Читать книгу A Companion to the Hellenistic and Roman Near East онлайн

96 страница из 236

In the second century BCE the Greeks learned about the monsoon winds, what they called the etesian (annual) winds, which permitted long-distance open-sea travel to India at certain times of year. Strabo (2.3.4) seems to report an early discovery of the monsoons in his account of the hapless Eudoxus of Cyzicus who made two voyages across the Indian Ocean for Ptolemy Physcon and Cleopatra III in c. 117–116 BCE, while the author of the Periplus Maris Erythraei (dated to the mid-first century CE based on a reference to Malichus II of Nabataea, r. 40–70 CE) credits a fellow sea-captain named Hippalos. It is possible that both attributions are correct and that other Hellenistic sea-farers independently noticed the phenomenon, but Strabo obtained his reference for the winds from a text, in this case Posidonius’s history of Eudoxus’s misadventures.⁵ Using the monsoons correctly, later travelers were able to venture much farther beyond the Persian Gulf and Arabia, although the Arabian frankincense trade ensured that Near Eastern ports remained important. The most complete Periplus text is the Periplus Maris Erythraei, preserved in a tenth-century codex (Codex Palatinus Graecus 398, fol. 40v–54v), written by an Egyptian Greek merchant from his personal experiences sailing out of the Red Sea at least as far as Rhapta (near Dar es-Salaam, Tanzania) and Cape Comorin, India.⁶ He meticulously reports the distances between stops, types of anchorage available at each stop, the local political situations, and what commodities can be acquired and offloaded. Much later, Marcianus of Heraclea (1.15–19) converted Ptolemy’s world map into a Periplus of the Outer Sea, supplying similar accounts of the Arabian and Persian Gulfs as the earlier Periploi authors, but within a global scheme (Schoff 1927: 6).