Passing on to the time when the transfer of the seat of empire was made from Rome to Constantinople, and when the Persians vied with the merchants of Egypt and the ship-owners of Arabia to divert the course of the Oriental trade from the Red Sea and Alexandria to the Euphrates and the Persian Gulf, Ceylon continued to be the great rendezvous alike for the traders of the West and the East.[276] Nor has it lost in any way its ancient fame as a place of call. At the harbour of Galle the steamships from Europe, by way of the Red Sea, destined for Calcutta and the ports of China, now exchange their passengers and specie with the lines of steamships which trade to the ports of Australia; while traders from Bombay to Bengal, and other ports of the East, still make it the centre to which, and from which, their respective routes converge or diverge. Again, India within itself has, from the earliest period of authentic history, carried on a large internal commerce both by land and sea. Rice and other necessaries of life must have been transported from the countries along the Ganges, where they grow abundantly, to the sandy shores of the peninsula; and cotton, though manufactured with the same activity on the coasts as in the interior, differed so much in each district, in its texture and mode of preparation, that a large interchange of its various kinds must naturally have occurred. Again, the mode of life, especially in such cities as Ayodhya (Oude) implies the existence of a multitude of wants, natural and artificial, which could only be supplied by a corresponding system of active commerce between the different parts of India. It is clear, from Ptolemy, that along the shores of the Indian peninsula there were a number of ports known to the traders of his time by the name of “Emporia,” or places of rendezvous; but, as Dr. Robertson has pointed out, we have no means now of determining whether these, or most of these, were simply ports for native vessels, or for the larger ships that conveyed the merchandise of Alexandria and of the West. It seems, however, probable from his strange ignorance of the real size of Ceylon (in which ignorance he nearly equals Arrian), that even then direct communication with that island was not very common; add to which, that, beyond the Golden Chersonesus, Ptolemy has noticed but one emporium, a fact clearly showing that few, if any, reports had reached him of the trade beyond the present site of Singapore. [Sidenote: Manufactures of India.] But, however little we may know of the outline of the coasts of India, or of its harbours to the eastward of Cape Comorin, previous to the Christian era, there can be no doubt of the comparatively high state of civilization then prevalent among the Hindus generally, and of their skill in manufactures.