A History of South India from Prehistoric Times to the Fall of Vijayanagar c6.49

c6.49

Among classical writers, the first direct notice of South India occurs in Megasthenes who gives a quaint account of the Pāndyan kingdom ruled over by Pandaia, a daughter of Herakles to ‘whom he assigned that portion of India which lies southward and extends to the sea’. The kingdom was organized into 365 villages; one village had to bring the royal tribute to the treasury every day and, if necessary, assist the queen in collecting it from defaulters. Trade between South India and Egypt was carried on in the Hellenistic period and continued more actively under the Roman empire. Strabo records the increase in the knowledge of India among the Romans of his day and the success of the expedition under Gallus, sent by Augustus (25 B.C.) to secure for the empire the command of Aden and the Red Sea route to India which was becoming increasingly popular among the merchants of the empire. Pliny the Elder (c. A.D. 75), the anonymous author of the *Periplus of the Erythraean Sea*, and Ptolemy (A.D. 130) represent the further stages in that increasing acquaintance of the Romans with the countries of the east of which we get the first hints in Strabo. While Pliny and Ptolemy derived their information from other writers, the author of the *Periplus* certainly visited many of the ports of western India and had a direct knowledge of the conditions of trade that prevailed there. However, he seems to have had little knowledge of the east coast. Ptolemy's geography, on the other hand, takes account of the east coast of India and of much of Farther India as well. The most notable name after Ptolemy is that of the crotchety Byzantine monk Cosmas (c. A.D. 550) called Indikopleustes (‘the man who sailed to India’). A merchant in his early life, he visited many places on the Persian Gulf, on the west coast of India and as far east as Ceylon. His *Christian Topography* has been characterized, not very unjustly, as ‘a continent of mud’ from which we may extract, however, ‘a few geographical fossils of considerable interest’.