How the World Has Seen India Across Twenty-Five Centuries
THE MIRROR AND THE MARVEL From Greek Geographers and Roman Merchants to Modern Universities, the International Imagination of the Subcontinent India: From Herodotus to Megasthenes 1.1 Herodotus and the Eastern Periphery of the World The earliest sustained Greek engagement with India appears in the fifth century BCE writings of Herodotus of Halicarnassus — the so-called Father of History — whose Histories contains a remarkable if often fanciful account of the distant eastern lands. For Herodotus, writing in the 440s BCE, India (which he calls "the most easterly inhabited country in the world") was simultaneously a geographic reality and a philosophical boundary — the place where the known world ended and the marvellous began. [1] Herodotus's India is a land of superlatives: it has the most people of any nation, the most gold, ants larger than foxes that dig up gold-bearing sand, and a climate of constant heat. The historical kernel behind these embellishments is real: I...