What remains of these two once splendid cities is a sleepy provincial town,

What remains of these two once splendid cities is a sleepy provincial town, Ujjain, and a village called Tamluk, which is now far from the river and the bay that once carried its merchantmen. It seems as though the urban culture quietly went to sleep for a thousand years. After the Huns had broken up the Indian empire and the lucrative western trade had declined with the fall of the Roman empire, the yawns of village India finally drowned out the cries of the city barkers. Hardly a memory remains, only the wistful nostalgia of epigonic literature. One has to travel to Southeast Asia to see the culture which the merchants sparked, for in all of India not a picture of the ships that carried it abroad survives. If Ujjayini and Tämralipti have dwindled to insignificance, Madura in the south still stands where it stood in the days when it prospered on the spice trade and transport business that depleted the Roman empire of much gold and more silver. On the threshold of Central Asia far to the north, Talgaéilä, the Taxila of the ancients, lies in ruins on the bank of Horace's fabled Hydaspes.