Letters and coinage are the natural fruits of commerce. Scholars agree that the Indian or Brahma alphabet had a Western origin, and owed its existence to commercial exigencies. But while Hofrath Dr. Bühler traces it to a Phoenician source, and ascribes its creation to the early part of the eight century b.c., M. Halévy derives it from an Aramaean script in the time of Alexander the Great No such definite theory has been put forward with regard to the silver coins called purānas, the most ancient coins of India; but it is generally believed that they were current before the Macedonian invasion, and, as silver has always been one of the most important of the imports from the West into India, we should naturally suppose that silver coinage came also from the West—unless, indeed, it were an indigenous invention. In the case, then, both of Indian letters and of Indian coinage, a direct and constant intercourse with Western Asia is the presupposition of every solution. Now, for a trade between Western Asia and India three routes are possible. The first climbs up the precipitous and zigzag passes of the Zagros range—which the Greeks called “ladders”—into the treeless regions of Persia. This route was barred for centuries by the inveterate hostility of the mountaineers, and it did not become practicable until the “Great King” reduced the Kurdish highlanders and the lowland Semites to an equal vassalage.
Art. XVI.—The Early Commerce of Babylon with India— 700–300 b.c.
