With the increasing commercial intercourse between the West and the East, Ceylon, from its central position, half way between Arabia and China, had during the same period risen into signal importance as a great emporium for foreign trade.  The transfer of the seat of empire from Rome to Constantinople served to revive the over-land traffic with India; and the Persians for the first time[1] vied with the Arabs and the merchants of Egypt, and sought to divert the Oriental trade from the Red Sea and Alexandria to the Euphrates and the Tigris.

[Footnote 1:  GIBBON, ch. xl.; ROBERTSON’S India, b.i.]

Already, between the first and fifth centuries, the course of that trade had undergone a considerable change.  In its infancy, and so long as the navigation was confined to coasting adventures, the fleets of the Ptolemies sailed no further than to the ports of Arabia Felx[1], where they were met by Arabian vessels returning from the west coast of India, bringing thence the productions of China, shipped at the emporiums of Malabar.  After the discovery of the monsoons, and the accomplishment of bolder voyages, the great entrepot of commerce was removed farther south; first, from Muziris, the modern Mangalore, to Nelkynda, now Neliseram, and afterwards to Calicut and Coulam, or Quilon.  In like manner the Chinese, who, whilst the navigation of the Arabs and Persians was in its infancy, had extended their voyages not only to Malabar but to the Persian Gulf, gradually contracted them as their correspondents ventured further south.  HAMZA says, that in the fifth century the Euphrates was navigable as high as Hira, within a few miles of Babylon[2]; and MASSOUDI, in his Meadows of Gold, states that at that time the Chinese ships ascended the river and anchored in front of the houses there.[3] At a later period, their utmost limit was Syraf, in Farsistan[4]; they afterwards halted first at Muziris, next at Calicut[5], then at Coulam, now Quilon[6]; and eventually, in the fourth and fifth centuries, the Chinese vessels appear rarely to have sailed further west than Ceylon.  Thither they came with their silks and other commodities, those destined for Europe being chiefly paid for in silver[7], and those intended for barter in India were trans-shipped into smaller craft, adapted to the Indian seas, by which they were distributed at the various ports east and west of Cape Comorin.[8]

[Footnote 1:  Aden was a Roman emporium; [Greek:  Rhomaikon emporion Adanen].—­PHILOSTORGIUS, p. 28.]

[Footnote 2:  HAZMA ISPAHANENSIS, p. 102; REINAUD, Relation, &c., vol. i. p. 35.]

[Footnote 3:  MASSOUDI, Meadows of Gold, Transl. of SPRENGER, vol. i. p. 246.]

[Footnote 4:  ABOU-ZEYD, vol. i. p, 14; REINAUD Discours, pp. 44, 78.]

[Footnote 5:  DULAURIER, Journ.  Asiat., vol. xiix, p. 141; VINCENT, vol. ii, pp. 464,507.]

[Footnote 6:  ABOU-ZEYD, p. 15; REINAUD, Mem. sur l’Inde, p. 201.]