page_title: Regio Patalis
section_title: The Regio Patalis in classical literature
hierarchical_section_title: Regio Patalis / The Regio Patalis in classical literature
caption_attribution_description: English: Closeup of the Martin Waldseemüller map showing the city of "Patala"
context_page_description: Regio Patalis is Latin for “the region of Patala”, that is the region around the ancient city of Patala at the mouth of the Indus River in Sindh, Pakistan. The historians of Alexander the Great state that the Indus parted into two branches at the city of Patala before reaching the sea, and the island thus formed was called Patalene, the district of Patala. Alexander constructed a harbour at Patala.
  While the Patala was well known to mariners and traders of the Ancient Mediterranean, by the European Middle Ages, mapmakers no longer knew its location. Regio Patalis appeared on late 15th and early 16th century maps and globes in a variety of increasingly erroneous locations, further and further east and south of India. It even appeared on some maps as a promontory of Terra Australis.
  Some scholars identify Patala with Thatta, a one-time capital of Sindh. But the identity of Patala is much debated among scholars.
context_section_description: Pliny the Elder (Gaius Plinius Secundus, 23-79 AD) referring to “the island of Patale, at the mouth of the Indus”, wrote in Historia Naturalis: “Also in India [as well as at Aswan in Egypt] at the well-known port of Patale the sun rises on the right and shadows fall southward”.
  The geographer Strabo (c.64 BC–c.24 AD) had said: “The Indus falls into the southern sea by two mouths, encompassing the country of Patalênê, which resembles the Delta in Egypt”.   He noted: “All these [nations] were conquered by Alexander, and last of all he reduced Patalênê, which the Indus forms by splitting into two branches… Patalênê contains a considerable city, Patala, which gives its name to the island”. 
    
  The 1507 Martin Waldseemüller map shows Patala in this location. 
  In the late 2nd  century BC, Agatharchides of Cnidus recorded merchants from Patala, or as he called it, Potana, coming to the island of Socotra to trade with Alexandrian merchants.   The 2nd century AD author Dionysios Periegetes said in his Orbis Descriptio: “This river [the Indus] has two mouths, and dashes against the island enclosed between them, called in the tongue of the natives, Patalênê”. Or, as Priscian put it in his popular rendition of Periegetes: “the River Indus... Patalene is girt by its divided waters.” 
  Siltation has caused the Indus to change its course many times since the days of Alexander the Great, and the site of ancient Patala has been subject to much conjecture. Ahmad Hasan Dani, director of the Taxila Institute of Asian Civilisations, Islamabad, concluded: “There has been a vain attempt to identify the city of Patala. If ‘Patala’ is not taken as a proper name but only refers to a city, it can be corrected to ‘Pattana’, that is, [Sanskrit for] a city or port city par excellence, a term applied in a later period to Thatta [onetime capital of Sindh], which is ideally situated in the way the Greek historians describe”.  
  The eighteenth century French geographer, Jean-Baptiste Bourguignon d'Anville, also identified Thatta with Patala:“Tatta is not only a town, but also a province of India, according to modern travellers; this town has taken the place of the ancient Patala or Pattala, which formerly gave name to the country included between the mouths of the Indus.” This opinion was shared by Alexander Burnes, who voyaged up the Indus on a diplomatic mission in 1831-32, and wrote:"The antiquity of Tatta is unquestioned. The Pattala of the Greeks has been sought for in this position, and, I believe, with good reason; for the Indus here divides into two great branches; and these are the words of the historian:- ‘Near Pattala, the river Indus divides itself into two vast branches’ (Arrian, lib.vi). Both Robertson and Vincent appear to have entertained the opinion of its identity with Tatta".
  The reason for Pliny mentioning Patala, or as he called it, Patale, was to indicate that it, like the other places mentioned in the same chapter of his Natural History, particularly Syene (Aswan, in Egypt), was situated on or below the Tropic of Cancer and so shadows there were cast southward in midsummer, thus demonstrating the rotundity of the Earth. Pliny, writing in Latin, used the form, Patale: in accordance with convention, he treats Patala, being for him a Greek-derived noun, as a third declension Latin noun with the genitive form Patalis, as though its nominative case was Patale: hence, Regio Patalis not Regio Patalae.
  Syene is connected with the measurement of Earth's circumference by Eratosthenes of Cyrene in c.240 BC, although the method traditionally considered a used by Eratosthenes is actually a simplification of another author, Cleomedes, who proposed his readers to imagine to observe the angle of a shadow cast at Alexandria on the day of the summer solstice — eighty-three degrees — and deducting that from the ninety-degree right angle of the sun over Syene on the same day, from that deducing the acute angle — seven degrees — at the apex of the segment of the Earth's circumference represented by the known distance from Syene to Alexandria — 500 stadia
caption: Patala on the Waldseemüller map
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