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north of the mountains to Tashkend, Bokhara and Merv. This did not become important until later.

The general topography of these Turkestan routes is shown by a passage from the Han Annals quoted by Richthofen ( China, I, 460) from Stanislaus Julien ( Notices sur les pays et les peuples etrangers, tirces des geographes et des historiens chinois, in Journal Asiatique, Ser. IV, Vol. VIII, 1846, pp. 228-252), as follows:

““Hsi-yii is bounded on the east by the barriers of Viimen-swan and Yang-kwan, and on the west by the Tsung-/ing (Pamirs). But the 7sung-/ing is the trunk from which the great mountain-ranges branch out, which enclose the district on the north and the south, and these same ranges bound the districts of Nan-/u and Péi-/u on the south and north.” And again: “‘The land along the Nan-shan (Kuen-lun) is called Nan-tau, and that along the Pé-shan (Tian-shan) is called Péi-tau. Both these provinces lie to the south of Pé-shan. Hsi-yii extends 6000 /; from east to west, and 1000 / from south to north. ”

That is, Tibet and Sungaria had no part in the transcontinental silk-trade in Roman times.

This Central Asian trade-route was first comprehensively de- scribed by Marinus of Tyre, some two generations later than the Periplus. His account is preserved by Ptolemy, and is said to be based on the notes of a Macedonian silk-merchant named Maés, whose Roman name was Titianus; who did not perform the whole journey, but repeats what he learned of Turkestan from his ‘‘agents’’ or trading associates whom he met at the Pamirs. The route, he says, began at the Bay of Issus in Cilicia, crossed Mesopotamia, As- syria and Media, to Ecbatana and the Caspian Pass; through Parthia and Hyrcania, to Antiochia Margiana (Merv); thence through Aria into Bactria. Thence the route passed through the mountainous country of the Comédi, and through the territory of the Sace to the “Stone Tower,’’ the station of those merchants who trade with the Seres ( Tashkurghan, in Sarikol, on the upper Yarkand River in the Chinese Pamirs; a fortified town built on a great rocky crag that rises from the Taghdumbash valley, at the convergence of routes from the Oxus, the Indus and the Yarkand. See Stein, of. cit., 67-8.) Thence to the Casii (Kashgar) and through the country of the Tha- guri, until after a seven-months’ journey from the ‘‘Stone ‘Tower’’ the merchants arrived at ‘“Sera Metropolis,’ the ‘“City called Thine’’ of the Periplus.

By too literal an application of this “‘seven-months’ journey’ both Marinus and Ptolemy were led into grave error as to the longi-