# Further India/Chryse the Golden and the Chersonesus Aurea

​FURTHER INDIA
CHAPTER I
CHRYSE THE GOLDEN AND THE CHERSONESUS AUREA
THE great peninsula which forms the south-eastern corner of the Asiatic continent, comprising, as we know it to-day, Burma, Siam, French Indo-China and the Malay Peninsula, will be found, in comparison with other regions of the East, to have suffered at the hands of Europeans from a wholly unmerited neglect. Latterly, it is true, the Powers of the West have been busy here, as in other quarters of the world; but in spite of their new-born political importance only a languid interest has, for the most part, been excited in the countries themselves and in the problems to which their affairs have given rise. The failure of the lands of southeastern Asia to make a strong appeal to the imagination of the peoples of Europe is to be ascribed, however, not to their intrinsic unimportance, nor yet to any lack of wealth, of beauty, of charm, or of the interest that springs from a mysterious and mighty past. The reason is to be sought solely in the mere accident of their geographical position. Lying as they do midway upon the great sea-route which leads ​from India to China, it has been the fate of these countries to be overshadowed from the beginning by the immensity and the surpassing fascination of their mighty neighbours. Thus, even when India and Cathay had emerged at last from the nebulous haze of myth, superstition and conjecture with which the imaginations of Europeans had early enshrouded them, southeastern Asia continued to be wrapped in obscurity, such knowledge of it as was possessed being practically confined to a bare acquaintance with its coast-lines, with a few ports of call, and with the seas traversed by ships in their passage from the shores of Malabar to the southern provinces of China. Similarly, in our own time, while every schoolboy can point out Canton or Peking, Delhi or Peshwur, as a matter of course, not one educated man in fifty can put his finger unhesitatingly upon the spot on the map which represents Chieng Tong or Bhamo, Pahang or Pnom-Penh. The real exploration of this region, beyond the limits of a narrow zone of coastlands, was not accomplished until during the latter half of the nineteenth century, while the work done in this direction by Francis Garnier and a host of smaller men is even less known in these islands than are the localities in which their labours were performed.
It is not easy to realise to how late a period in their history the Greeks remained in almost total ignorance of the Eastern world, or indeed of any inhabited lands lying at a distance from the seaboard of the Mediterranean. It was not until the invasion of Xerxes forced the fact upon ​their attention in uncompromising wise that they completely grasped the proximity of Persia. Hecatæus of Miletus, who wrote between 520 and 500 B. c., is the first of the ancients to make mention of India and the Indus by name, and Megasthenes, who was in the service of the Syrian King, Seleucus Nicanor, during the third century B. C., was the earliest writer to extend the western acquaintance with the East to the banks of the Ganges. He traversed the great peninsula from the Indus to the former river by means of what he describes as "the royal road"—probably the first of the grand trunk-roads of India—crossed successively the Sutlej and the Jumna, and descended the Ganges to Palibothra, a town at the mouth of the Sone which was the capital of a king called Sandracottus (Chandra-gupta). He brought back with him much detailed information concerning the country, its people and its products, and he speaks of cinnamon and other spices as being imported from the southern parts of India, which may possibly be an indication of the existence, even in his time, of the spice-trade of the Malayan Archipelago.
It was not, however, until after the beginning of our era that the first, faintest hint reached Europe concerning the existence of lands lying to the east of the Ganges. It is found in the writings of Pomponius Mela, whose date can be fixed from internal evidence at A. D. 43, which make mention of a headland named Tabis, described by the author as the most easterly extremity of Asia, and of another, apparently further to the south, called Tamus. Off the latter lay Chryse, or the Golden ​Isle, while Argyre, the Isle of Silver, was opposite to the mouth of the Ganges. Pomponius Mela places the land of the Seres—the name by which the inhabitants of northern China were known—south of Tabis and between that headland and India. These statements, though they represent nothing more than a vague groping after the truth, are interesting because they mark the dawn of a pcrccption that beyond the Ganges there lay further to the east certain inhabited lands, and because they show that in Pomponius Mela's time the Seres were recognised as occupying country at the extreme east of the Asiatic continent. Concerning Chrysc itself Pomponius Mcla, it is probable, entertained no very definite ideas, but his mention of the mythical isle indicates that a new geographical conception had come into being. Henceforth the Ganges was no longer to be regarded as the eastern limit of the habitable world. The map of the earth according to Pomponius Mela, here reproduced from Mr. F. H. Bunbury's admirable History of Ancient Geography, shows the distorted character of his notions concerning the configuration of the seas and continents; but in the insignificant island of Chryse, there seen lying off the promontory of Tamus, we must recognise the earliest attempt ever made by a European to locate the lands of southeastern Asia.
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Part of the World according to Pomponius Mela
From Bunbury's "History of Ancient Geography" ​us that the southwest monsoon was called the Hippalus, and the author of the Periplus explains that "a pilot named Hippalus was the first, who, from observing the position of the ports, and the configuration of the sea, discovered the mode of sailing right across the open sea; from which the name of Hippalus is given to the local wind which blows steadily from the southwest, in the Indian seas."
The voyage of Hippalus, whose example had been so generally followed in the time of Pliny that the journey to and from India was then regularly made by many ships every year, marks an epoch in the story of navigation. Up to this time the seamen of western Asia and of Europe had not ventured out of sight of land, and the length of their voyages had been determined by the convolutions of the coast-lines which they skirted. The man who, first of all his kind, had the hardihood to face the open sea, to lose the comfortable sight of terra firma, to stake his life upon the accuracy of his own crude knowledge of geography, and to sail thus bravely into the Unknown, deserves to take rank with the world's great adventurers, with Colombus, with da Gama, with Magellan, and in that he had less of accumulated experience to fortify his resolution, he may even be accounted a greater than they.
The opening up of the direct sea-route to India thus effected served at once to give an enormous impetus to trade between Alexandria and the East, and Pliny was able to obtain first-hand information on the subject of Ceylon from four ambassadors whom a king of that ​island sent to the Court of the Emperor Claudius. He states, among other things, that trade was carried on by the natives of Taprobane (Ceylon) with the Seres of northern China, though doubt is cast upon the matter by the fact that the Chinese arc described as fair-haired, blue-eyed giants. On the other hand it is significant that no mention is made of any commercial relations subsisting between the peoples of Ceylon and those of south-eastern Asia. This is, at the best, but negative evidence, yet it is noteworthy as seeming to indicate that the sea-route between India and China was not even then in general use, despite the fact that commercial intercourse between the two empires had been carried on overland from a period of remote antiquity.
Of Chryse, the Golden, Pliny, in fact, has nothing to tell us, and the author of the Periplus, whose personal knowledge did not extend beyond Nelkynda, probably Melisseram, on the Malabar coast, says of it only that it was situated opposite to the mouths of the Ganges and that it produced the best tortoise-shell found in all the Erythræan Sea. He speaks, however, of Thina, the land of silk, situated "where the seacoast ends externally," whence we may gather that Chryse was conceived by him as an island lying not only to the east of the Ganges, but also to the southward of the Chinese Empire. This indicates a distinct advance in knowledge, for the isle of Chryse, albeit still enveloped in a golden haze, was to the author of the Periplus a real country, and no mere mythical fairy-land. Rumours, it would seem, must have
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Part of the World according to Ptolemy
From Bunbury's "History of Ancient Geography" ​believed he could rely—and this would tend to prove that the sea-route to China via the Straits of Malacca, even though it was not yet in general use, was no longer unknown to the mariners of the East. We know that less. than a century later the sailor Alexander, from whom Marinus of Tyre derived the knowledge subsequently utilised by Ptolemy, had himself sailed to the Malay Peninsula and beyond, and it may safely be concluded. that the feasibility of this southeastern passage had become known to the seafarers of China long before an adventurer from the West was enabled to test the fact of its existence through the means of an actual voyage.
Ptolemy's views concerning the geography of south-eastern Asia, derived mainly from the works of his predecessor Marinus of Tyre, may best be appreciated by a glance at the map here reproduced from Mr. Bunbury's History of Ancient Geography. His primary misconception of the Indian Ocean as another and vaster Mediterranean was responsible for many of his geographical distortions, yet if this preconceived notion, and the bias which it imparted to his ideas, be borne in mind, it will be found that there is good reason to believe that the information supplied to him was derived originally from a man who had first-hand knowledge of the sea-route to China. Marinus had quoted the sailor Alexander as journeying from the Golden Chersonese along a coastline which "faced south"—that is to say, ran from west to east,—for a period of twenty days, until a port called Zabæ was reached. From this point, he declared, ships ​sailed eastward of south for a still longer period until the town of Cattigara was reached. The exact locality of Cattigara has been much disputed, Mannert placing it in Borneo, while Bunbury inclines to the belief that some point on the coast of Cochin China is indicated. On the other hand Marinus and Ptolemy both expressly state that Cattigara was a city of the Sinæ, or in other words a port of southern China, and a study of the route followed at a later period by Arabian and European travellers alike reveals the fact that few ever passed on a long voyage to the eastward of the Golden Chersonese unless they were bound for the Celestial Empire. Furthermore, it will be found that it is only by taking some port of southern China as our starting point—viz., as being the town of Cattigara—that Ptolemy's itinerary can be made to have any sequence or meaning. The Sinus Magnus, which is described as the first sea crossed after leaving Cattigara, would then be the China Sea; the Promontorium Magnum, dividing it from the Sinus Perimulicus, which is perhaps identical with Marinus's Zabæ, would be some point upon the shores of Indo-China, corresponding with Champa, the kingdom which at a later period was an invariable port of call for vessels making the China voyage. Similarly, the Sinus Perimulicus itself, which is described as washing the eastern shores of the Golden Chersonese, would be the Gulf of Siam; the Golden Chersonese would be, as it is usually agreed that it is, the Malay Peninsula; and the Sinus Sabaricus, on the western. shores of the Chersonese, would correspond to the Straits of Malacca from their southern portals to the Gulf of ​Martaban. The island of Iabadius, or Sabadius—the reading of the name is doubtful—has generally been taken to represent Java, though there appears to be slight reason for the assumption, Java lying at a considerable distance from the sea-route to China, and being to a much later time visited with comparative infrequency by travellers from the west. On the other hand, Sumatra lay close to the track of ships plying between India and the Far East; was a regular port of call from the period to which belongs the first authentic records of the China voyages; and could not fail to be sighted by ships running up the Straits of Malacca. It will be seen from the above that it is only by starting from southern China, that is by recognising Cattigara as a port of the Celestial Empire, possibly the Zayton of the medieval wanderers, or a town which preceded Zayton, as Zayton itself preceded Canton, that Ptolemy's descriptive outline can be applied to the true geographical facts of the region dealt with. No straining of probabilities becomes necessary; no statements have to be elaborately explained away; and it may be stated without fear of refutation that this ceases to be the case if any other point be taken as the site of Cattigara.
To the account of the distances said to have been supplied to Marinus by the sailor Alexander, no real importance can be attached. It was the rough estimate of a man who was probably very ignorant, and it was given to a geographer who was not averse to making a bold guess if thereby the reported facts could be forced to fit in with ideas previously conceived. The same qualifying ​consideration must be held to apply to the direction in which ships making the voyage to Cattigara are said to have sailed after passing the Golden Chersonese. The brief examination of Ptolemy's itinerary already attempted will suffice to establish the probability that Marinus's informant had actually travelled over the sea-route to southern China, and that the geographical confusions shown in the map of the world according to Ptolemy were due less to error in the information supplied than to the faulty reasoning occasioned by misconceptions on the part of the philosophers themselves.
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Ptolemy's Further India, as interpreted in the XVth Century
From the Roman Ptolemy of 1490 ​as the source whence was drawn the almost fabulous riches of which history held the record.
In this connection a curious passage may be cited from Josephus's Antiquities of the Jews, which was written during the latter half of the first century, at a period, it will be noted, prior to the date of the works of Marinus of Tyre. Here, in speaking of the pilots furnished to Solomon by Hiram of Tyre, he writes:
"To whom Solomon gave this command that they should go along with his stewards to the land that of old was called Ophir, but now the Aurea Chersonesus, which belongs to India, to fetch gold."
Here, it will be remarked, Josephus speaks of the Chersonese with a certain familiarity, as of a region with the existence of which his readers would be in some sort acquainted, but apart from this he makes two very definite statements—that Ophir and the Chersonesus Aurea are one, and that Ophir belonged to India. The second of these would seem to imply that he recognised that the Chersonese was not an integral portion of India, and since the name had never been borne by any country of the West, he must have intended to convey the meaning that it lay beyond the valley of the Ganges, which in his day was recognised as the eastern boundary of Hindustan.
It is now generally held that Ophir itself was, in all probability, a mere distributing centre situated somewhere in the neighbourhood of the entrance to the Red Sea, and that the pilots of Hiram of Tyre did not guide the Stewards of Solomon to the actual source of the gold ​which went to deck the temple of Jehovah in Jerusalem. The discovery of vast mines in southern Africa, which are believed to date from an immense antiquity, has led of late years to the conclusion that this was the region whence Solomon in his glory drew his stores of gold.
M. Auguste Pavie in the second volume of his monumental work on Indo-China contends that ancient Kambodia is the original Ophir, and that to the whole of the vast peninsula, rather than to its southern portion of Malaya, was applied in ancient days the name of the Chersonesus Aurea. The wonderful civilisation of the Khmers which brought into being the splendid buildings of Angkor, of which more will be said in a later chapter, testifies to the existence of a mighty empire in Indo-China which must once have been a centre of wealth and commerce. The vast siltage, borne down from the remote interior by the floods of the Mekong, has changed the face of the country within historical times, and Angkor Thom itself, now distant nearly two hundred miles from the coast, was once a seaport. That the Khmer Empire must in its day have played an important part in the history of eastern Asia cannot be doubted, but M. Pavie's arguments, plausible though they often are, fail to carry conviction when he seeks to prove the identity of Kambodia with Ophir. Also, as regards his contention that the whole of Indo-China was included in the term the Golden Chersonese, it is difficult to believe that what is in fact an immense peninsula was ever recognised as such by the early mariners and geographers. Its bulk is too ​great for its peninsular character to be easily or immediately appreciated, while the Malay Peninsula, that long and slender tongue of land projecting to the south of the continent of Asia, forces an understanding of its nature upon the least scientific and observant traveller.
In these circumstances M. Pavie's arguments seem to be impossible of acceptance, and the recent discovery in the Malayan State of Pahang—the home of apes and ivory and peafowl—of immense gold mines of very ancient date and of a workmanship that has no counterpart in southeastern Asia, supplies an ample reason for the designation of "golden" so long applied to the Chersonese. Here, hidden away under the shade of the primeval forest, are excavations which must have yielded in their time tons of the precious metal, and if Josephus spoke truly, and did not, as is more probable, merely hazard a bold conjecture, here perhaps are to be found in the heart of the Chersonesus Aurea the mines of Solomon the King. Of the race that worked them, of the slaves who toiled and suffered and died therein, we to-day possess no clue, for this, the story of the earliest exploration of a portion of southeastern Asia, is lost to us forever. Here, however, at the very outset of our enquiry, we obtain a glimpse of one of those pregnant suggestions wherewith Asia impresses our imaginations. by virtue of her antiquity, her wonder and her mystery. Hers is the land of buried story, of hidden records, of forgotten romance. The East baffles while she fascinates us: fascinates because she baffles. Sphinx-like she propounds riddles which few can answer, luring us onward ​with illusive hopes of inspiring revelations, yet hiding ever in her splendid, tattered bosom the secrets of the oldest and least amply recorded of human histories.
After the time of Ptolemy there follows a long and barren period during which little advance in geographical knowledge was made by the nations of the West, nor is it until the sixth century that anything resembling new light is thrown by a European upon the topography of southeastern Asia. Moreover the shedder of that light is himself a grotesque figure, an angry theologian bent upon proving the impossible, and moved to intense fury by the impiety of those who, touching more nearly the skirts of truth, have not the advantage of agreeing with him. This is Cosmas Indicopleustes, a monk and an Alexandrian Greek, who between 530 and 550 A. D. set himself the task of proving that the universe was fashioned after the model of the Ark made by the Children of Israel in the desert. It is not necessary to follow him through the mazes of his argument, all of which he supported by texts culled from the Scriptures, but out of the tissue of absurdities to which he pinned his faith two facts emerge. While inveighing in season and out of season against those who clung to the belief that the world was globular, and against the unspeakable naughtiness of the adherents to the poisonous doctrine of the antipodes, he displays a sound knowledge of the sea-route to China, stating that a ship after travelling sufficiently far to the east, must turn to the north, and must sail in that direction at least as far as a vessel ​bound for Chaldea would have to run up the Straits of Hormuz to the mouths of the Euphrates" in order to reach the Celestial Empire, thus disposing once for all of Ptolemy's theory of a great southern continent enclosing the Indian Ocean upon which the land of the Sinæ, or southern Chinese, was formerly supposed to be situated. Cosmas, too, as Yule remarks, "was the earliest writer to speak of China in a matter-of-fact way, and not as a country enveloped in a half-mythical haze." In his work, therefore, we find the first written record of an appreciation on the part of a European of the true relative positions of China and of the lands of south-eastern Asia. The advance in knowledge thus indicated is not great, but it is considerably ahead of that possessed by Ptolemy, and for the sake of the truth which he was the earliest to disseminate we may forgive Cosmas the monk the farrago of nonsense with which he surrounded it, and also much of his bigotry and rage.
Meanwhile inter-Asiatic intercourse by means of the sea-routes had been steadily on the increase. It was the energy and the enterprise of Hippalus, a Greek,—or so we are led to believe by the classical writers who are on this point our only authorities—which showed the way to the Arabs and the Persians across the Indian Ocean, but during the centuries which followed upon his discovery, though an immense trade was in the hands of the merchants of Alexandria, the greatest sea-power in this quarter of the world, after the decline of the Roman Empire, was that of the Persians. As early as the middle of the second century the Romans had ​established trading-stations at Aden, on the shores of Arabia and in Socotra, while during the same period the commerical relations between the Persians and India had undergone a great expansion. Before the first half of the fifth century had ended this commerce had been considerably extended while the Roman trade had declined, and according to Masudi and Hamza of Ispahan the port of Hira was visited at this time by numbers of vessels, not only from the mainland of India, but also from distant China. The rise of the Muhammadan power, while it closed the portals of the East to the nations of Europe, gave to the Muslims the practical monopoly of Asiatic trade with the West, and during their prime the Khalifs of Baghdad were well-nigh supreme in the Indian Ocean, Muhammadan colonies were scattered broadcast over the eastern world, and in 758 the followers of the Prophet in China were sufficiently numerous to be able to cause serious disturbances in that country. The existence of these colonies too made it possible for a Muslim to travel with ease in almost any quarter of the East, and the excellent Ibn Batuta, the professional religious man who preyed upon the Faithful with such satisfaction to himself and to his victims, though he was one of the earliest to give to us a detailed account of his wanderings, was certainly not among the first Muhammadans to take advantage of the opportunities which the accident of their religion afforded to them.
It has already been noted that no mention of the sea-route to China occurs in any work prior to that of ​Marinus of Tyre, despite the fact that the overland route from India to the Celestial Empire had been in general use from a very remote period. It is certain, however, that the existence of the former means of communication must have been known to the mariners of the Far East long before any rumour concerning it filtered through to the geographers of Europe. The overland route was still much frequented as late as the thirteenth century, when the Polos passed over it on their journey to China, and its greater antiquity would suffice to account for the fact that it was familiarly known to traders from the West who visited India long before the sea-passage had been heard of by them. It is none the less impossible to believe that the latter highway was unknown, at any rate to the natives of Southern China, some time before the beginning of our era. The Chinese civilisation is one of the most ancient in existence, presenting as it does the twin marvel of an immense antiquity and of a precocious development inexplicably arrested. The Chinese are said to have understood the use of the mariner's compass as early as B. C. 2634, and though there is reason to question the accuracy of this statement, their written records concerning the properties of the lodestone date from early in the second century of our era, and it is thought that the compass was in practical use long before the earliest treatise of this kind which has come down to us. If this were so, it is at least possible that Chinese seamen were accustomed to venture out of sight of land before ever Hippalus made his way across the Indian Ocean, and a glance at the map will show that ​few opportunities for doing so would occur unless voyages from the point of Kambodia to the Malay Peninsula and the islands of the Archipelago, or again from the Straits of Malacca to Ceylon and India had become habitual.
We may conclude with a fair show of probability that the littorals of the China Sea, the Gulf of Siam and the Straits of Malacca were explored by the seamen of China not earlier than the coast-line between the mouths of the Indus and the Straits of Hormuz was skirted by the fleet of Alexander under Nearchus in the fourth century B. C.
Again, the unmistakable impress of Hindu influence which is to be detected in the architecture of the Khmers of Kambodia, several of whose buildings date from 200 B. C., demonstrates the fact that intercourse between India and Indo-China must have been frequent at a very early period, and such intercourse would almost certainly have been conducted by sea. It has even been accepted by many as a fact that Gauthama Buddha himself visited Kambodia, and if this were so—the matter is one which is hardly susceptible of mathematical proof—it would presuppose communication between India and Indo-China as early as 500 B. C.
Owing to the fact, already noted, that after the rise of the Muhammadan power the sea-borne trade between western and eastern Asia passed almost exclusively into the hands of Muslims, the first detailed accounts of the sea-route to China come to us from the Arabian and Persian geographers. The earliest Arabic manuscript of this kind belongs to the year A. D. 851, and has been edited and translated by M. Reinaud, the French ​Orientalist. The first few pages of this work are lost, but its earlier portion was obviously written by one who had himself made the China voyage. The second part of the book dates from the year 916, and is the work of a certain Abu Zaid Hassan, a native of Siraf on the Persian Gulf, who, though he does not appear to have had any personal experience of the trade-route dealt with, must have enjoyed opportunities of obtaining first-hand information from those who had themselves made the voyage. The portion of the book written by the mer chant-mariner is in the nature of sailing directions, and the Arab's genius for mispronouncing foreign tongues, which is second only to that of the Englishman, causes the proper names given in the manuscript to present a series of puzzles to the enquirer. M. Reinaud himself would appear to have completely misunderstood the route indicated, and by far the best identification which has yet been suggested is to be found in an article from the pen of M. Alfred Maury in the Bulletin de Géographie for the year 1846.
It would be tedious to examine in detail the grounds for the identification of the various seas and lands there set forth, but the facts to be gathered from an examination of the somewhat wearisome itinerary laid down in the manuscript are that ships sailing from India for China took, during the ninth century, approximately the following After touching at Ceylon and the Nicobars, they came to anchor in a port near the northeastern extremity of Sumatra. Thence, after occasionally touching at a State on the western coast of the Malay ​Peninsula, they made their way to the southern outlet of the Straits of Malacca, halted at the island of Bentan to take in fuel and water, or for similar purposes at an island of the Natuna group, came to port once more at some harbour either of the eastern shores of the Malay Peninsula, Siam or Kambodia, passed on to Champa, and thence to Zayton or some other port of the southern provinces of China. It will be noted that the route thus traced is practically identical with that over which we have supposed the sailor Alexander to have journeyed, and in a later chapter we shall find that a precisely similar course was followed by all the medieval travellers to and from China of whose wanderings we have a record. The sea-route via southeastern Asia had by this time become a well-beaten track, but certain ports of call were used to the exclusion of all others, and the primary value of this great highway was as a means of getting to and from China, few wanderers being tempted to stray from the appointed path which custom had marked out for ships plying in these waters.
The establishment of important commercial colonies in China by the Arabs and the Persians, concerning which Abu Zaid Hassan's portion of the manuscript furnishes some interesting particulars, presupposes that the passage to the Celestial Empire via the Straits of Malacca and the China Sea was now made by these people with great frequency, and the ports of call along that route, which seem to have been practically the same from the time of Marinus of Tyre to that of Ibn Batuta who returned from his wanderings in 1347, were also to some ​extent used by the Arabs as settlements and trade depôts. It is obvious from internal evidence furnished by the works of Abu Zaid, of Masudi, Edrisi and Abulfeda that a few Arab mariners turned aside from the beaten track sufficiently far for Java to become a country which was comparatively well-known, but this was the exception, not the rule, and nowhere do we find reason for thinking that the Arabs ever ventured far inland, save only in China itself. In spite of a wider and surer knowledge of Malaya and Indo-China than any which at this time was possessed by Europeans, the notions entertained concerning these regions by the Arabian geographers were still very vague and imperfect. Ptolemy's misapprehension concerning the Mediterranean character of the Indian Ocean was endorsed and perpetuated by successive Arabian geographers, many of whom doubtless arrived at this false conclusion independently of their great predecessor. Some held with him that the African continent was prolonged in such fashion that it lay to the south of Malaya, while others were of opinion that the great southern terra incognita, whose existence they had deduced from unknown premises, was divided from Africa by a narrow strait. For the rest, in spite of persistent attempts to treat geographical questions in a scientific manner, and to divide the habitable world into climates, or latitudes and longitudes, the general ideas at which they arrived concerning the comparative sizes and the relative positions of various countries were extraordinarily inexact.
This is well illustrated by the two maps showing the ​world according to Masudi and Edrisi respectively, here reproduced from M. Reinaud's excellent edition of La Geographie d' Aboulféda. Masudi, who wrote during the first half of the tenth century and who was a contemporary of Abu Zaid Hassan, had not only travelled extensively, but was also well versed in the literature of his subject and had had access to older Arabic works which have since been lost to us. His book therefore represented the widest and soundest geographical knowledge of his time, yet a glance at the chart which puts his conception of the universe before us in a convenient form suffices to demonstrate how radical were many of his misconceptions concerning the form and nature of the earth's surface, and how great was his confusion in matters of detail. For him Indo-China and Malaya consisted of one lozenge-shaped peninsula to the south of which lay Sumatra in the same latitude as Ceylon, while Java was situated further to the eastward almost on the same parallel. China itself was also a peninsula, separated from that of Indo-China by a great gulf, while far to the south of all lay a vast terra incognita which had its beginning near the south of the Sudan.
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The World, according to Erdisi
The World, according to Masudi ​belongs to it. When he passes to the eastward of Al Rami, or Sumatra, he becomes involved in inextricable confusion.
An examination of these two charts will serve better than aught else to bring home to the reader the exceedingly rudimentary state of geographical knowledge even as late as the twelfth century, yet it must be remembered that at this period the geographers of Arab nationality were far in advance of Europeans, and that, notwithstanding their many errors, substantial progress is shown by their work if it be compared with the shadowy surmises and guesses of Marinus and Ptolemy, more especially with regard to southeastern Asia.