THE PERIPLUS INDICATES clearly enough that the traffic with India was basically of two kinds. There were goods which were produced by the sub-continent itself, and there were others which reached the Indian markets from further afield, particularly from central Asia and China. Trade of the former category may usefully be termed 'terminal trade'; that of the latter was 'transit trade’. Although at certain ports, such as Barygaza, the two groups of commodities would converge, they were essentially separate and may be separately considered.

The trade of central and southern India was mainly terminal trade. The spices, muslins, pearls and jewel-stones which constituted the bulk of it came principally from those regions. On the showing of the Periplus, there may be added a modicum of transit trade, chiefly in the form of silk which, diverted by Parthian hostility from the more direct continental routes, sometimes found its way deviously from China via the east coast of India to the ports on the Malabar coast and so joined up with the direct monsoon route to the West. We are reminded that, centuries later, on this same cosmopolitan coast a colony of Chinese merchants and craftsmen established themselves and adequately prospered at Quilon. But in Roman times it may be suspected that the China trade normally found its way through more northerly ports in a manner to be discussed presently.

The importance of the South Indian trade with the West in the 1st century A.D. has long been underlined by the impressively abundant Roman coinage which has come to light fortuitously in the peninsula since 1775. Of 68 finds which (excluding those from Ceylon) are known from the whole sub-continent-India and Pakistan together-no fewer than 57 come from south of the Vindhyas; and, with the exception of a stray denarius of Tiberius at Taxila in the Punjab, all 1st-century Roman coins not associated with later issues have been found in the south. More precisely 29 finds, distributed through Madras province and the states of Hyderabad, Mysore, Cochin, Pudukottai and Travancore, comprise aurei or denarii ranging from Augustus to Trajan. This mass of coinage demands analysis.

The first noteworthy point is that, of the 29 1st-century finds, at least 20 are known to have constituted hoards, ranging individually from four or five coins to 'some hundreds, if not thousands'. In the circumstances it is reasonable to suspect that some of the ill-recorded strays likewise represent hoards.

Secondly, these 1st-century coins are invariably of gold or silver. There is no authenticated discovery of a Roman 'brass' coin of the 1st or 2nd century in India.