DDK HistoryF.p65 - CSIR

276 SATAVAHANA TRADE [8.6
and lead; coral and topaz; thin clothing and inferior sorts of all kinds ; bright coloured
girdles a cubit wide; storax, sweet clover, flint glass; realgar (== arsenic monosulphide),
antimony, gold and silver coin, on which there is a profit when exchanged for the money
of the country; and ointment, but not very costly, and not much. And for the king there
are brought into those places very costly vessels of silver, singing boys, beautiful maidens
for the harem, fine wines, thin clothing of the finest weaves, and the choicest ointments..
There are brought down to Barygaza from these places (Paithanj and Tagara) by wagons
and through great tracts without roads, from Pai^han car-nelian in great quantity and
from Tagara much common cloth, and other merchandise brought there locally from
the region along the sea-coast. The market-towns of this l region are, in order after
Barygaza (Broach) : Sopara, and the city of Kalyan. which in the time of the elder
Saraganus(?) became a beautiful market-town; but since it came into the possession of
Sandanes the port is much obstructed^, and any Greek landing there may chance to be
taken to Barygaza under guard”. (Schoff 42-3).
It is important to note that the region from Paithan to the ports
was (as the Periplus explicitly states) still heavy jungle filled with
savage beasts of prey, not the settled, cultivated territory that it became
later. The ox-carts would be used near each end of the journey, or for
flat stretches. Much of the goods must have been carried by caravans
of pack-animals as the Lamans still carry it. Duarte Barbosa (D.B.
163) reporte4 the practice at Chaul on the west coast in A. D. 1500.
“They bring their goods laden on great droves of trained oxen with packsaddles,
like those of Castille, and over these long sacks thrown across,
in which they pack their goods, and behind them goes a drover (canaittor)
who drives twenty or thirty oxen before him.” The local merchants took
over near Chaul port, by exchange. The closure of Kalyan port by a
hostile Satakarni king (whose name was corrupted in the Greek
account to Sandanes) was supposed to account for the brief emergency
of Dhenukakata as a Greek trade-settlement, from which so many of the
Karle donors originated. This explanation is much less plausible than the
disappearance of the highly specialized trade.
The Buddhist Jatakas give a fairly good picture of this society,
and not — as is so often supposed — of society in Magadha and
Kosala at the time of the Buddha. They cannot have been written