re Roman Trade with India:
Tamil Trade
The Roman (-era) trade vessels are referred to as the ships of the Vamanas (westerners) in old Tamil poetry; also, the Romans recruited and moved at least one workforce from India to a factory town on the Red Sea, probably to save costs and shipping miles (and/or avoid piracy or other problems).
The great scholar Lionel Casson has written that larger Roman ships displaced about 100 tons, but that's simply impossibly low, because those obelisks one can see in modern Rome were moved there by the Roman emperors from Egypt, and many of them far exceed 100 tons. Caligula's pleasure barge (destroyed in WWII bombing, alas) displaced about 300 tons, and the largest of the obelisks in Rome possibly exceeds that weight.. Caligula had columns quarried in Egypt for his temple (which was possibly finished during his reign, otherwise shortly thereafter, and since that time most of it has been dismantled), and each of them ran about 200 tons.
Just to satisfy the needs of the "games", the Romans imported Indian elephants (which are somewhat smaller than African elephants), a large African bear (which was apparently hunted to extinction by these efforts), and loads of other things. The Roman aristocracy loved exotic critters and unique foreign goods.
Those About To Die
Chapter XII
by Daniel P. Mannix
There were also man-sized apes called tityrus with round faces, reddish color and whiskers. Pictures of them appear on vases and they were apparently orangutans, imported from Indonesia. As far as I know, the Romans never exhibited gorillas although these biggest of all apes were known to the Phoenicians, who gave them their present name which means "hairy savage."
The surviving ancient text,
Periplus of Hanno, describes a voyage down the western coast of Africa by Carthaginians (who were Phoenician in origin, language, and ethnicity); it describes Mount Cameroun in eruption, and the gorilla; a couple of gorilla skins were tacked up on the wall of the Carthaginian temple where a Greek traveler encountered the text and preserved a Greek translation. Anyway, when the gorilla was rediscovered by non-Africans in the 19th century, the
Periplus account of the beast was remembered, and that's how it got its name. :')