highest
and its value would increase with the affluence of the ruling class,
according to the ratio existing between their wealth and that of the
average community; for the centralization of wealth establishes a
price for its imperishable forms which debars the masses from
ownership. So, probably, the Aryans from the north acquired the pearls
they found in the possession of the Dasyus. When the shepherd invaders
were settled in the territory they had conquered and became divided
into castes of Vaisyas, Kshattriya and Brahman, pearls gravitated to
the upper classes, to be garnered later by their princes as the
government assumed a tyrannical form; and so it is that the great
pearls of India found in ancient times are among the jewels of the
princes of India, or of the Shah of Persia and the Afghan Ameers, who
in turn looted some of the richest treasuries of India.
In
countries east of India one can only imagine the history of pearls for
there are no records of them. Year after year, for centuries and
cycles, in undiscovered deeps, the beds of the sea were strewn with
noble gems that
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