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The same method of measuring journeys by stops along a route was employed for sea travel recorded in the Periploi texts for the Phoenician and Arabian coasts. A Periplus was literally a “sailing around,” and was used as a title for several Greco-Roman texts giving the sailing distances around the Mediterranean sea, the Black Sea, and Indian Ocean. Sometimes the term paraplus, or “a sailing alongside,” is employed instead. Like Stathmoi texts, Periploi used a combination of distance units (based on variable sailing times as well as different measurement units, see Arnaud 1993: 231ff) and noted information about regions, cities, harbors, flora, fauna, commodities, and political curiosities along the routes described. Also like the land geographies, the Periploi were written to satisfy a number of different aims, some for practical application by navigators, others for more theoretical exercises. The earliest known Periplus is credited to Scylax of Caryanda, commissioned by Darius I to explore the Indus river and Indian Ocean.⁴ In the mid-fourth century BCE, an author now known as Pseudo-Scylax wrote a Periplus of the Mediterranean, which includes a description of the Syrian and Phoenician coast and so is a useful source for what was known of this region at the outset of the Hellenistic period (Müller, GGM I, xxxiii–li, 15–96). This text is wrongly attributed to Scylax of Caryanda (see Shipley 2011: 4–6), and it is now thought that it was not based on first-hand exploration, but worked more as philosophical geography. Alexander’s fleet-commander Nearchus and court historian Onesicritus wrote up accounts of their 326–325 BCE voyage from the Indus eastward to the Persian Gulf, which served as sources for Strabo and Pliny (HN 6.96, 109, 124; FGrH 133; Pearson 1960: 112ff). In 324 BCE Alexander sent out several explorers along the Arabian coast, including Androsthenes of Thasos, who had also traveled with Nearchus and wrote Periplus of the Indian Coast, a source used by Eratosthenes and Athenaeus (Strabo 16.3.2; Athen. 3.93b; FGrH 711; Wirth, “Androsthenes 4,” Der Kleine Pauly, 350–351; Potts 1990: 5). Other reports from sea expeditions sent by Alexander and the Ptolemies informed the historian and geographer Agatharchides of Cnidus (c. 200–c. 145 BCE) who wrote On the Erythraean Sea, known from excerpts in Diodorus Siculus (3.12–48), Strabo (16.5.5–20), and Photius (Bibliotheca Codex 250) (FGrH 86, Müller, GGM I, liv–lxxiii, 111–194; Burstein 1989: 30–32, 176ff).