About the Book
Gerini's Researches on Ptolemy's Geography of Eastern India remains an important contribution to the study of ancient geography, especially in terms of its treatment of the Indian subcontinent and Southeast Asia. While some of Gerini's conclusions have been updated with more recent scholarship and technology, his work continues to be influential for historians of ancient cartography, Indian history, and Southeast Asian studies.
His analysis of the geography of Ptolemy's Geographia laid the groundwork for later studies of ancient trade routes, maritime history, and the cultural exchanges that took place in the Indian Ocean and Southeast Asia. The intersections between Greek and Indian geography, as well as the interaction between ancient knowledge systems and local traditions, have remained key topics in the study of the region's historical geography.
Preface
THE word "Notes" originally heading the title-page of this work clearly showed the spirit which guided its preparation, and at that time no more was meant, for it was first intended as a series of articles for the Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, where the first of the series in fact appeared. This will account for the somewhat unsymmetrical arrangement of the text, as well as for the excessive disproportion in the length of its chapters, which would have been otherwise distributed and brought into shape if their embodiment into a compact volume had been planned from the outset, and if it could have been limited, as was then contemplated, to about one-third of the size it has ultimately attained.
It is entirely due to the initiative of the Royal Asiatic Society in honouring this work with a place among its Asiatic Monographs that the original notes, jotted down in a cursory manner, definitely assumed the present form.
A start was made to put them into type as early as 1899, but the printing and preparation for the press lingered on year after year as the striving after greater comprehensiveness intensified research and disclosed new facts and issues. Thus the subject-matter steadily increased; considerable interpolations and additions suggested themselves and even became necessary in order to bring the work up to date in the light of recent discoveries. This accounts for the far greater length of later chapters and for the more diffused treatment which the subject received after the first hundred pages or so in comparison with the earlier ones.