ABSTRACT
Social behaviours are ranked in such a way that the most preferable are to be found in the heartlands of ‘Aryan’ India, which also receives the greatest degree of detail by comparison with the margins. Comparison between the Periplus and the Natural History would, on the face of it, suggest a clear distinction between local and global knowledge, where global obviously refers to the extended Mediterranean region known to Greeks and Romans as the oikoumene or orbis terrarum. Another aspect of India’s representation on the Peutinger map deserves mention: the place it accords Alexander. In the case of the ancient Mediterranean, the question of defining maps is made more acute by the lack of surviving visual evidence when we know for a fact that ancient Greek and Roman societies did, in fact, have and use maps. Claudius Ptolemy’s Geography was destined to have a profound impact on the history of maps.
