052: Mapping the Oikoumene - Explorers & Exploration of the Hellenistic World

Hi there. You're listening to The Hellenistic Age Podcast. Episode 52. Mapping the Oikumene. Explorers and Exploration of the Hellenistic World. The ancient Greeks always expressed a fascination for the things which lay beyond the periphery of the inhabited world. Places where reality and fantasy mixed and the blank spaces of the map These same motivations would drive the likes of Ibn Battuta, Ferdinand Magellan, and countless other peoples and groups, whether for God, glory, or gold, or some combination of the three. Throughout history, the Mediterranean was the pond around which the Greeks encircled, settling in colonies and on trade routes like frogs on lily pads. But the conquest of the Persian Empire by Alexander the Great would for the first time provide the Greeks with unprecedented access to the lands of Asia and Africa. The successors of Alexander were now faced with the prospect of having to explore these new territories, as much of their kingdoms now lay outside of the previous conception of the inhabited world, the Oikumene. At the same time, the increased connectivity permitted those daring enough to set out for new opportunities to do so. Surveyors, diplomats, traders, generals, all would set out on voyages and expeditions to help chart the uncharted and redraw the map as they knew it. In this episode, we are going to discuss the exploration of the Hellenistic world, tracing the development of the Oikumene as an idea, and primarily by focusing on the figures and expeditions who expanded the Greeks' understanding of the world beyond their own. The Greek conception of the world had been rapidly changing up to the time of the Hellenistic period, at least among thinkers and scholars. The general framework of a singular landmass surrounded by a vast body of water known as ocean, lying flat upon a circular disc like a compass, had already been challenged by the 5th century BC. It was understood that the earth itself was spherical in shape, but early cartographers presented the inhabited world, the Oikumene, as a two-dimensional plane. Usually it was conceptualized as a geometric shape, like a rectangle or trapezoid, and there was a tendency to impose a symmetrical order upon it. For instance, the southern part of the Indian subcontinent was imagined as being on the same parallel as Libya in order to fit this geographic space. Alexander the Great and his entourage presumed that Europe and Asia were surrounded by one contiguous body of water which linked both the Nile and the Indus, based upon the observation that both rivers possessed similar flora and fauna like lotus plants and crocodiles. There was an emphasis on simplified geographical landmarks like rivers or mountains in order to demarcate the boundaries, otherwise he would use peoples. The historian Euphorus created a map using groups to mark his borders, with Ascythians for the north, Indians for the east, Ethiopians for the south, and Celts for the west. The Greek-speaking world was often placed at the center of any map, a nucleus of order and civilization which gradually became less so as one moved past these boundaries. Case in point, Delphi, home to the famed oracle and a holy sanctuary, was often nicknamed the Omphalos, the naval of the world, much like Jerusalem in Jewish and Christian worldviews. Since they were at the center of it all, those like Aristotle believed the Greeks to be well-balanced individuals due to living in a reasonable climate, that is, relative to the barbarians who lived in either freezing or sweltering ones. The characteristics of those living on the periphery varied. Sometimes you had savage barbarian tribes, the decadence and pomp of eastern courts, or perhaps even utopias, in poorly understood areas like India. Even if they may have had negative conceptions about outsiders, there were many Greeks keenly interested in visiting foreign lands and observing the customs of its inhabitants. Herodotus is the most famous, having journeyed from Asia Minor to places like the Black Sea in Upper Egypt and wrote about his finds in his Histories. In some sense, the act of exploration or investigation is also a way to quote-unquote civilize the uncharted world. Many mythological figures were often repurposed into world travelers by Greek writers and observers, and the demigod Heracles was the most prolific. His twelve labors took him to the ends of the earth. He imposed geographical markers such as Pillars of Heracles on the modern Strait of Gibraltar, fathered sons in Celtic Gaul, and fought against the Amazons in Scythia. Dionysus was said to have journeyed to India and conquered it, leaving behind ivy plants as a calling card for those like Alexander to come across centuries later. It could be argued that as the Greeks established colonies across the Mediterranean and Asia, these immigrants attempted to find or impose characteristics upon new landscapes that are shared with their original homelands. Like any sort of modern diaspora, people often cling to any indications of home or comfort. Perhaps these stories could also be rationalizations to either make sense of previously unknown regions or to incorporate them within the boundary of the inhabited world. From the 4th century onwards, we see a rapid departure from the original understanding of the oikumene. Due to the earth's spherical nature, and by following the logic of mathematics, Greek thinkers soon came to the conclusion that the world could potentially carry other peoples and places that they had no knowledge of. Though this may be obvious to us, this was stepping out of the comfort zone for those who barely understood their immediate non-Greek neighbors to begin with. The expansion of the Greek world into Asia, Africa, and Western Europe through the Macedonian conquests would soon reaffirm this potentially frightening thought. At the same time though, there are clear signs that the Greeks were quickly coming to terms with this new conception of the world, in often radical ways. In the 3rd century, a brilliant scientist named Eratosthenes would pioneer the concept of geography while working in Ptolemaic Alexandria. Among his more famous feats was the innovation of a geographic coordination system using latitude and longitude, and the 2nd century astronomer Hipparchus would build upon Eratosthenes' works to make it even more accurate. Maps began to focus on cities and more complex geographical locations rather than broad generalizations regarding ethnicity or simplified landmarks. With their expanded perspectives, funded by royal patronage, and likely aided by the past knowledge of the indigenous peoples like the Egyptians and Babylonians, the scientists and thinkers of the Hellenistic period were radically transforming and advancing the science of geography. Because I have a good amount of material to present without overstaying my welcome, I'm going to have to save the bulk of our discussions on the specific details and figures of Hellenistic geography when I get to my episodes on science and technology. Most of these scientists, with one very notable exception, would rely upon data collected in the field for their work though. Throughout the rest of this episode, we are going to talk about the explorers who helped make all of it happen. In his final days, Alexander the Great's generals asked him, who should succeed him? Alexander's answer, the strongest. Taken literally, this would see the close of the classical Greek age, an age thousands of years in the making. Join me, Mark Selick, as I go back to retell the story of Ancient Greece in my series, Casting Through Ancient Greece. We will cast our way back to its beginnings, all the way through to the spread of its culture throughout the known world. You can listen and subscribe to the series at www.castingthroughancientgreece.com or you can listen on your favorite podcasting platform. Don't forget to follow the series over on Twitter at Casting Greece or on Facebook at Casting Through Ancient Greece. I look forward to seeing you there. It is very possible that Alexander had used it as a guide during the initial part of his campaigns, but beyond the cities of Babylon and Ecbatana, the upper satrapies were by and large unknown. To help determine the exact scope of his quickly expanding empire, Alexander employed a vast number of surveyors known as behemothists, organized into a military body that would determine the topography and distance of the empire by translating it into paces, which would be essential when it came to logistics and supply routes for the army. Multiple reports describing geography, flora and fauna, and indigenous inhabitants were created as a result of official commissions, but a number of Alexander's companions composed their own personal memoirs. Nearchus, Alexander's naval commander, wrote a lengthy description of his navigation of the Indus River and the Indian and Persian Gulfs, including a close encounter with a pod of whales that nearly smashed the Macedonian fleet. Like his mythological predecessors, several acts of Alexander would symbolically or literally demarcate the boundaries of the empire, and by extension, the oikumene. The establishment of twelve altars dedicated to the Olympian gods at the Hyphasis River in the Punjab not only acted as a marker of his own progress, but would continue to be used as an easternmost reference point in much later maps, such as the Tabula Putingeriana from the 4th century A.D. And Alexandria was established in the Fergana Valley of modern Tajikistan, the northernmost limit of the empire, and was called Alexandria Eshkete. Literally translated, it means Alexandria the Farthest, an appropriate name if you were looking to try and set a definite boundary. His alleged last plans included the campaign into Arabia, scouted by a naval officer named Anaxicrates, and a commission to sail into Africa, though these were ultimately never completed. Both the Ptolemies and the Seleucids chartered expeditions, either for the purposes of diplomacy, trade, or simply to determine the reach and boundaries of their empires. There was also something of a royal precedent as well, since they could look to their Greek past and emulate heroes like Jason, Heracles, or more recently, Alexander. They also could have turned to the past behaviors of the great kings of Persia and the Egypt, who sponsored navigational expeditions like Darius' commission of Skylax, or Neko II's alleged circumnavigation of Africa. These expeditions came in two forms, the Periploi and Itineria. The Periploi, literally translated as voyages around, are works of descriptive geography created for maritime traveling. Instead of map making, the Periploi are crafted in such a as to present waypoints like landmarks, harbors, cities, and peoples in a sequence that could either be memorized or adapted for variations in sailing speeds. Nearchus' account of his Indian voyage would fall into this category, along with most of our sources for this period. The Itineria was the terrestrial counterpart, though it tended to provide actual distances, usually in paces or later Roman miles, which was often for military purposes. This has allowed us to reconstruct ancient road networks and overland routes by combining archaeological evidence and surviving itineraries, like Isidore of Carax's Parthian stations. For the purposes of this episode, I'm going to cover the surviving accounts in a relatively organized manner. We will go from the eastern limits of the Hellenistic world through Central Asia, then into Africa, and finally conclude in Western Europe. Ancient India was the furthest extent to which Macedonian arms were carried during the time of Alexander, turning back just before the exit of the Punjab, but never before had the Greeks had access to these nearly mythical lands. Seleucus would receive the lion's share of Alexander's empire, and so the exploration of Central Asia and India was largely left up to his discretion. The most famous of his officials that were sent to the east was Megasthenes, a Seleucid ambassador in the late 4th early 3rd century. He was commissioned to travel to the court of the Indian emperor Chandragupta Maurya, located in Pataliputra along the Ganges River, modern-day Patna. We talked quite a bit about Megasthenes in episode 32, since he wrote about his observations in his book The Indica. The Indica has only survived in fragments, but it remains the best eyewitness accounts written by a Greek on ancient India, covering everything from the capturing of elephants to the political workings of the Mauryan state. The exact purpose of his writings have been debated for many years. Through its description of a great imperial power in the east, it may serve as a way to justify why Seleucus was unable to conquer India, or perhaps it was intended as a guide to assess the capabilities of the Maurya should the Seleucid king decide to launch another campaign there. There were other Greek diplomats to the Mauryan court, such as Demacus of Plataea, who authored his own Indica during the reign of the second emperor Mindusara, and the Ptolemaic official named Dionysius in the time of Ashoka the Great, but none were as well-known or as well-written as Megasthenes. Demodamas of Miletus was another of Seleucus's commissioned officers, this time being sent as a military official to oversee the northeastern borders of the empire in the 290s. He wrote a memoir which served as a major source for later authors like Pliny the Elder when discussing the inhabitants of Central Asia between the Jexartes River and the Hyrkanian Sea, the modern Syrdaria and Aral Sea respectively. Demodamas even consecrated the furthest extent of his travels with altars to Apollo. It is also possible that a refounding of Alexandria Ashkete into Antioch and Scythia occurred under Demodamas' supervision, reinforcing Alexander's borders, and to help deter the nomads, as we talked about in the last episode. The last was Patrocles, who was ordered to compose a Periplus of the Caspian Sea, the world's largest saltwater lake. Patrocles was also the region's governor, and perhaps the only Greek to ever have sailed the entirety of the Caspian shores on two separate voyages. His work is known to us only through the references of Strabo and Pliny, but it was immensely influential for centuries afterwards. Despite this, the Periplus is filled with outright fabrications and falsehoods, and it was heavily criticized by Strabo and Eratosthenes, who compared it to the more reliable accounts of Megasthenes and Demacus. It was originally theorized that the Caspian was an isolated body of water, but Patrocles has seemed to have turned it into a gulf of a great northern ocean. Patrocles also claimed that the Oxus and Jexartes emptied into the Caspian, and how one could travel through the Caspian into these rivers before eventually reaching India, like a classical version of the Northwest Passage. Even accounting for the passage of time and its effects on the meandering rivers, this is impossible. Perhaps there was a misreading of Patrocles' original description, and a conflation of the Caspian Sea with that of the Aral Sea, from which both the Jexartes and Oxus do flow. Paul Kosman offers a unique point of view by arguing that the restructuring of the Caspian was part of a vision of the Seleucids to create a fictional northern oceanic border of their empire, which paralleled the Persian and Indian gulfs to the south. There are certainly hints of imposing an imperial will. Pliny claims that there was an effort to rename the Caspian as the Seleucian or Antiochean Sea, along with plans for a grand canal that would link the Caspian with the Black Sea via the Camarian Bosporus, the modern Kerch Strait, which would only be possible through Patrocles' great northern ocean framework. The exploration of the southern end of that ocean framework would actually be the responsibility of the Seleucids' main rivals, the Ptolemaic dynasty. Possessing a commercial empire and a vast fleet of ships, the Ptolemies were very interested in sponsoring expeditions to investigate new trade routes or providing the patronage of geographers who worked in Alexandria. From their base in Egypt, they were primarily responsible for two main regions, the eastern coast of Africa and the Red Sea. The Red Sea, known in antiquity as the Erythraean Sea, divides the continent of Africa from the Arabian Peninsula. Along with the Nile River, it was an economic highway that gave access to the lucrative incense and aromatics trade with the Nabataeans and Sabaeans of western and southern Arabia. It was also the main way in which the Ptolemies could engage with the merchants of India, as they would meet somewhere off the This wasn't the most ideal arrangement for the Greeks, since it meant having to repeatedly pay tolls to Nabataean pirates, and they were always looking for a way to bypass overland travel into India. It is quite possible to sail from the Red Sea to the Indian Ocean by way of the Bab-el-Mandeb Strait and the Gulf of Aden near the coast of Somalia, but the Greeks were not privy to this information. Never mind that, sailing the Indian Ocean requires knowledge of the monsoon winds which could seriously hamper travel, as it happened with the Macedonian fleet under Nearchus during their return to Babylon. The Ptolemies got their break in the latter half of the 2nd century during the reign of Ptolemy VIII Viscon, when a shipwrecked sailor of unknown origin was rescued by the Ptolemaic Coast Guard. In time, this sailor would learn Greek, and he explained to the king that he was a native of India and originally part of a crew intending to reach Egypt before ending up in his predicaments. Ptolemy then commissioned this sailor as a navigator in an expedition to India headed by a gentleman named Eudoxus of Syzicus, who had gained a reputation in the Ptolemaic Court as a skilled helmsman sailing up the Nile. By the year 116 BC, Eudoxus was the first known Greek to make a successful round trip to India from the Red Sea, bringing home a boatload of gemstones and perfumes that were promptly seized by the king. On his second voyage, he was briefly shipwrecked in East Africa and once again had his treasure taken by the crown. The third voyage nearly resulted in Eudoxus being marooned by his supposed new benefactor, King Bacchus of Mauretania, who initially approved of a western circumnavigation of Africa to get to India, a la Vasco da Gama, before suspecting Eudoxus' potential spot. The results of the fourth expedition are a complete mystery, and he disappears from the annals of history. The success of Eudoxus proved to be too little too late for the Ptolemies. Control of the Red Sea had slipped out of the grasp in the face of domestic strife, and the route to India would not be capitalized by them to any significant extent. About the same time or shortly after Eudoxus, a figure named Hippolys is also credited with being the first Greek to sail to India by the anonymous author of The Periplus of the Erythraean Sea, a handbook which describes the trade network of the Red Sea and Indian Ocean during the first century AD. We have no idea when he existed, and there have been a number of attempts to reconcile the claims between him and Eudoxus, with little success. Hippolys is said to have discovered how to use the monsoon winds to more effectively sail to India, and the western monsoon bore his name thereafter. While the Ptolemies would not take advantage of this route to India either, the Roman conquest of Egypt would result in the flourishing of the maritime trade of the Indian Ocean from the first century BC to the third century AD. The Roman merchants would build upon the work of Eudoxus and Hippolys in order to meet the demands for Indian spices and Chinese silks, especially if they could avoid having to deal with the Parthian Empire which taxed the overland routes in Central Asia. The search for a route to India had its purpose, but the Ptolemies were more easily able to reap the benefits of their other main avenue of exploration, the coast of East Africa. Neighboring the Ptolemies was the Meroitic Kingdom of Kush, the latest iteration of Egypt's traditional southern rival, which had undergone a political and cultural renaissance during the 4th and 3rd centuries. Contrary to the claims of later writers, the Greeks were somewhat familiar with the Kushites since at least the 5th century, but during the reigns of Ptolemy I and II, the Macedonians penetrated northern, lower Kush through a number of military campaigns and expeditions of exploration. Nubia had possessed extensive gold mines that could feed the Ptolemaic demand for bullion, and it was one of the only places that could provide an accessible source for elephants, used as both a weapon of war and for their ivory. An important source of information comes from the work of Agatharchides of Nidus, an Alexandrian scholar of the 2nd century BC whose work On the Erythraean Sea describes the conditions of the Red Sea in northeastern Africa during the 3rd century. He appears to have synthesized the accounts of a number of Ptolemaic officials like elephant hunters, naval officers, and scientists like Eratosthenes. It is very useful though, since it can act as a paraphrase by describing the various colonies and trading posts founded by the Ptolemies, but also provides us with ethnography and accounts of the flora and fauna. Ptolemy II's career ushered in a new wave of Greco-Cushite contact, first by his conquest of lower Nubia during the 270s, but then by establishing outposts along the coastline. The principal outpost was Ptolemais of the Hunts, founded by an elephant hunter named Eumides somewhere in northeastern Sudan. The process of capturing and shipping elephants back up the Nile was extremely expensive, though the outposts were intended to be self-sufficient to some extent or another. Attrition and human predation took its toll. The hunters had to go farther and farther with each generation to locate new elephants, establishing ports as distant as modern Somalia during the late 3rd century. This was the furthest point in the interior of Africa that the Hellenistic world would reach on a semi-consistent basis, but the outposts would gradually fade into the memory by the turn of the millennium. The military and elephant hunting expeditions of the Ptolemies seem to have provided a wealth of information about Africa for the Greek scholars in Alexandria, perhaps the best the Mediterranean world would see for several centuries. Apparently, Ptolemy II's campaign discovered the ever-elusive source of the Nile River in the highlands of modern Ethiopia, and while it is not entirely true they needed to go deeper to reach Lake Victoria and beyond, it certainly was the closest guess made thus far. Though there was a great amount of trade and exploration, we just don't have the writings of those like Simonides the Younger, who resided among the Kushites in their capital city of Meroe, nor the naval officer Temastenes, who took an account of all the colonies and ports in the region. So far in this episode, all of the routes being charted were directly within or bordered the Hellenistic world. Nearly every explorer, scientist, or expedition has been on the payroll of monarchs in pursuit of new knowledge to strengthen their kingdom. There is one major exception to this pattern. Instead of traveling to the humid tropics of Africa or India, one figure decided to journey to the tempestuous and frigid waters of northwestern Europe, Cepheus of Massalia, a Greek citizen of the colony that would later become the Marseilles of modern France, which set out on a voyage from the western Mediterranean and into the Atlantic Ocean and North Sea, sometime around 325 BC. Upon his return, he published a book on his travels entitled On the Ocean, which sadly has not survived in its entirety. Instead, it has been paraphrased by writers like Polybius and Strabo. Unfortunately for Pytheas, both authors openly consider him to be an exaggerator at best and an outright liar or fraud at worst. Others were generally more sympathetic, such as Pliny the Elder and the lost accounts of Timaeus and Eratosthenes. In all fairness, much of Pytheas' observations would be quite extraordinary to your typical Greek, as we soon shall see, but the claims of Pytheas have actually been demonstrated to be reasonably accurate insofar as we are able to reconstruct his route by using the references of these later writers. For this episode, I am relying heavily upon the work of the academic Barry Cunliffe in his book The Extraordinary Voyage of Pytheas the Greek, The Man Who Discovered Britain, which gives a rich account of both Pytheas' journey and western Europe during antiquity. The exact motivation for Pytheas' expedition is unknown. We have no indication nor evidence that he was commissioned on the part of any major figure at the time, though it is tempting to try and claim a connection to the contemporary Alexander the Great. Even then, we know almost nothing about the man besides his birthplace and voyage, so it is entirely speculative. To begin his journey, Pytheas departed Massalia by one of two options, the first by taking a boat and sailing along the coast of Gaul through the Pillars of Herakles before wrapping around and hugging the coastline of northern Iberian Peninsula. The doubt for the sea route lay in the claims that Carthage had imposed a naval blockade across the Pillars of Herakles to prevent Greek ships from passing through to protect their trading interests. The existence of the blockade has been questioned in recent years, but it is possible that Pytheas had taken an overland route from Massalia into the region of Celtica in northwestern France, cutting the distance from 3200 km of coastal travel to 500 km of land and river travel. Either way, this would bring him to the shores of Amorica, the modern French Brittany. From there, he took a boat across the English Channel and likely landed in what would eventually become Cornwall, the southwesternmost point of the island of Britain. Perhaps one of the reasons why Pytheas made his venture into the Atlantic region was to see first-hand one of the only sources of a very important commodity, tin, which was found in abundance in Brittany and the island of Britain, particularly in Cornwall. Tin is one of the two parts necessary to create the bronze alloy, the other being copper, and throughout antiquity, traders in Britain exported tin across the Channel into Gaul. The mining and trading of the metal was controlled by the Celts, who dwelled in western Europe, and no doubt the Massiliots had close ties with the Gauls that neighboured him to the north. In the time of Herodotus, the broad region that produced tin was known as the Cassiterides Islands, but even then, he is unsure about the existence of such a place. Pytheas was now the first major Greek author to visit and report on the lands of Britain and its peoples in great detail. The next important classical writer to do so would be Julius Caesar, nearly 300 years afterwards. He also gave an extensive description on the tin harvesting and smelting process, which may hint at his economic motives. Pytheas circumnavigated the island, likely in a craft of Celtic design known as the curragh, that was able to handle the choppy waters of the Atlantic, as described by Caesar. Incredibly, the Massiliot not only got the rough shape of the island right, but actually managed to determine its circumference to such a degree that he was only off by about a few hundred kilometres. The name for the island can also be attributed to Pytheas as well. Because the various dialects of Celtic differ in their pronunciation, sometimes the B sound can be substituted for a P sound. With the inhabitants of Britain, Pytheas calls them Pretanicae, which was transliterated from the Celtic Pretani. This was copied by authors like Diodorus, who referred to the island as a whole as Pretania, and it was transformed into Britannia, aka Britain. His journey took place on both boat and by foot, travelling clockwise around the coastline starting at Cornwall and visiting places like Ireland, Scotland, and the Isle of Man. Ever the scientist, Pytheas also gives a description of the effect of the moon on the tides. More specifically, he described the phenomenon of a spring tide, which occurs when the gravitational pull of the full and new moons is at its strongest, resulting in large waves and dramatic changes in depth. Upon reaching the northernmost point of Scotland, here is where the story becomes more mysterious. According to Pytheas, after taking a six-day boat ride north of Britain, one would reach the island of Thule in the Arctic Circle. From the description, Thule was a land that fluctuated between continuous daytime in the summer and overwhelming darkness during its fierce winters, inhabited by peoples who farmed oats and kept bees, which allowed them to concoct an alcoholic drink not unlike mead. Just a day sailing beyond Thule lay the congealed or Cronian Sea, which contained phenomena called sea lungs, amalgamations of liquid, air, and land that floated across the surface of its icy waters. Scholars have debated on the topic of Thule and the sea lungs throughout the ages, each positing their own theories in order to explain what Strabo and Polybius believed to be the most outrageous of Pytheas' fabrications. The sea lung is thought to be a metaphor for the bobbing of ice flows which resembled the movement of a jellyfish. The Greek term for sea lung is plumon thalassios, which is the same word for jellyfish. In regards to the exact location of Thule, popular candidates include the Orkney Islands, Shetland, Norway, and even as far north as Iceland. Of these four, Norway and Iceland are considered to be the most likely, with highly convincing arguments for each. Those of the pro-Norway camp point to the imports of human habitation, agriculture, and beekeeping, which are attested to by Norwegian archaeological records of the 4th century BC, whereas Iceland was uninhabited until the arrival of Norse settlers in the 9th century AD. Those in the pro-Iceland camp argue that the description of habitation refers not to Thule, but the lands near Thule, at least in the writings of Strabo. In addition, Iceland experiences the extreme variations of sunlight across the seasons, lies near the positive latitude of 66 degrees at the Arctic Circle, and one can easily reach the congealed or frozen seas in a day's journey compared to Norway. If the Iceland theory is true, then Pytheas holds the prestige of being the northernmost traveler in all of antiquity, at least that we know of. From the region of Thule, Pytheas returned to Britain, but soon traveled to the southeast. He eventually reached a large island known as Basilia, near the enormous Metuanus estuary which was nearly 1,100 kilometers long, where Germanic-speaking peoples collected hardened sap and used it for kindling. From this rather vague description, the best guess as to where Pytheas had ended up is either in the Jutland Peninsula of modern Denmark, or just shy of it at the Elbe River, both of which border the North Sea. Like tin, it is possible that Pytheas also wanted to investigate the source of another important commodity in northern Europe, amber, a semi-transparent and honey-colored material possessing the hardness of a gem, yet is derived from fossilized tree resin. The regions of the Baltic and North Seas were the main sources of amber, due to the remains of a prehistoric forest that once covered the coastline, and harvesters would collect it upon the beaches. Its use in jewelry and aromatics made a valuable product in the ancient world, with international trade going back to the early Bronze Age based upon specimens found in Minoan tombs. The Greeks and Romans were no different, and the demand for what they called Electrum resulted in the creation of an amber road, and during the 4th century, this led from the Danish Jutland to Britain and through the Pillars of Heracles. Having made his observations of these seemingly unremarkable peoples and their amber, Pytheas returned to about five years after beginning his journey. The legacy of Pytheas has cemented him as being one of the greatest explorers and geographers in history, providing knowledge of northwest Europe's geography and peoples that would be unrivaled for centuries after the publication of his book, On the Ocean. Despite a lack of advanced navigational equipment, the Mesaliot was able to calculate his latitudinal position relative to his hometown thousands of miles away with a very small margin of error, which would assist Eratosthenes in the construction of his geographic coordination system. His skills as a sailor allowed him to explore waters unimaginable to any Greek captain, and very likely with the assistance of the local Celtic and Germanic speaking peoples, with no troubling incidents reported. Ever the able astronomer, Pytheas also demonstrated that there was no truth nor star at the Pole, for Polaris had changed position over thousands of years since. The Hellenistic Age was a time of remarkable advancement in the While perhaps they were not always a hundred percent accurate, the explorers who helped expand the knowledge of the Greeks would see their work vindicated. The discovery of a sea route to India, and the sailing of the Atlantic Ocean would be exploited by Roman commanders and merchants, who would build upon the foundations laid before them by helping create a vast network of trading routes that would link from the Mediterranean to China, in a time of unprecedented levels of connectivity and communication. Much of the writings of these authors would be continuously relied upon as sources of information, well into the Middle Ages, with regions like Thule being placed as the end of the world in the maps of those who continued to wonder at what lay beyond. I've hoped you enjoyed this episode, it was a fun one for me to write, but as ever I have included a PDF of the transcript containing all of the sources and footnotes for your convenience, so feel free to take advantage of it by clicking on the link in the podcast description or by heading to my website at hellenistighpodcast.wordpress.com for the notes of this episode. If you like what you've been listening to, consider subscribing or leaving a review on the platform of your choice. If you want to keep up with show updates, read interesting factoids, or hear book recommendations, follow me on my social media accounts like Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. At the time of writing this, I have been invited to do a public talk of sorts with the Calliopean Club, an academic Discord server which will host a question and answer session with me on October the 31st at 5pm Central Standard Time, so if you're interested in that, check out the link I provided in the podcast description or by searching up www.calliopean.club. With all that said and done, next episode will end our tour of the Black Sea and Asia Minor regions with a discussion on the Kingdom of the Bosporus. Once again, thank you so much for your support, and you've been listening to The Hellenistic Age Podcast.