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The same method of measuring journeys by stops along a route was employed for sea travel recorded in the Periploi texts for the Phoenician and Arabian coasts. A Periplus was literally a “sailing around,” and was used as a title for several Greco-Roman texts giving the sailing distances around the Mediterranean sea, the Black Sea, and Indian Ocean. Sometimes the term paraplus, or “a sailing alongside,” is employed instead. Like Stathmoi texts, Periploi used a combination of distance units (based on variable sailing times as well as different measurement units, see Arnaud 1993: 231ff) and noted information about regions, cities, harbors, flora, fauna, commodities, and political curiosities along the routes described. Also like the land geographies, the Periploi were written to satisfy a number of different aims, some for practical application by navigators, others for more theoretical exercises. The earliest known Periplus is credited to Scylax of Caryanda, commissioned by Darius I to explore the Indus river and Indian Ocean.⁴ In the mid-fourth century BCE, an author now known as Pseudo-Scylax wrote a Periplus of the Mediterranean, which includes a description of the Syrian and Phoenician coast and so is a useful source for what was known of this region at the outset of the Hellenistic period (Müller, GGM I, xxxiii–li, 15–96). This text is wrongly attributed to Scylax of Caryanda (see Shipley 2011: 4–6), and it is now thought that it was not based on first-hand exploration, but worked more as philosophical geography. Alexander’s fleet-commander Nearchus and court historian Onesicritus wrote up accounts of their 326–325 BCE voyage from the Indus eastward to the Persian Gulf, which served as sources for Strabo and Pliny (HN 6.96, 109, 124; FGrH 133; Pearson 1960: 112ff). In 324 BCE Alexander sent out several explorers along the Arabian coast, including Androsthenes of Thasos, who had also traveled with Nearchus and wrote Periplus of the Indian Coast, a source used by Eratosthenes and Athenaeus (Strabo 16.3.2; Athen. 3.93b; FGrH 711; Wirth, “Androsthenes 4,” Der Kleine Pauly, 350–351; Potts 1990: 5). Other reports from sea expeditions sent by Alexander and the Ptolemies informed the historian and geographer Agatharchides of Cnidus (c. 200–c. 145 BCE) who wrote On the Erythraean Sea, known from excerpts in Diodorus Siculus (3.12–48), Strabo (16.5.5–20), and Photius (Bibliotheca Codex 250) (FGrH 86, Müller, GGM I, liv–lxxiii, 111–194; Burstein 1989: 30–32, 176ff).

In the second century BCE the Greeks learned about the monsoon winds, what they called the etesian (annual) winds, which permitted long-distance open-sea travel to India at certain times of year. Strabo (2.3.4) seems to report an early discovery of the monsoons in his account of the hapless Eudoxus of Cyzicus who made two voyages across the Indian Ocean for Ptolemy Physcon and Cleopatra III in c. 117–116 BCE, while the author of the Periplus Maris Erythraei (dated to the mid-first century CE based on a reference to Malichus II of Nabataea, r. 40–70 CE) credits a fellow sea-captain named Hippalos. It is possible that both attributions are correct and that other Hellenistic sea-farers independently noticed the phenomenon, but Strabo obtained his reference for the winds from a text, in this case Posidonius’s history of Eudoxus’s misadventures.⁵ Using the monsoons correctly, later travelers were able to venture much farther beyond the Persian Gulf and Arabia, although the Arabian frankincense trade ensured that Near Eastern ports remained important. The most complete Periplus text is the Periplus Maris Erythraei, preserved in a tenth-century codex (Codex Palatinus Graecus 398, fol. 40v–54v), written by an Egyptian Greek merchant from his personal experiences sailing out of the Red Sea at least as far as Rhapta (near Dar es-Salaam, Tanzania) and Cape Comorin, India.⁶ He meticulously reports the distances between stops, types of anchorage available at each stop, the local political situations, and what commodities can be acquired and offloaded. Much later, Marcianus of Heraclea (1.15–19) converted Ptolemy’s world map into a Periplus of the Outer Sea, supplying similar accounts of the Arabian and Persian Gulfs as the earlier Periploi authors, but within a global scheme (Schoff 1927: 6).