Greco-Roman history. The intensity of these relations is sufficiently documented through excavations and coin finds in India, through occasional papyri and inscriptions, through the Periplus of the Erythraean Sea, by individual remarks of Greco-Roman authors like Pliny and Ptolemy, and through Indian sources. Trade across the Indian Ocean was undoubtedly a significant factor in the external economy of the Roman Empire, for it was by no means limited—as Pliny’s laments might suggest—to the costly import of Indian luxury goods into the Roman world. On the contrary, the Periplus of the Erythraean Sea shows that bulk commodities of agricultural and artisanal production were regularly shipped to India.