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Slender Evidence, Weighty Consequences: On One Word in the Periplus Maris Erythraei

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 May 2014

Jan Vansina
Jan Vansina*
Affiliation:
University of Wisconsin–Madison
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From time to time one encounters a situation where a wisp of a source yields evidence of momentous consequence for the understanding of a whole society in the past. Such a situation raises the question of how much evidentiary weight a slender source can credibly bear, for when the evidence is so slender or tenuous, the slightest misunderstanding or misinterpretation can lead to hugely magnified errors in historical reconstruction. At the same time, the more slender the evidence, the more tempted researchers will be to interpret it according to their own a priori vision of the past in question. This is a genuine problem which can only be overcome by finding more relevant evidence.

Such situations naturally crop up wherever sources (written or otherwise) are very rare, so that every scrap of evidence must be scrutinized and exploited with the greatest care and to its fullest extent, a common circumstance in African history in relation to written documents before ca. A.D. 1450 and documents at all times about topics such as, for instance, women's history or specific techniques of agriculture that were normally not recorded. The situation then, while unusual, is frequent enough to warrant a more detailed discussion of one such instance to illustrate what the problem is and how it can be tackled. This illustration will be the case of oratoi, a single word in the Periplus Maris Erythraei.

The Periplus is justly famous in African historiography. Known from a single manuscript now in Heidelberg and held to date from the early tenth century and a much later copy from that now in the British Museum, written in a mixture of classical and vulgar Greek by either a Greek living in Egypt or an Egyptian, and firmly dated to between AD 40-55, the Periplus contains the first, albeit succinct, information about the inhabitants of the East African coast, more than half a millennium before other comparable written mentions occur.

Type
Research Article
Information
History in Africa , Volume 24 , January 1997 , pp. 393 - 397
Copyright
Copyright © African Studies Association 1997

References

Notes

1. I doubt whether this note would ever have been written without the input of Professor Ken Sacks, a specialist in Greek history to whom I ran for help in the assessment of oratoi and The arotai proposed emendation. Thanks, Ken!

2. Casson, Lionel, ed., The Periplus Marts Erythraei: Text with Introduction, Translation, and Commentary (Princeton, 1989), 6n7Google Scholar, for a reference to the much debated date. The attempts by Gervase Mathew to claim that the manuscript in the British Museum is partly independent from that at Heidelberg and that the original manuscript is a “cumulative text,” and his proposed dates are all unconvincing. Cf. Mathew, , “The Dating and the Significance of the Periplus of the Erythraean Sea” in Chittick, H. Neville, and Rotberg, Robert I., eds., East Africa and the Orient: Cultural Syntheses in Precolonial Times, (New York, 1975), 147–63.Google ScholarHorton, Mark, “The Periplus and East Africa,” Mania 25 (1990), 95Google Scholar, narrows the dates from AD 40-70 to before AD 40-55.

3. Casson, , Periplus, 6 (Greek text), 7 (his translation).Google Scholar

4. Frisk, Hjalmar, “Le Périple de la Mer Érythrée suivi d'une étude de la tradition et la langue,” Göteborgs Högskolas Årsskrift, 33 (1927), 6Google Scholar; Huntingford, G.W.B., trans, and ed., The Periplus of the Erythraean Sea (London, 1980), 30, 63.Google Scholar

5. Casson, , Periplus, 82, 83.Google Scholar

6. Looking at oratoi without knowledge of Giangrande's article, Ken Sacks proposed the same interpretation.

7. Giangrande, G., “On the Text of the Periplus Maris Erythraei,” Mnemosyne 28 (1975), 293–94.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

8. Casson, , Periplus, 253–54.Google Scholar Technically the emendation is quite attractive because of the similarity between alpha and omicron. Omicron was written as a perfect circle and alpha as a loop in the shape of a circle, the only visual difference being alpha's two tiny extrusions at the beginning and the end of the loop.

9. On the etymology see Huntingford, , Periplus, 63.Google Scholar The meanings “laborer” or “dockworker” in vulgar Greek were established by Ken Sacks from a perusal of the Perseus database.

10. (London 1959), 151, where he discusses the contents of the Periplus. The same distaste for pirates, rather than a critical attitude toward the emendation, probably explains their absence in Sheriff's, A.M.H. “The East African Coast and its Role in Maritime Trade” in Unesco General History of Africa II (Berkeley, 1981), 555.Google Scholar

11. Oliver, Roland and Mathew, Gervase, eds., History of East Africa I (Oxford 1963), 95Google Scholar; Freeman-Grenville, G.S.P., The East African Coast (Oxford 19620, 2Google Scholar; Rotberg, Robert I., A Political History of Tropical Africa (New York, 1965): 28Google Scholar—and 27n59 for the link with Mathew; Fage, J.D., ed., The Cambridge History of East Africa 2 (Cambridge, 1978), 373 (by Roland Oliver and Brian Fagan).Google Scholar

12. Horton, , “Periplus,” 96.Google Scholar

13. Sutton, J.E.G. “East Africa: Interior and Coast,” Azania 29/30 (1994/1995), 231Google Scholar; Yajima, H., “Some Problems on the Formation of the Swahili World” in Sato, Shun and Kurimoto, Eisei, eds., Essays on Northeast African Studies (Osaka, 1996), 348n2.Google Scholar

14. Giangrande, , “Text,” 294.Google Scholar See also Periplus 20:16; 27:20; 30:6-7; 33:16.

15. Casson, , Periplus, 60/61 and 84/85.Google Scholar