The Periplus also describes the route from China to India, where silk was shipped by land via Bactria to Barygaza and then via the Ganges River to Limyrike. This passage provides evidence of connections between China and Rome during the first century of the Common Era. The trade links were significant, with many travelers focusing on trade, particularly silk, which formed an important part of the economies of several societies.

If, reading Herodotus, we have the sentiment of a turning point, do we not have, reading our times, the certainty of an even more considerable change, such that the events offering themselves to us would no longer be linked in a way according to what we are used to calling history, but in a way still unknown? . . . Today we meet an event bearing an elementary trait, that of impersonal powers, represented by the intervention of mass phenomena, by the supremacy of mechanical play, and thirdly by the seizure of the constitutive forces of matter. These three factors are named in a single word: modern technics, since technics comprises at once collective organization on a planetary scale for the calculated establishment of plans, mechanization and automation, and finally atomic energy, a key word. What hitherto only stars could accomplish, mankind does. Mankind has become astral. This astral era that has begun no longer belongs to the measures of history. (Blanchot 1969, 396) To the measures of history belonged the divide separating the human world from the stars, and thereby constituting that world. Humanity (the human world) was history (the world of Herodotus was the human world). Humanity (the human world) has become a star (has become the world of the human having become a star). This is an astral figure of power, which speaks to a change in epoch, to modern technics. But the power of whom or of what? Of humanity, or of the “impersonal forces” of modern technics itself?

Croesus

Mazares

For my part, I shall not say that this or that story is true, but I shall identify the one who I myself know did the Greeks unjust deeds, and thus proceed with my history, and speak of small and great cities of men alike.

Herodotus

For my part, I shall not say that this or that story is true, but I shall identify the one who I myself know did the Greeks unjust deeds, and thus proceed with my history, and speak of small and great cities of men alike.

After this time, the destruction by Cyrus son of Cambyses of the sovereignty of Astyages son of Cyaxares, and the growth of the power of the Persians, distracted Croesus from his mourning;

Eleon

Many stories are told of Cyrus' death; this, that I have told, is the most credible.