Early Mapping of Southeast Asia. Thomas Suarez

powers.

      Greece

      The earliest known cartographic allusion in Greek civilization, is the so-called 'shield of Achilles' from the Iliad of Homer (before 700 B.C.). This was a cosmological device not intended to show specific geographic features; neither Asia as an entity, or even the divisions of the continents, were reflected in this view. Achilles' shield depicted a 'River Ocean' surrounding the cosmological whole, which foreshadowed the idea of an ocean sea encircling the continenral land. The enrire earth, as well as the seas, sun, moon and stars, all formed part of the center of the disk. True geographic divisions were drawn in the sixth century B.C. by Anaximander, a theoretician who, like Homer, lived in what is now Turkey. The Greek world, itself blessed with a wealth of islands, probably envisioned islands dotting much of the ocean sea.

      The Name 'Asia'

      'Asia' is an ancient name. In the fifth century B.C., Herodotus was already speculating about its origin, noting that most Greeks believed the continent to have been named after the wife of Prometheus. Other accounrs describe Asia as the mother, by Iapetus, of Atlas, Prometheus, and Epimetheus. In any event, Asia was an Oceanid, a sea-nymph daughter of Oceanus and Tethys, similar to a Nereid.

      Greek Excursions to the East

      In about 513 B.C., the region of the Indus valley was taken by Darius of Persia. A Greek officer, Scylax of Caryanda, was sent into the newly-acquired territory, sailing much of the Indus River and helping to push the Persian − and ultimately the Greek − world view eastward into Asia. Scylax, however, reponed that the Indus flowed to the southeast, an error that, as we shall see, helped stunt even a hypothetical expansion of the continent farther east (although segments of the river do indeed flow to the southeast, the overall orientation is flowing to the southwest). Scylax also initiated the durable tradition of concocting strange quasi-human inhabitants for the Orient, such as the people whose feet are so large that they use them as umbrellas.

      The ancient world never reached any consensus regarding the extent of Asia. About 500 B.C., Hecataeus of Miletus espoused the notion of a disc-shaped earth with Asia and Europe of roughly equal size. Herodotus (ca. 484-425 B.C.), remembered fondly as the 'father of history', argued instead that Europe was larger than Asia, and questioned whether the inhabited world was entirely surrounded by water. "I cannot help laughing," Herodotus mused, "at the absurdity of all the map makers- there were plenty of them -who show Ocean running like a river round a perfectly circular earth, with Asia and Europe of the same size." He believed Europe robe as large as Asia and Africa combined. Among his early critics was Ctesias of Cnidus (ca. 400 B.C.); whereas Herodotus vastly understated the size of Asia, Ctesias exaggerated it.

      A proponent of experience-founded empirical geography, Herodotus reviewed a great number of writings and reports about Asia. In his opinion, ''Asia is inhabited as far as India; further east the country is uninhabited, and nobody knows what it is like." He dismisses reports furnished by his countryman Aristaeus⁹⁵ of the sundry people said to live far across Asia, flatly stating that "eastward of India lies [an uninhabitable] desert of sand; indeed, of all the inhabitants of Asia of whom we have any reliable information, the Indians are the most easterly."

      Alexander the Great

      Thus by the time Alexander the Great (356-323 B.C.) pushed eastward in his attempt to conquer the world, Greek civilization had diverse ideas regarding the eastern end of the world. Some of Alexander's soldiers probably believed that they would need only to subdue India before meeting the ocean sea which ringed the earth. But Alexander had been tutored by the great philosopher Aristotle (384-322 B.C.), who postulated a vast Asian continent, extending much farther to the east than Alexander's exploits. Aristotle believed that the circumference of the earth was 400,000 stades, which exceeded the correct figure by at least 50 percent, and that the expanse of sea separating the eastern shores of 'India' from Spain was not great. Thus he envisioned the Asian continent extending through, and well beyond, our Southeast Asia. Alexander never learned for himself what lay past the Indus, since his troops refused to advance past the river. "Those who accompanied Alexander the Great," noted Pliny in the first century A.D., "have written... that India comprises a third of the whole land surface of the world and that its populations are uncountable."

      Alexander's conquests, and his decision to split his people into three segments for a return via inland, coastal, and ocean routes, greatly expanded Greek knowledge of the East and of the western Indian Ocean region. With his conquests began regular trade in India's ivory and spices. Despite Alexander the Great's failure to reach Southeast Asia, two thousand years later some 'credible' European writers would claim that the extraordinary Cambodian edifices at Angkor were built by him.⁹⁶ As absurd as such an assertion was, it would lend legitimacy to European designs on Southeast Asian soil.

      Following the death of Alexander, the various factions of the Greek empire fell into ruinous warfare among themselves, dampening any energy for exploits into India until Seleucus Nikator consolidated power in about 300 B.C. Seleucus, realizing that he could not overpower the Maurya rulers east of the Indus, instead negotiated safe passage for an ambassador named Megasthenes to cross India to the Maurya court in Pãtaliputra (Patna), along the valley of the Ganges. Megasthenes was, indeed, on the frontier of 'India beyond the Ganges', Southeast Asia. His account of India, Indica, was the paramount Greek record of 'eastern' Asia. It was Europe's first notice of Ceylon, of Tibet, of the origin of the Ganges in the Himalayas, the shape of the Indian subcontinent, and of the monsoons, that great natural engine which would facilitate travel across the Indian Ocean.

      The various reports gained from Alexander's exploits and Megasthenes' embassy were examined by Eratosthenes (ca. 276-ca.196 B.C.), a brilliant librarian at Alexandria, born about a half century after Alexander's death. Eratosthenes, who is best remembered for having calculated an uncannily accurate figure for the earth's circumference, learned of Ceylon and the peninsular nature of India from Megasthenes' reports.

      But Eratosthenes, perhaps extrapolating from the erroneous southeasterly flow of the Indus assigned by Scylax, concluded that the Indian subcontinent was oriented to the southeast, leading him and his contemporaries to believe that India formed the southeastern threshold of the Asian continent. It is true, of course, that the Ganges River was now known, suggesting that 'India beyond the Ganges', our Southeast Asia, was there by implication, since something obviously had to form the eastern banks of the Ganges. But the Ganges was instead adapted to fit the existing world view, flowing to the east into the ocean sea rather than south into the Indian Ocean. As a result of their misconceptions, 'beyond the Ganges' meant north of the Ganges. In the mid-sixteenth century Gerard Mercator, under entirely different circumstances and for unrelated reasons, reached the same conclusion, deciding that the Ganges was in reality the Canton River in southern China (see page 101, below).

      With the decline of the Greek empire, Greek civilization and the Hellenic world effectively lost touch with the world east of the Hindu Kush mountain range in Central Asia, dampening any dreams of further expansion. Intermediaries seized the opportunity for trade, and Indian merchants may have reached Alexandria directly by the second century B.C. In 146 B.C., the remnants of the Greek states were effectively subjugated by the next emerging European superpower, Rome.

      Rome

      Contact between Rome and entrepôts far to the east is recorded in 26 B.C., in which year Augustus received envoys from Sri Lanka. A white elephant exhibited in Rome during Augustus' time may have originated in Southeast Asia, in the general region of what is now Thailand (the 'white' elephant in this case was probably an albino animal rather than the so-called 'white elephant' which is revered in Siam and Burma- the latter is identified by a number of physical traits, of which color is of relatively minor importance).⁹⁷ In about 166 A.D., a group of Roman musicians and acrobats traveled to China via Burma; a Roman lamp dating from this era has been unearthed in P'ong Tük, on the northeast part of the Malay Peninsula, along what may have then been a trans-peninsular shortcut.⁹⁸

      Hippalus

      The consolidation of the Roman Empire helped circumvent many of the middle-traders who had come into the Indian trade after Alexander. But until the very early Christian era, Mediterranean merchants had either to rely on the monopoly of traders in southwestern Arabia, or sail the