The Greeks in Bactria and India c10.s7.115

c10.s7.115

I have carefully avoided mentioning the much discussed and variously dated Hippalos, the traditional ‘discoverer’ of the south-west monsoon, for it matters nothing to me which stage he inaugurated or even whether he was not a man at all but either a sailors’ name like Davy Jones or a personification of the monsoon,³ as Greeks had personified other winds as Boreas or Zephyrus. And I have also not mentioned ‘direct’ voyages, because the first man who went right through from India to Egypt or *vice versa* could have done it as well coasting as in any other way. One Indian¹ and perhaps a second,² who cannot be dated, appeared in Egypt in the Ptolemaic period, but the first man actually recorded to have gone all the way by sea was the Indian captain who in the reign of Ptolemy Euergetes II was picked up half-dead in the Red Sea, having lost his crew (? killed by Arabs);³ and the first Greek recorded as having gone all the way was Eudoxus of Cyzicus, who sailed under that Indian’s guidance to Demetrias or Barygaza.⁴ Eudoxus got back to Egypt before Euergetes’ death in 116, but his subsequent activity was under that king’s successors; his voyage therefore was *c.* 120, and he presumably coasted. After him a few ships in the late Ptolemaic period went right through from Egypt to India,⁵ but the extreme rarity of Ptolemaic coins in India shows that to the end the Ptolemies really relied on their Arab middlemen.