460 elizabeth ann pollard
Among the earliest Mediterranean-based accounts of India are fragments (c. 300
bce) by Megasthenes, Hellenistic ambassador to Indian ruler Chandragupta Maurya,
which were incorporated into the work of later writers such as Diodorus Siculus,
Strabo, Pliny the Elder, and Arrian, and which reveal an early Greek interest in inter-
actions between the Mediterranean and the Indus region. Similarly, the records of
Nearchus, Alexander’s naval officer who sailed his fleet from the Indus, through the
Persian Gulf, and up the Euphrates, were preserved in later works such as Arrian’s
Indica (second century ce). The anonymous Periplus of the Erythraean Sea describes
first-century ce exchange between the Red and Arabian Seas, highlighting the various
ports along the way and the goods that might be off-loaded or picked up by mer-
chants traversing some portion of the route. Pliny the Elder’s Natural History (late
first century ce) describes plants, animals, and minerals available in the Mediterranean
via Indian Ocean exchange. Arrian’s Anabasis of Alexander and Indica, which drew
on records from Alexander’s contemporaries, including Ptolemy I, Aristobulus,
Callisthenes and the already-mentioned Nearchus, recount Alexander’s late fourth-
century bce military expansion to the region of modern Pakistan.
Early non-canonical Christian texts, as well as Church Fathers, describe the Apostle
Thomas’ mid first-century ce missionary travel from Palestine to India (both the
Malabar and southeast coast), where he reputedly won many converts, male and
female, elite and poor (Brown, 1982 [1956]: 43–63). In the early third-century ce,
Philostratus described the travels (c. 100 ce) of the wonder-worker Apollonius
of Tyana, although Christopher Jones claims that Apollonius’s travels beyond
Mesopotamia, that is, to India, contain too many geographical errors to reflect
anything other than a largely literary invention based on classical authors’ imagination
(Jones, 2001: 186). Later travelers who offer descriptions of their journeys along the
routes linking the Mediterranean and Indian Ocean worlds include Cosmas
Indicopleustes (sixth century ce), who composed his Christian Topography based on
travels to Christian communities in the Red Sea and Indian Ocean all the way to Sri
Lanka, and Ibn Battuta, the fourteenth-century Islamic scholar whose journeys,
which took place over the course of nearly 30 years, took him from the Mediterranean
world (North Africa) to much of the Indian Ocean, from the coast of southern Africa
to India and China.
Exchange between the Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean finds representation
in many of the earliest geographies of the first millennium bce and on many of the
attempts at cartography of the first millennium ce and later. For Greek geographers,
including Hecataeus of Miletus (c. 500 bce), Eratosthenes of Cyrene (late third
century bce), and Poseidonius of Apamea (c. 150 bce), the Mediterranean held a
prominent and central location; but improved understandings of latitude and the
campaigns of Alexander in north-west India contributed to their increasingly complex
understandings of Mediterranean linkage with the Indian Ocean, or at least the
Erythraean/Red Sea and Persian Gulf. Roman geographers, particularly Strabo (late
first century bce) and Ptolemy (c. 150 ce), offered even more accurate understandings
of the Indian Ocean. On Ptolemy’s map, cartographically preserved only on maps
drawn about 1000 years later based on his writings, the Indian Ocean is significantly
larger than the Mediterranean, holds a more central location, and becomes much
more than the Arabian Sea, extending farther down the coast of east Africa than on
previous maps. The Peutinger Table, known from a copy (c. 1500 ce) of an arguably