Discovery Of India By Greeks

SR No.: 269274
Original Sutra Author: N/A
Author: J W De Jong
Publisher: J W De Jong
Total Pages: 28
Language: English
Classification: Article
File Size: 2 MB

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J. W. DE JONG
Greek sources in their proper perspective because they give both useful and useless information. Of the later authors, a special place must be given to two geographical works which give much interesting information on India. The first is the Periplus maris erythraei 'The Circumnavigation of the Erythrean Sea' which was probably written in the middle of the first century A.D. by an Egyptian Greek. The Erythrean Sea is the name given by the Greeks and Romans to the Indian Ocean including the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf. The Periplus gives an account of the trade of the settlements on the coast of this ocean and many interesting details of the voyage, partly along the coast and partly across the sea 36. The second work is the Geography (Γεωγραφική υφήγησις) of the famous astronomer and geographer Claudius Ptolemaeus, an Alexandrian Greek who lived in the second century A.D. His work describes in eight books the world as it was known at that time. The seventh book is devoted to India 37. His work has remained the standard geographical source until the 16th century38.
Megasthenes was sent as envoy to king Candragupta, the founder of the Mauryan empire, and Deimachos to his son Bindusāra. The most famous king of the Mauryan dynasty is Asoka, the son of Bindusāra, who reigned in the middle of the third century over a kingdom which extended over almost the entire Indian subcontinent. History does not record any Greek envoy to Aśoka. However, Aśoka must have been in contact with the Greeks as we know from his own edicts. Asoka's edicts on rocks and pillars are the oldest epigraphical monuments of India. In one of these edicts Asoka proclaims to have conquered through Dharma ‘as far away as at the distance of six hundred Yojanas, where the Yavana king named Antiyoka is ruling and where, beyond the king
36. IIeplious tñS 'EpuSpāç Odrásons ed. by Hjalmar Frisk, Göteborg, 1927.
37. La Géographie de Ptolemée. L'Inde (VII, 1-4), texte établi par Louis Renou, Paris, 1925; W.H. Stahl, Ptolemy's Geography, a Select Bibliography, Bull. of the New York Public Library, LV, 1951, pp. 419-432, 484-495, 554-564, 604-614; LVI, 1952, pp. 1841, 84-96.
38. André Berthelot, L'Asie ancienne centrale et sud-orientale d'après Ptolemée, Paris, 1930.