So did the ancient Greeks have knowledge about other distant races...

So did the ancient Greeks have knowledge about other distant races? Reading mythology by Edith Hamilton I read something about how the greeks believed that where strange races of men that existed beyond the ocean like the Hyperborean and Cimmerians, was this the greeks interpretation of other distant races?

Probably not

Europe didn't know much about anything east of Persia until the high medieval period, when extensive trade networks were established by Christian monasteries

>when extensive trade networks were established by Christian monasteries
u wot m8

tin trade routes stretched from Afghanistan to Greece during the bronze age, people definitely knew a lot more than we think they did

And yet all of that collapsed into irrelevance at the end of the Bronze Age

>didn't know anything east of Persia until the high medieval period
Herodotus name-drops India. Ctetias, shortly after him, and wrote a histories on India. Imperial Rome had some some-what knowledge of China.

The more further the area, the more stranger and bs the tales get about the people.

>Europe didn't know much about anything east of Persia until the high medieval period
Rome had trade with China so nah, you're full of shit.

>Imperial Rome had some some-what knowledge of China
They had a round-about trade route with China, though it's likely they had no idea the goods came from China since China to them was this quasi-mythical place at the edge of the world.

This is an illustration made from a roman guide book for merchants interested in trading opportunities in the Indian Ocean.

Proof?

Pytheas of Massalia circumnavigated Britain in the 4th Century BC, was the first person to describe the summer midnight sun in northern latitudes, and possibly discovered Iceland.

Unfortunately his primary account of his voyages have been lost.

Roman glassware found in China, mentions of the Greeks in Daxia (Bactria) and their assistance in designing/training the prisoners that built the terracotta army, and Chinese jade found in Roman ruins. There's plenty of evidence of trade between Rome and China, though most of it was indirect, it still happened.

Until all of the planet was discovered people thought that everything is possible, not like us who think that everything we don't know about is impossible.
People coexisted with other humanoids for tens of thousands of years and even after that a traveller to far lands could have discovered unknown animals, ruins of deserted cities that were bigger than the biggest cities he knew from his homeland and other cultures that very very strange to him with very different looking people.

I love it when fucktards get called out and picked apart from getting shit out of their ravaged, leaking, AIDS-ridden anuses. Good job lads!

Forgot the silk, m8.

Alexander had personally reached the Indus. His wife was roughly from Afghanistan.

They had silk you moron.

The Byzantines only managed to produce silk after some missonaries smuggled the silkworms out of Central Asia.

Just because Roman goods made it to China and vice versa doesn't mean they know anything about each other. If everybody trades with their immediate neighbors only, eventually goods disperse everywhere.

Except we have written accounts from China talking about Rome and from Rome talking about China, and we know the Romans had a trading outpost in southern India.

And there was a Greek enclave far east of India that bordered southern China (The place where the Chinese Emperor tried to get horses from).

That doesn't mean the Romans KNEW a whole lot about China, just that far out east there was some empire.

>Except we have written accounts from China talking about Rome and from Rome talking about China,

Yes, and what do they say? How much actual knowledge do they show? Was China more than "the very far away place where this stuff came from," to Romans?

>So did the ancient Greeks have knowledge about other distant races?

Depends on how far back you consider the Greeks "ancient".

If you're talking about in the Classical period, no, they probably didn't.

Tacitus did know about Germanics though 300 years after the Classical period.

Absolute horseshit. A Chinese embassy even arrived in Rome during the 2nd century AD, and the Greeks had founded a kingdom that straddled the borders of India and Central Asia. Chinese explorers and merchants visited their prosperous Baktrian cities in Ferghana as early as the 3rd century BC.

Well they knew that north of them were a bajillion "celtoi" peoples that we call the Celts today. And I'm pretty sure the term Albion to refer to Britain is from the Greeks.

They knew OF Dravidian indians since Herodotus specifically mentions Ethiopians from the east during the Persian war. But further east than that, what they knew was from bar room tales from traders as far as I know.