Ptolemaic India

One of the finest maps depicting the Ancient European conception of India, as conceived by Claudius Ptolemy (circa 150 AD), printed in Venice in 1511. This fascinating map, while published in the early 16th Century, reflects how the Ancient Greeks and Romans conceived of India. Importantly, it remained the most authoritative source of geographical knowledge of the subcontinent available to Europeans prior to Vasco da Gama’s arrival in India in 1498.

The map was devised by the Italian cartographer Bernardus Sylvanus and was printed in Venice in 1511. However, it is based on the work of Claudius Ptolemy, a Greco-Egyptian geographer, living in the 2nd Century AD, in Alexandria, Egypt, which was then part of the Roman Empire. While the India depicted on the map is at first unfamiliar to the modern eye, once one becomes immersed in its details, the map comes alive.

While Ptolemy’s India is correctly framed by the ‘Indus flu.’ (Indus River) in the northwest, and the delta of the ‘Ganga flu.’ (Ganges River) in the northeast, the interceding coastline meanders jaggedly into the sea, as opposed to forming the familiar triangular peninsula of Southern India. However, the map features a roughly accurate sequence of the main ports of India as they appear along the coastlines. One will notice ‘muziris em.’, which refers to Muziris ‘Emporium’, one of the wealthiest and most famous ports of contemporary India.

Preserved in the name of the Kochi-Muziris Biennale, the city’s legacy has long been associated with Kochi and its region, although the exact location of Muziris remains a source of debate amongst archeologists. It is widely held that it was located near the mouth of the Periyar River (named by Ptolemy ‘Pseudostomus f’, meaning 'one with false mouths'), just to the north of Kochi, near Kodungallur. Muziris remained an important centre until it was destroyed by floods in 1341.