Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: June 17, 2025
The Periplus Hannonis remains, a brief and obscure record of this expedition, and a subject of great comment and controversy. By some it has been pronounced a fictitious work, fabricated among the Greeks, but its authenticity has been ably vindicated.
His situation and opportunities as governor, enabled him to derive the most accurate and particular information respecting the Euxine Sea, which he addressed in a letter to Adrian; this Periplus, as it is called, "contains whatever the governor of Pontus had seen, from Trebizond to Dioscurias; whatever he had heard from Dioscurias to the Danube and whatever he knew from the Danube to Trebizond."
The Greek Periplus, composed about 418, sets down the Samnites proper with their "five tongues" as reaching from the one sea to the other; and specifies the Campanians as adjoining them on the Tyrrhene sea to the north, and the Lucanians to the south, amongst whom in this instance, as often, the Bruttii are included, and who already had the whole coast apportioned among them from Paestum on the Tyrrhene, to Thurii on the Ionic sea.
From Patala, the Egyptian merchants brought spices, gems of different kinds, particularly sapphires, silk stuffs, silk thread, cotton cloths, and pepper. As Patala is not mentioned in the Periplus, it is probable it was abandoned for Baragaza, a far more considerable mart on the same coast, and most probably Baroche on the Nerbuddah.
It is not, however, meant to be denied that a few vessels, in the time of Ptolemies, reached some part of India from the Red Sea, by coasting all the way. The author of the Periplus of the Red Sea, informs us that, before the discovery of the monsoon, by Hippalus, small vessels had made a coasting voyage from Cana, in Arabia, to the Indies.
The exports of the island of Trapobane, or Ceylon, are particularized as consisting chiefly of pearls, gems, tortoise-shells, and muslins: cinnamon is not named; an almost decisive proof, if other proof were wanting, that the author of the Periplus had never visited this island.
Myos Hormos is described as the first port of Egypt on the Red Sea; as it lies in twenty-seven degrees north latitude, and Rhapta, the boundary of the Periplus to the south, in nearly ten degrees south latitude, the distance between them will be about 2,500 miles.
In addition to pepper from Mali on the coast of Malabar, and the articles already enumerated from China, &c., copper, a wood resembling ebony, and a variety of stuffs, were imported from Calliena, a port shut to the Egyptian Greeks at the time of the Periplus; and from Sindu they imported musk, castoreum, and spikenard.
The countries beyond the Ganges, the Golden Chersonese, and the countries towards China, are very obscurely noticed in the Periplus, though the information he gives respecting the trade carried on in these parts is much more minute and accurate.
Rome annihilated it. Then occurred that which has no parallel in history an entire civilization perished at one blow banished, like a falling star. The Periplus of Hanno, a few coins, a score of lines in Plautus, and, lo, all that remains of the Carthaginian world!
Word Of The Day
Others Looking