this post was submitted on 26 May 2024
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In medieval Europe, spices from outside the world known to Europeans made it there through chains of traders and were luxury items. (IIRC, a spice from what is now Indonesia is recorded as having been a gift at a wedding in what is now Poland in the 13th century.) I’m guessing the definition of “known to” in this post is similar: Romans had access (at a price) to goods from these places, though nobody from the Roman world had actually been there, or even met anyone from there.
As far as the ancient European world goes, I think the furthest east they actually got were some sort-lived Greek-speaking states in the vicinity of India.
People would follow the silk road sometimes. Rome actually had limited diplomatic contact with China, even. That's not on the map, maybe because they didn't really understand where it was, besides somewhere far to the east. I'm surprised SE Asia is on it, I'll have to do some reading about that, but India was known even to the Greeks.
Quality of information would drop off really rapidly with distance, though, since it was easy to make up a fish tale about what you saw in far-off lands. So, you find a lot of crazy BS mixed in with helpful nuggets in things like Herodotus's Histories.
Alexander even tried to conquer India, but died before he got that far.
IIRC some of the scribes say he actually did, but didn't stay out of respect for their bravery. But, yeah, that's basically "she goes to another school", that never happened.
Plineys writings serve the same purpose. An example of knowledge brought to my by beer.
There were hellenic Indo-Greek and Indo-Bactrian states in the northwestern India and Pakistan for some two hundred years. I recommend reading the wikipedia article about greek influence on buddhism. Fascinating stuff.