NEW DELHI, INDIA April 18, 2011 (Telegraph India): Mariners from India’s east coast exploited monsoon winds to sail to southeast Asia more than 2,000 years ago, an archaeologist has proposed, challenging a long-standing view that a Greek navigator had discovered monsoon winds.
Sila Tripati at the National Institute of Oceanography (NIO), Goa, has combined archaeological, meteorological, and literary data to suggest that Indian mariners were sailing to southeast Asia riding monsoon winds as far back as the 2nd century BC.
A 1st century AD Greek text, ‘Periplus of the Erythreaean Sea’, and a contemporary Roman geographer named Pliny have claimed that the Greek navigator, Hippalus, discovered the monsoon winds and the route across the Arabian Sea to India around 45 AD.
But Tripati has now used multiple lines of evidence — from inscriptions on ancient Indian coins to bronze pottery from an archaeological site in western Thailand — to question that claim and argue that mariners of India’s east coast knew about the monsoon winds perhaps about 200 years before Hippalus. Tripati’s research is published in the journal Current Science from the Indian Academy of Sciences.