The western dichotomy of West and East is no phenomenon of modern times, but rather goes back to the ancient Greeks and Romans. Even though there was no strict distinction between East and West in classical antiquity, the eighteenth-century concepts of East versus West relied on ancient thoughts and sources. While the beginning of a European self-consciousness goes back at least to the Greco-Persian encounters in the fifth century BCE, this chapter deals with the Roman visual representation of India. In Roman depictions, India is often used to illustrate the superiority of western—that is, Roman—civilization above all others. Mercantile contacts, historical knowledge and imported goods interacted to construct the Roman image of Indians and Ethiopians. To depict images of unfamiliarity, luxury and exoticness, artists used the same traditional semiotic conventions—generalized—for both littoral peoples of the Indian Ocean. Based on these matching semiotic characteristics for stereotyped Indians and Ethiopians in Roman depictions, this contribution is going to deduce Roman self-location in an entangled ancient world and ways of European provincializing in antiquity.