Travellers, traders, priests and pilgrims travelled vast distances for knowledge, opportunity and spiritual fulfilment, or to escape persecution. They carried with them goods, money, values, skills, ideas, inventions, and even germs and diseases.
1. Spread of disease-carrying germs can also be traced as far back as the seventh century. By the thirteenth century it had become an unmistakable link.
2. Around 3000 BC Indus valley civilisation had trade links with present-day West Asia.
3. For more than millennia, cowries (the Hindi cowdi or seashells, used as a form of currency) from the Maldives found their way to China and East Africa.