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Hippalos: Early Navigation of Deep Sea Routes Between India and Egypt - Part I

Morgan, Chris
http://www.ancient-origins.net/ancient-places-asia/hippalos-early-navigation-deep-sea-routes-between-india-and-egypt-part-i-005848

Publisher:  Ancient Origins
Date Written:  08/05/2016
Year Published:  2016  
Resource Type:  Article

On the south-east or Coromandel Coast of India, about two miles (3.2km) south of the former French enclave of Pondicherry, there is a tract on the east known locally as Arikamedu, near the village of Virampattanam. After 1937 it was gradually revealed as an Indo-Roman trading station.

Abstract: 
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Excerpt:

In his novel Hippalos, Professor Kamil Zvelebil, who was one of a succession of scholars who have worked on this topic, speculated on how, in a partly-destroyed but still well-preserved amphora, was found a scroll with Greek text. It revealed the reminiscences of Hippalos (or Hippalus) , a legendary Greek navigator credited in the first few centuries before the common era with the discovery of a direct route between Egypt and India across the Indian ocean!

However, these days the consensus seems to be that Hippalos was probably a fiction, although his name is repeated in several classical courses as discoverer of this ancient sea route connecting east and west, across thousands of miles of the Arabian sea or northern Indian Ocean, depending on your point of view.

Arikamedu is real enough and was only one of several Roman outposts in India. The most famous being the port of Musiris, where, at the time of Jesus, a Greco-Roman merchant colony was established as the first landfall after an epic sea journey of two thousand miles across the Arabian Ocean.

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