A Chinese Translation With Extensive Notes Of The Periplus Of The Erythraean Sea

The Periplus of the Erythraean Sea is a nautical record written in the Roman Empire.The full text of the book was written in koine Greek language,and the author may have been Greek businessman who lived in Egypt at the time.The whole book takes voyages as the line and ports as the point,its scope covers North Africa,East Africa,West Asia and South Asia.It describes in detail the commodity trading situation of the Egyptian province belonging to the Roman Empire and the Eastern countries at that time,which contains a lot of historical information on politics and economics and culture.It is also the earliest and complete historical material for the study of ancient East and West sea traffic history.However,the book seems to have not been treated as a mainstream work in the ancient West.It was not until the 19 th century that the academic community began to pay more attention to it,and different editions and modern translations of multiple languages emerged.Relying on the fruitful achievements of senior scholars,this paper aims to comprehensively analyze The Periplus of the Erythraean Sea,including the three parts of the problem overview,Chinese translation and extensive note.The translation bases on the more authoritative Frisk edition,and the notes refer to the commentary of Huntingford and Casson.Through generalize and analysis of the book,the paper provides a more reliable Chinese translation as far as possible.The text is written from the perspective of an ancient Roman citizen.Many of the accounts bear subjective imprints,in fact,it is the ancient Western understanding of the world at that time.The restoration and examination on paper also enriches the concept of the ancient world view to a certain extent.