500 BCE–300 CE: (The Expansion of Levantine Trade Connections Across the Red Sea and Indian Ocean — Levantine Trade Connections Extending Across the Red Sea …

500 BCE–300 CE: (The Expansion of Levantine Trade Connections Across the Red Sea and Indian Ocean — Levantine Trade Connections Extending Across the Red Sea to the Horn of Africa and in the Second Half of the First Millennium BCE Around the Indian Ocean Shores to India, Indian Merchants Then Pushing the Network Still Farther to Southeastern Asia and Island South Asia, Late in the First Millennium BCE Overland Routes Spreading These Connections Across Central Asia to East Asia, Expanding Sea Trade Extending Far South Along the Eastern African Coast While Western Sea Links Reached the Tin of Cornwall and the Amber of the Baltic): Levantine trade connections extended across the Red Sea to the Horn of Africa and, in the second half of the first millennium BCE, around the Indian Ocean shores to India. Indian merchants then pushed the network still farther, to southeastern Asia and Island South Asia. Late in the first millennium BCE, overland routes carried these connections across Central Asia to East Asia. In the same period, expanding sea trade began to stretch far south along the eastern African coast, while far to the west other sea links led around the western side of Europe to the tin of Cornwall and the amber of the Baltic. The geography of ancient commerce was not a network radiating outward from a single center. It was a web, with multiple nodes, multiple arteries, and Africa embedded in its structure at every point. The Horn of Africa was not a peripheral destination for Levantine traders; it was a gateway — the hinge point connecting the Red Sea corridor to the Indian Ocean world. When Indian merchants extended the network to southeastern Asia, they were building on a chain of connections whose westernmost anchor was African. And the eastern African coast, receiving the expanding sea trade of the late first millennium BCE, was not passively absorbing commerce from elsewhere. It was participating in a global commercial system whose goods — ivory, gold, tortoiseshell, frankincense — were African in origin and African in production. The tin of Cornwall and the amber of the Baltic were the outermost ripples of a commercial wave whose center of gravity lay as much in the Red Sea and the Indian Ocean as in the Levant.