Scylax: Darius’s sailor from the Indus to the Red Sea

About 2,500 years ago, King Darius of Persia had a question in mind: where does the River Indus finally flow into the sea? To find the answer, he sent out boats. With them he sent a sailor from Asia Minor named Scylax. The party entered the river in the region of Gandhara and reached the Indus delta. It then went by sea along Makran and Arabia and through the Red Sea to Egypt. It is among the oldest recorded expeditions to pass through our land.

Background: the sailor of Caria and the empire of Darius

Herodotus calls Scylax “a man of Caryanda”. Caryanda was a small settlement in Caria, in south-western Asia Minor (present-day Turkey). Herodotus’s own city, Halicarnassus, was also in this region. At that time the area was part of the Persian Achaemenid empire, so Scylax was in the service of the Persian king.

The Encyclopaedia Britannica writes that, according to Herodotus, Darius I sent Scylax around 515 BC to find the route of the Indus. According to Jona Lendering, editor of the Livius website, the journey took place after 519 BC, when Darius’s rule had become secure, and before 512 BC, when India had apparently become part of the Persian empire.

The journey: from Caspatyros to the sea

Herodotus writes in Book IV that Darius discovered much of Asia. He wished to know where the Indus, which he says is one of only two rivers in the world that have crocodiles, flows into the sea. He sent several men whose truthfulness he trusted, in ships, and Scylax of Caryanda was among them.

They set out from “the city of Caspatyros and the country of Pactyike” and sailed down the river “towards the east and the sunrise” to the sea. Lendering writes that Pactyike was part of ancient Gandhara, and that Caspatyros, which no other source mentions, must have been somewhere on the River Kabul. The Indus flows south, not east. Many scholars therefore think the party first went east on the Kabul and turned south after joining the Indus. Others think Herodotus made a mistake in giving the direction.

Caspatyros also appears in Book III of Herodotus. There he writes that the Indians living near Caspatyros and Pactyike live to the north of the other Indians and are the most warlike. He adds that they are the ones who go to fetch gold from the “gold-digging ants” in the sandy desert. That story will be covered, with reference to Herodotus, in the sixth instalment of this series.

The sea route: the thirtieth month

According to Herodotus, from the mouth of the river the men sailed west on the sea. In the thirtieth month they reached the place from which the king of Egypt had sent Phoenician sailors on their voyage round Africa, that is, the northern end of the Red Sea. Britannica describes it as a voyage of two and a half years that ended near Suez.

Herodotus gives no details of the voyage. According to Lendering, the route must have passed the Indus, the Indian Ocean coast and the Persian Gulf. It must then have rounded the Arabian peninsula and entered the Red Sea. He writes that we can gauge this coast from a voyage two centuries later. Nearchus, the admiral of Alexander the Great, went by the same route from the Indus along the Makran coast to the Persian Gulf. His account mentions the tides, whales and the hard life on the coast of Gedrosia. Nearchus’s voyage is the subject of the seventh instalment of this series.

After the voyage: the Indus in the Persian empire

Herodotus writes that after this voyage Darius subdued the Indians and began to use that sea. According to Lendering, the expedition was therefore in fact preparation for the conquest of the Indus valley. In his list of the provinces of Darius’s empire, Herodotus names the Indians as the twentieth province. It paid 360 talents of gold dust every year, which he says was more than any other province.

Some commentators have also doubted whether the voyage took place as Herodotus describes it, since the only detailed account is in his book. Britannica and Lendering, however, both accept it as historical.

The lost book of Scylax

According to Britannica, Scylax was a forerunner of geography and the first Western observer to write about India. References by ancient writers show that he wrote an account of his voyages, but the book was lost. The few fragments that survive suggest it was a coastal guide for sailors. It contained geography and accounts of peoples, and, in its description of India, some strange tales.

The Greek philosopher Aristotle cites the book in his “Politics”. He writes that rulers are not so far above their subjects “as Scylax says the kings are in India”. According to Britannica, the “Periplus” (coastal voyage account) that exists today under the name of Scylax cannot be his work and is by a later author. Lendering writes that the fame of Scylax in the ancient world was so great that a naval guidebook of the fourth century BC was published under his name.

Significance

The voyage of Scylax is the first occasion on which the Indus, Gandhara and the coast of Sindh entered Greek writings. It showed the Greeks that Egypt could be reached from India by sea. Two centuries later Alexander and Nearchus followed the same route. After that, for centuries, trading ships sailed from the Indus delta to the Red Sea. They will be covered in the tenth instalment of this series.

Next instalment: Hanno: the Carthaginian admiral and the west coast of Africa.