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The Hellenistic soldiers and colonists who ventured into the Near East under Alexander and his Successors entered a not entirely unfamiliar region. Many Greeks had journeyed into Persian territory often in the service of the satraps and kings, such as the Greek mercenaries employed by Cyrus the Younger between 401 and 399 BCE and Ctesias of Cnidus who served as physician in the court of Artaxerxes II Mnemon until 398/7 BCE and wrote histories of Assyria and Persia.² People returning from Near Eastern travels likely transmitted a good deal of geographical information by word of mouth, and this shaped people’s awareness of Persian territory. Hecataeus of Miletus (fl. 500 BCE) traveled in Asia and Egypt and wrote Periodos Gēs (Circuit of the Earth), alternatively titled Periēgēsis (Guidebook of the Earth), in which he combined information from his travels with the ideas promulgated by the Milesian philosophers.³ This was the first geographical prose text, soon followed by Herodotus’s Histories, which contains several criticisms of earlier methods and results (cf. Hdt. 4.36–42). We know of other early writers of Persian histories (typically entitled Persika), whose works are now fragmentary: Dionysius of Miletus (FGrH 687), Hellanicus of Lesbos (FGrH 687a), and Charon of Lampsacus (FGrH 687b) all wrote in the fifth century, while Heracleides of Cyme (FGrH 689), Deinon of Colophon (FGrH 690), and Ephorus of Cyme (FGrH 70) wrote in the fourth century. Thus at the outset of the Hellenistic period, Greeks, Macedonians, and others from the West arrived with a set of preconceptions about life in the East, including notions of Eastern geography and the disposition and significance of different territories within it.