and unenterprising fashion just above subsistence level. To it suddenly, from unthought-of lands 5,000 miles away, came strange wines, table-wares far beyond the local skill, lamps of a strange sort, glass, cut gems. Traders arrived across-country from the west coast to meet the large Indian east coast ships of which the Periplus tells us, laden with gemstones from Ceylon, pearls from Kolchoi (Colchi), or spices and silks from the Ganges. A small foreign quarter like that of Puhar came into being, and finally the village was replaced by a brick-built town, spreading northwards to the sea. There is no reasonable doubt that this new town was the Podouke of the Periplus,the Podouke emporion of Ptolemy, the Pudu-chcheri or 'New Town' of the Tamils, garbled by Europeans as Puddicherry and Pondicherry. Shifting sands have moved the town a mile or two, but the name has come down, little changed, through nineteen centuries.

Of the buildings of this New Town something is now known, although brick-robbers have upturned much of the site. At the northern or seaward end, beside the river and at water-level, was a large, simple brick structure upwards of 150 ft. long, pretty obviously a warehouse. Further south were courtyards walled with brick and timber, containing stoutly constructed brick tanks and cisterns, drains, wells and soak-pits, the last made in a characteristically Indian fashion of superimposed terracotta rings. South again, a formidable brick revetment, sloped or battered and surviving to a height of 6 ft., was traced by Mr. Casal for a distance of 80 yards eastwards from its broken end on the river bank and was interpreted as the side of a tank or reservoir, but may rather have been a defensive revetment. And still further south scraps of walling have come to light in the much-disturbed ground. The overall impression is that of storage-accommodation towards the mouth of the former estuary, backed by industrial quarters where, it may be supposed, the 'Agaritic' muslins which the Periplus mentions as an export of the region were made and dyed, and where beads and other objects of semi-precious stones, which litter the area, were assembled or worked. The administrative centre, temples and dwellings of the town have not yet been identified.

Most of the brick buildings explored were constructed after the red-glazed Arretine ware had ceased to arrive from Italy, where its manufacture, in the forms and fabric now in question, came to an end about A.D. 45. On the other hand the importation of wine-amphorae seems to have preceded that of the Arretine and certainly continued after the Arretine had ceased. The main development of the port may in fact be ascribed approximately to the middle of the 1st century A.D., although its international usage must have begun