The only reason for believing that Hindostan and Ceylon were known to the Phoenicians is a short passage in the Biblical History of Solomon, in which we are told that after a three years' absence, Hiram's Tyrian sailors returned from Tarshish, bringing what our translators call ivory, apes, and peacocks. The words in the Hebrew original are said by Tennant to be all but identical with those in use in Ceylon at the present date. For a full account of the probable identity of the Tarshish in the passage alluded to and Galle, see Emerson Tennant's _History of Ceylon_. Yet, if we grant that the Tyrian shipmen traded to India, we are bound to confess that the knowledge which they acquired died with them; nor did their successors, the Greeks, know anything distinctly about Hindostan prior to the time of Alexander the Great. In the Biblical story of Esther we are told, i. 1, viii. 9, that a Persian king reigned from India to Ethiopia, the Hebrew word for the former being _Hodoo_, supposed to be a form of _handoo_, or _hindoo_; Pehlevi, _hendo_; Zend, _heando_; Sanscrit, _Sindhu_ (Fuerst, s.v.), equivalent to the Greek _Indikee_, or the country of the Indus. We find reason to believe that the India of Artaxerxes was a portion of Hindostan--first, because the Persian monarch had Indian soldiers in his army, and elephants, when he fought with Alexander; and secondly, because the peacock, a bird of Ceylon, was known to the Greeks, in the time of Aristophanes, as "the Persian bird." That the Persians traded with Northern India we infer, from the account which Appian gives us of the advance eastward of Alexander, after his victory at Arbela. But the whole story of the Grecian warrior's advance into the Punjaub and down the Indus, contains, in itself, tolerably clear proof that Hindostan was very little known to the Greeks. Of a subsequent invasion of India by Alexander's successor, Seleucus Nicator; of the mission of Megasthenes to Sandracottus, the grandfather of Asoka, the Buddhist Constantine; of the navigation of the Grecian ship down the Indus, and the subsequent traffic by land and sea between the Greeks and the Hindoos, we need not say more than that Augustus, b.c. 30, regulated the trade to Hindostan, _via_ Alexandria, and that, at the time of Pliny the elder, about A.D. _60_, voyages were being made to India every year, companies of archers being carried on board the vessels to protect them from pirates. We learn also that a twelvemonth did not elapse without a drain upon the Roman Empire of about one million and a-half sterling for India, in exchange for Hindoo wares (book vi., ch. 26).