Strabo, the Scribe and Me

Finding the world’s oldest map of India (probably)

Hello again!

Need some coffee and a little historical pick-me-up?

As usual, it’s bring-your-own coffee but hopefully this little beauty will brighten up your day as much as it did mine when I found it.

A map of India in the margin of summaries from Strabo’s Geography, written in the first century BCE/CE. The manuscript was created in ninth-century Constantinople. In the middle of the rhombus is the Greek word ‘Indiki' (= India). Above it are the words for ‘north’ and ‘Caucasus’. To the left is the abbreviation of ‘west’ and ‘River Indus’. Along the bottom edge and the righthand side, the two words closest to the rhombus lines read together ‘Erythreian Sea’, or ‘the Western Indian Ocean’. At the bottom of this image is the word ‘south’ and, nearly falling off the edge of the page, is the Greek for ‘east’. (Universitätsbibliothek Heidelberg CPGraec 398, f. 141v.)

Before I explain why it made me so happy, a massive thank you, a heartfelt apology and a hopeful declaration.

A massive thank you: to all of my subscribers, new and old, paid and free. It means the world to me that you are interested in things historical and in finding out some of them from me!

A heartfelt apology: the university teaching year has its own rhythm and September and October are always busy but for reasons I don’t need to bother you with, this year has been absolutely bonkers. I’m sorry for the silence, but I think I have a cunning plan…

A hopeful declaration: at least until January, I am not going to be able to post regularly with anything that needs lots of images or references. That doesn’t mean I’m not thinking about the past, so what I’m going to try is this: each week I’ll just check in and talk to you about what I’ve been thinking about. If you have been, too, let me know in comments or mail me.

Now, back to the world’s oldest map of India…

This is a sketch map drawn in the margin of a summary of a world geography written by a Greek-speaking Roman man called Strabo in the first century BCE/CE. The scribe, who was writing out this summary in the ninth century CE, was clearly trying to make sense of what Strabo says about India: that it is shaped like a rhombus with the rivers Indus in the west, the Caucasus mountains to the north and the Erythreian Sea (as the Western Indian Ocean was called in both Greek and Latin) to its south and east.

I love the glimpse it gives of a person thinking, probably more than a thousand years ago, trying to get to grips with how the world fits together. Whether it is the oldest or not, this map of India is immensely special as a document of human curiosity and knowledge building.

There are two reasons, though, why I’m fairly confident of the claim that it is the oldest map of India.

First, not that many maps survive from before the tenth century. I haven’t seen them all, by any means, but I’ve got a pretty good sense of their general range, especially from Europe, North Africa and West Asia. There are some contenders for preserving older ways of representing India, but they exist as copies of older material, drawn after the tenth century. I’m only claiming this as the oldest surviving map.

This is a modern, re-coloured copy of one of those later copies of earlier maps. The Peutinger Map is a bizarre artefact: a six-metre-long, thirty-centimetre-deep map of much of the world, focussed on the Roman Empire, but extending out to India. The Indian port site of Muziris is shown here. There is plenty of debate about the date of the original prototype(s) for this map. There are clues in favour of the first or second centuries CE, the fourth, fifth or even the eighth or ninth, but whichever argument you prefer, there is no doubt that the copy we actually have was made in the thirteenth century.

Second, my claim is intentionally limited. If I said this was the oldest surviving map of South Asia, i.e., the area now substantially covered by the Republic of India, there is a very good chance that I would be wrong.

For example, travellers from East Asia, from at least the fourth century CE onwards, journeyed to South Asia to collect original Buddhist scriptures. As a result, East Asian mapmakers definitely knew of South Asia and its location. Very few maps from before the tenth century survive in East Asia either, but I know them less well than the material from further west, so I would be on thin ice.

This East Asian map, published in 1628, depicts part of the fifteenth-century voyage of the Ming Dynasty admiral and explorer, Zheng He. It shows the East coast of peninsular South Asia and Sri Lanka and uses traditional cartographic techniques from East Asia (used from Wikipedia).

Fortunately, fascinating as these maps are, they don’t really matter to my claim. Map makers in East Asia (or, indeed, South Asia) would never have referred to the subcontinent as ‘India’ in the ninth century, or for many centuries after that.

The term originated in Greek, before being taken up in Latin. In Arabic the label ‘al-Hind’ derived from Greek and Latin, but mostly seems to have referred to the region around the River Indus, rather than the whole subcontinent. It was European trade and colonisation, from the fifteenth century onwards, that exported the label ‘India’ to other languages.

‘India’ in the Greek and Latin imagination was a term for a region to the east, beyond high mountains and the sea. It was both fantastical and real. Its limits were unclear, especially to the south and east. Did it join up to the bottom of Africa and form a single continent, enclosing the Erythraean Sea or was it separate from Africa? How did it relate to the lands even further East?

This printed map from 1482, now in the British Library, was based on the work of another Roman geographer, Ptolemy, who wrote in the second century CE. The ribbon of land along the bottom edge of the map runs all the way from Africa (labelled Ethiopia Interior) and curls upwards to join up to Asia on the eastern edge of the Indian Ocean (Mare Indicum, labelled in yellow). Roman geographers were not certain about this land route between Southern Africa and Asia. It was one option they considered, while recognising that these areas were completely unknown to them.

On one hand, products such as pepper and gemstones came to the Mediterranean from ‘India’, proving its reality. On the other hand, it was a place of uncertainty and speculation, as foreign and distant from Strabo in Amasya or our scribe in Constantinople as the first or the ninth century are from us.

How did the world of the Mediterranean fit together with the world of the Western Indian Ocean?  How was it possible to know about places far away and the people who lived in them? What did people mean when they talked about ‘India’ and how did that match up to South Asia itself?

Here you can see the map in context, next to the summary of Strabo’s Geography. If you are interested, you can browse the whole manuscript, thanks to the Heidelberg University Library.

In a sketch map in the margins of a manuscript, we can see two people a thousand years apart, asking these questions. It still gives me a shivery feeling to think that Strabo and the scribe would understand, if I could explain to them, that a thousand years later still, I’m asking those same questions, too.