Monday, 23 January 2017

THE PERIPLUS OF THE ERYTHREAN SEA



THE PERIPLUS OF THE ERYTHREAN SEA: TRAVEL AND TRADE IN THE INDIAN OCEAN BY A MERCHANT OF THE FIRST CENTURY TRANSLATED FROM THE GREEK AND ANNOTATED BY WILFRED H. SCHOFF, 1912

هذا، كتاب نادر من ٣٤٢ صفحة تشير التقديرات انه قد كتب حوالي ٦٠ ميلادية سجل لبحار يوناني ، الذي قاد سفينته في مياه المحيط الكبير ويعود أول سجل مفصل للواردات والصادرات من أسواقها، والشروط والتحالف بين شعوبها. وقد كتب بالتفصيل عن ميناء عزولي ـ ادوليس

This, 342 pages book estimated to have been written about 60 A.D. plain and painstaking log of a Greek in Egypt, a Roman subject, who steered his vessel into the waters of the great ocean and brought back the first detailed record of the imports and exports of its markets, and of the conditions and alli- ances of its peoples. It is the only record for centuries that speaks with authority on this trade in its entirety, and the gloom which it briefly lighted was not lifted until the wider activities of Islam broke the time-honored custom of Arab secrecy in trading, and by grafting Arab discovery on Greek theory, laid the foundations of modern ge- ography. Not Strabo or Pliny or Ptolemy, however great the store of knowledge they gathered together, can equal in human interest this unknown merchant who wrote merely of the things he dealt in and the peoples he met—those peoples of whom our civilization still knows so little and to whom it owes so much; who brought to the restless West the surplus from the ordered and industrious East, and in so doing ruled the waters of the "Erythraean Sea."

"South Arabian inscriptions discovered by Glaser indicate the separation of Axum from its mother-land, the Habash or Ethiopia of South Arabia, not long before the date of the Periplus; and the fact that there is no mention of Axum in any work earlier than the Periplus, and not even in Pliny, suggests the same conclusion ; namely, that the Abyssinian Chronicles are unreliaable, at any rate in their earlier portions. 


You can download the book here:
https://ia600201.us.archive.org/18/items/cu31924030139236/cu31924030139236.pdf

OR here: http://www.mediafire.com/file/9xn64n968bysqg1/ER_Periplus+of+the+Erythrean+Sea.pdf

And a book review of the book:

http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/1032373213478603

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