The "Banyan" or Indian Presence at Massawa, the Dahlak Islands and the Horn of Africa. [From: Journal of Ethiopian Studies, Vol. 12, No. 1, January 1974]. …

p. 185-212. Binding a bit light-margined, paper browned, otherwise good and very clean. - From the text: THE EARLIER HISTORICAL SETTING. An Indian commercial presence in the area of the Gulf of Aden, including the Gulf of Aden and Red Sea coasts of Africa, can be discerned from very early times. Tradition, later recorded by the Arab historian Masudi, relates that in the fourth century B. C. the Greek philosopher Aristotle wrote to Alexander the Great at the time of the latter’s expedition to the East, giving him information on the island, and proposing the establishment there of a colony of Greeks. Alexander, it is said, accordingly despatched a certain number of Greeks, as a result of which “they subdued the Indians who were established there, took possession of Sokotra and removed a colossal idol to which the Indians paid homage.” Support for Masudi’s story of this early Indian presence on the island is afforded by Diodorus of Sicily who stated in the first century B. C. that the island of Panchaea, generally identified as Sokotra, had a foreign population of “Oceanites and Indians and Scythians and Cretans, ” and that the islands called fortunate, another apparent reference to Sokotra, were “frequented by merchants who come there from all parts, and principally from Potana, the town which Alexander had built on the bank of the Indus river.” Such references are further confirmed in the Periplus of the Erythraean Sea, a work of the first century or so of the Christian era, which reports that the island’s population included “a mixture of Arabs, Indians and Greeks who have emigrated to carry on trade there.”