hardly be supposed that a sea-faring people would not take advantage of them, to embark in such a lucrative trade as that of India.  “There is no history which treats of them which does not notice them as pirates, or merchants, by sea, as robbers, or traders, by land.  We scarcely touch upon them, accidentally, in any author, without finding that they were the carriers of the Indian Ocean.”  From the earliest period that history begins to notice them, Sabaea, Hadraumaut, and Oman, are described as the residences of navigators; and as these places are, in the earliest historians, celebrated for their maritime commerce, it is reasonable to suppose that they were equally so before the ancient historians acquired any knowledge of them.

We cannot go farther back, with respect to the fact of the Arabians being in India, than the voyage of Nearchus; but in the journal of this navigator, we find manifest traces of Arabian navigators on the coast of Mekran, previous to his expedition:  he also found proofs of their commerce on the coast of Gadrosia, and Arabic names of places—­a pilot to direct him, and vessels of the country in the Gulf of Persia.  Large ships from the Indus, Patala, Persis, and Karmania came to Arabia, as early as the time of Agatharcides; and it is probable that these ships were navigated by Arabians, as the inhabitants of India were not, at this time, and, indeed, never have been celebrated for their maritime enterprize and skill.  The same author mentions a town, a little without the Red Sea, from whence, he says, the Sabeans sent out colonies or factories into India, and to which the large ships he describes came with their cargoes from India.  This is the first historical evidence to prove the establishment of Arabian factories and merchants in the ports of India.  In the time of Pliny, the Arabians were in such numbers on the coast of Malabar, and at Ceylon, that, according to that author, the inhabitants of the former had embraced their religion, and the ports of the latter were entirely in their power.  Their settlements and commerce in India are repeatedly mentioned in the Periplus of the Erythrean Sea, and likewise their settlements down the coast of Africa to Rhaptum, before it was visited by the Greeks from Egypt.  For, besides their voyages from India to their own country, they frequently brought Indian commodities direct to the coast of Africa.  At Sabaea, the great mart of the Arabian commerce with India, the Greeks, as late as the reign of Philometor, purchased the spices and other productions of the east.  As there was a complete monopoly of them at this place, in the hands of the Arabians, the Greek navigators and merchants were induced, in the hopes of obtaining them cheaper, to pass the Straits of Babelmandeb, and on the coast of Africa they found cinnamon and other produce of India, which had been brought hither by the Arabian traders.