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A navis lapidaria at Kizilburun, Turkey
The Roman emperor Augustus claimed to have found Rome a city of brick and left it a city of marble (Suet. Aug. 28). Indeed, the remains of more than a dozen stone cargoes in the shallow waters off Italy, France, and Spain attest to the Roman appetite for specialty stones – white marble from Greece and Asia Minor; yellow marble from Numidia; red and gray granite from Egypt. The vast majority of these cargoes, however, have not been treated as coherent archaeological sites; instead they are only superficially explored, their stones partly or wholly salvaged.

As a result, archaeologists know regrettably little about the construction and lading of ancient stone carriers, which must represent some of the most sophisticated technological achievements of the ancient world. It was precisely such ships that brought 16 enormous monolithic granite columns, each nearly 40 feet tall, from Alexandria to Rome for the façade of Hadrian's Pantheon. A century earlier, the emperor Caligula arranged for the transport to Rome of a massive 320-ton obelisk. The historian Pliny, upon viewing the ship that delivered the obelisk, described it as "the most amazing vessel that had ever been seen on the sea (NH 36.70)."
At Empire's Edge:
Exploring Rome's Egyptian Frontier
by Robert B. Jackson
[at] Qusier al-Qadim, from the first and second centuries A.D... were inscribed with Tamil graffiti in the Brahmi script and likely came from Arikamedu in southern India (not far from the modern town of Pondicherry). These constitute the first Indian Tamil inscriptions ever found in Egypt, and their discovery, next to a small iron forge, raises the possibility that a small community of Indian merchants or metalworkers lived at Qusier al-Qadim... researchers found items typical of the east, for example, teak and cloth made from jute. [pp 82-83]
Rome's East India Company
[Field Notes]
A sturdy 100-foot-long Roman trading vessel bound for India foundered off the Red Sea port of Quseir, Egypt. The ship settled 200 feet below the surface, where it remained undisturbed until a group of British and American archaeologists discovered it in 1993. Douglas Haldane believes the ship was part of a fleet sent by the Roman emperor Augustus -- who seized control of Egypt after the naval battle of Actium in 31 B.C. -- to control trade in the Indian Ocean. He predicts that gold, silver and other precious metals used as currency will be found on board, as well as wine from the Campania region of southern Italy.
Arts of the Silk Roads
by John Major
Asia Society
A mirror from India with an ivory handle carved in the shape of a female fertility deity was buried under volcanic ash at Pompeii in 79 CE. Among the first images of Buddhist deities in human form were those carved in the province of Gandhara (present-day Pakistan) in the 2nd century CE. Unlike anthropomorphic Buddhist images carved farther south in India, these Gandharan figures, which were based on provincial Roman models, wear heavy, toga-like robes and have wavy hair. The figural tradition of Buddhist art spread through Central and East Asia and also to Southeast Asia, taking on local and regional characteristics.