being economically unprepared for it.

The discovery of Arikamedu is in more than one respect a landmark in the study of Indo-Roman relations. For the first time it gives a habitation and a name to one of the emporia with which the literature and the coinage had in a more general way familiarized us. The quantity of the Mediterranean material produced by comparatively trifling excavation is a suggestive index of the extent of the international trade which used the place. This fact, with the early date of some of the material and the suddenness with which it is superimposed upon a purely native and local culture, has substantiated the essentially Augustan organization of regulated monsoon traffic; whilst the remoteness of the site, on the further side of India, emphasizes the range of this new organization, the powerful purpose with which it was reaching out eastwards to the sources of pearls and silk. The imagination of the modern enquirer kindles as he lifts from the alluvium of the Bay of Bengal sherds bearing the names of craftsmen whose kilns lay on the outskirts of Arezzo. From the woods of Hertfordshire to the palm-groves of the Coromandel, these red-glazed cups and dishes symbolize the routine adventures of tradesmen whose story may be set only a little below that of king Alexander himself.

Other sites in central and southern India have produced occasional evidence of direct or indirect contact with Roman things, but cannot at present be classed with Arikamedu. Reference has been made to the rouletted dishes which were first identified and dated there, and to their distinctively Mediterranean character even when they may in fact be local copies. This type, wholly foreign to Indian ceramic tradition, nevertheless 'caught on' in India and has become an invaluable index of date on many sites where other time-evidence is lacking or inadequate. Far from the coast in northern Mysore, on the great central plateau, it has been found with, and has helped to date, an Andhra town of the 1st and 2nd century A.D. at Brahmagiri in the Chitaldrug district; and 45 miles away in the same district it has appeared at Chandravalli where, appropriately, denarii of Augustus and Tiberius have likewise been found. The Andhra towns of Maski and Kondapur, also on the Deccan plateau, have produced similar sherds; whilst nearer the east coast at yet another Andhra city, Amaravati, more rouletted pottery has been gathered on the surface, and the same site is said long ago to have yielded Roman coins not otherwise specified. Here, beside the famous st‡pa which provided the sculptures long exhibited on the main staircase of the British Museum, is a town site which from more than one standpoint would amply repay excavation. And away to the north? east, some 700 miles from Arikamedu, near the sacred temple-city