Ptolemaic India

This fascinating map, while published in the late 15th Century, reflects how the Ancient Greeks and Romans conceived of India. Importantly, it was the most authoritative source of geographical knowledge of the subcontinent available to Europeans prior to Vasco da Gama’s arrival in India in 1498. It is based on the writings of Claudius Ptolemy, a Greco-Egyptian geographer, living in the 2nd Century AD, in Alexandria, Egypt, which was then part of the Roman Empire. Ptolemy wrote a detailed description of the known world, the Geographia, which was rediscovered in Europe at the beginning of the 15th Century.

In the 1470s, a German monk, Donnus Nicolaus Germanus, designed a series of maps to accompany Ptolemy’s texts. Germanus’ maps were exquisitely carved into woodblocks by the artist Johannes of Armsheim and printed in Ulm, Germany in 1482. The map of India from the ‘Ulm Ptolemy’, with its beautiful original colour, is considered to be the most beautiful of all incunable printed maps of the Subcontinent.

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. 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. While the course of the Ganges flows down from an excessively northerly direction, it is still recognizable. The plains of the Punjab, traversed by the fan-shaped pattern of the tributaries of the Indus River, are unmistakable, a legacy of the over three century long Greek presence in the region, which followed Alexander the Great’s campaigns in the later 4th Century BC.

By contrast, the coastlines of the Subcontinent meander jaggedly into the sea, as opposed to forming the familiar triangular peninsula of Southern India. That being conceded, it is important to note that the Romans, an eminently practical people, were more concerned with creating accurate itineraries, as opposed to presenting precise planimetric renderings. As Roman contact with India was limited to maritime trade, the map provides an accurate procession of the main ports of India as they appear along the coastlines. Many of these locations correspond to modern Indian coastal cities.