On the Erythraean Sea

I accidentally skipped ahead a few centuries in my chronological Greek reading challenge, which meant I missed Alexander the Great and jumped straight to the Ptolemies ruling in Egypt. But by the time I realised I was reading the book too soon, I was much too engaged to put it down.

Sadly only a small amount of Agatharchides' (a name that breaks my brain every time I try to read or pronounce it) total output has survived, and even this one only contains parts of 2 out of 5 books. It's about an oft-ignored area, the Red Sea, parts of East Africa, Arabia and India as it was known in the Ptolemaic era. At the time it was the focus of exploration as a trade route to India as well as a source of war elephants, which were captured in Africa. show more

Agatharchides does his best to describe the peoples, places, and animals that can be found in these areas, although he is hampered by Greek-centric ideas of anthropology which causes his descriptions of fellow humans to stray into dehumanising territory. It also appears at one point that he included chimpanzees as a tribe of humans, though remarkably his observations seem to marry up with modern findings on chimpanzee behaviour.

I think for me the main draw is the obscurity of the exploration, the tales of difficulty in even reaching these regions, the dangers awaiting there, the strange creatures and peoples, the brave hunters who ventured into unknown lands to bring back great beasts for the pharoahs. It's also fascinating to see this information mapped onto modern knowledge of people and places - what they got right, what they got wrong, how they interpreted such things with the understanding they had. Unfortunately a lot of the locations mentioned aren't even very well explored today. Wikipedia and google maps have sparse information and/or few photos. It would have been neat, for example, to be able to follow along on Google Maps to get a better idea of what Agatharchides was trying to describe. show less