Page:The Periplus of the Erythræan Sea.djvu/270

 260

suggestive of the great influence exercised from India over all Indo- China.

H. C. Clifford ( Further India, N. Y., 1904, pp. 6-7) gives an excellent account of the hazy, yet vaguely correct, ideas of the Romans in the 1st and 2d centuries concerning the Far East. “Of Chryse, the golden, Pliny has nothing to tell us, and the author of the Periplus tells us only that it was situated opposite to the Ganges. He speaks, however, of Thina, the land of silk, situated ‘where the seacoast ends externally,’ whence we may gather that Chryse was conceived by him as an island lying not only to the east of the Ganges, but also to the southward of the Chinese Empire. This indicates a distinct ad- vance in knowledge, for the isle of Chryse, albeit still enveloped in a golden haze, was to the author of the Periplus a real country, and no mere mythical fairyland. Rumors must have reached him concerning it, on which he believed he could rely; and this would tend to prove that the sea-route to China via the Straits of Malacca, even though it was not yet in general use, was no longer unknown to the mariners of the east. We know that less than a century later the sailor Alex- ander, from whom Marinus of Tyre derived the knowledge subse- quently utilized by Ptolemy, himself sailed to the Malay peninsula, and beyond, and it may safely be concluded that the feasibility of this southeastern passage had become known to the seafarers of China long before an adventurer from the west was enabled to test the fact of its existence through the means of an actual voyage.” And as illustrating the state of knowledge in the Roman world in the 1st cen- tury, Mr. Clifford aptly cites Josephus {Antiquities of the Jews, VIII, 2) who recounts the Ophir voyages of Solomon, venturing some curious identifications: “At Ezion-Geber, a bay of Egypt on the Erythraean Sea, the king constructed a number of ships. The port is now named Berenice( ! ), and is near the city of Elan, formerly deemed to be in the Hebrew jurisdiction. King Hiram greatly assisted King Solomon in preparing his navy, sending him mariners and pilots, who conducted Solomon' s officers to the land that of old was called Ophir, but now the A urea Chersonesus, which belongs to India, to fetch gold.”

It is uncertain what knowledge Pliny had of Further India. His account of Eastern Asia (VI, 20) professes to begin with the “Scy- thian Ocean, ” — that is, the Arctic — and after some names of doubtful origin he mentions “the Promontory of Chryse. . . and the nation of the Attacori on the gulf of that name, a people protected by their sunny hills from all noxious blasts. . . and in the interior the Caseri, a people of India, who look toward the Scythians, and eat human flesh. Here are also numerous wandering nomad tribes of India.”