Taking the other articles, almug wood is no other than sandal. It occurs in Greek as santalan, and could have come from Tamil sandana or Sanskrit chandana, the pure Tamil word for it is aram. This is a peculiar product of the Malaya Hills, the southern portion of the Western Ghats. Apes are known in Hebrew as koph. In Egyptian, the word takes the form kafu, and. these are derived from the Sanskrit word kapi. Satin (cotton cloth) becomes sadain in Hebrew and sinthon in Greek, probably from Sanskrit Sindhu. These are all traceable to a part of India where the prevailing language might be Sanskrit. There are two words however for two articles imported from India which cannot be traced to Sanskrit, and these are peacock and rice. Peacock occurs in Hebrew in the from of tukim. In Persia, it occurs as tavis; in Greek as tofos. All of them seem derivable from the original togai which is unmistakably Tamil, at the worst Tamil-Malayalam. Rice occurs in Aramaic in the form aruz; Greek, oruza Latin oryza, and Spanish arros, all apparently from the Tamil arisi. The last two words must be held decisive, and must have reference to their origin in the Tamil country. This is confirmed by the discovery of a beam of teak in the excavations at Ur in Chaldea ascribed to the king Ur-Bagas, the first ruler of united Babylonia circa B.C. 3000 according to Sayce and Hewit. A similar teak beam was found by Hassan in the same locality in a building which was known to have been constructed by Nabonidus to the Moon-God in the middle of the sixth century B.C. Another beam of Indian cedar was found in the palace of Nebuchadnezzar at Birs-Nimrud. It is impossible that the teak wood could have gone to these places from anywhere other than the Malabar coast or from Burma. Rice and peacock were known in Athens in their names of Indian derivation in 430 B.C. Thus for about 500 years from the 5th century B.C. backwards, direct communication with India seems provable. That this was across the sea directly from India, and not overland through Persia may be established by the word for muslin being sinthon without the change of "S" into "H" as the Persians invari-ably change the "S" of Sanskrit into "H." This assumption of direct communication receives some confirmation from the fact that the South Indians, particularly of the classical Tamil literature, knew the western people by the designation Yavana, not by the northern designation of

Yona, even after the days of Asoka, showing thereby that communication between the Yavana region and South India belonged to an age when the Greek digamma had not dropped out of the word. The Baveru-Jataka, the Supparaka-Jataka, and the Mohosada-Jataka, all of them would be confirmatory equally, though these might well refer to communication between northern India and Babylon. The explicit statement of Berosus, that the Babylonian market exhibited crowds of all nationalities, may be held to include some Indian nationalities as well. That it was so will acquire greater probability from the following extract from Mr. Hornell's work already quoted :- "This sea-trade with Babylon, carried on in Indian vessels, cannot be less ancient than the sixth century B. C. and is probably a good deal older. Its centinuance in Achaemenid times is rendered probable by the discovery of Indian articles in the ruins of Susa, these consisting of libation cups, bangles and ornaments made from the shell of the conch fished even yet in quantities in the Kathiawar coast.1 The age of these ruins brings Indian trade with this region down into the fifth century, but some of the ornaments, one bangle especially, obtained from a lower stratum belong to a much older date, as Susa was a capital of the

1 Hornell, J. : Marine Zoology of Okhamandal, Pt. II.

Elamites long before the Acbaemenid occupation of the site. I have also identified chank ornaments from Tello (the site of ancient Lagash) in the Louvre Museum, Paris.1