How the fuck did the Ancient Greeks know about Lake Victoria?

That's pretty awesome, any other sources on early exploration of the Nile river.

Also, is Herodotus' histories worth reading for this kind of info about the ancient world?

Herodotus is a pretty fun read with some very interesting accounts of ancient cultures such as the sythians, ethiopians and indians, but he sometimes sounds like your old grandpa going off on tangents and telling you about the gold digging camel eating ants of Afghanistan or the dog headed people of Europe.

No one actually had to go there and come back technically. Some merchant goes to Meroe meets dindus with tales of the interior. A bantu tribesman knows a tribe who knows a tribe who lives on the lake. This knowledge becomes accepted there are some big ass lakes at head of Nile.

This, same way they know about Sri Lanka and Southeast Asia.

he described germanic cities as well. Unfortunately most if not all of the remains have been destroyed in the world wars.

East Africa wasn't as isolated from the Roman world as one might think. You had a trading civilization on the coast, Azania, which was the precursor of sorts to the later Swahili sultanates.

You had Roman explorers visit and describe the Mountains of the Moon/Lunae Mons in interior east africa (although some might have confused Kilimanjaro as belonging to the Lunae Mons, which is now believed to be the Rwenzori range in Uganda). Uganda/Kilimanjaro isn't too far away from Lake Victoria, which is much bigger than it looks on a map.

Herodotus is full of bullshit

Wasn't there a direct Roman - Sri Lankan connection?
I remember reading the story of some Roman merchant who convinced the Sri Lankans he as emperor

Possibly, but would that have been the case when Ptolemy made his map?

No, I just looked up the story and it's from the Byzantine period.

>5 months
Merchants were regularly making trips more than twice that long, just to make a living.
>hundreds of years to reach Sardinia.

>expecting dindus to have anything worth trading

Oh but they do

Was kinda disappointed that image didn't feature black women desu

Black women aren't worth anything. They're all ugly and smell bad, at least black males are strong and can work hard, black females are completely useless.

Thing on that map is mountains tho

But black females can breed black males.

I think you mixed something up: Azanis is the Name for all of east africa, at least in the periplus maris erythranei don't for other sources
The coastal Tradingpost/pirate kingdom is in the town/city of Rhapta , which some asume was situated as south as modern Mozambique

A king from Ceylon once send an embassy to Rome.
Also there was constant trade between egypt and the malabar coast in the first centuries ad

People would go from Sardinia to Cyprus in the bronze age, but I think 5 months is an exaggeration, more like two weeks or so

How did they do that? even with Renaissance tech it's barrily possible

I really shouldn't use that meme when I never bothered saving the related image...

Cypriots had galleys, look for instance army the uluburun wreck, They had the best ships at the time, in fact all bronze age shipwrecks found in the Mediterranean were probably built in Cyprus. Sardinians left no wrecks but they depicted ships in their iconography, which seemed large enough to make the trip, archaeologists have also found the cargo of one of their ships off the coasts of Sardinia and it probably transported tin ingots from Iberia

>guy in the front thinking what the fuck am I in for

Thanks for the Info but you should really gut your memes up to date.

There was some level of civilization around Lake Victoria. Individual merchants and traders went as far south as Tanzania at the very least and through Chinese whispers news would be able to reach Egypt. Shit, even Herodotus went far south in Egypt. The brutal barrier swamp in the Sudan that tends to be the biggest obstacle to travel south from Egypt could stop armies, but not individuals.

>civilization around lake victoria

Not during Greek times

Related in its scope:
simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_expeditions_to_Lake_Chad_and_western_Africa

The ancients did travel past the desert and knew of much of the world.

Here you go senpai

I have a feeling that this might be later reprint of the map, not the original.

It is. We have no original world maps of Ptolemy's saved. The one in the op is a 15th century copy of a 13th century Byzantine reconstruction of Ptolemy's map, based on Ptolemy's writing.

>People still believing this bait

Also Roman names for regions and oceans go virtually unchanged for English and many other languages. Cool.

They had contacts with Ethiopians, so it's not that wildly implausible.

>bantu
Nubians were not bantus.

Probably this

o wow, i actually know the answer

they didn't know, but there was a LONG standing tradition of HUGE mountains and 3 HUGE lakes that fed the mighty Nile River. Since they did know about the Nile, see it with their own eyes, and yes, it was a MIGHTY river, they just believed the ancient tradition.

Like many times in history, the story wasn't completely false. HUGE mountains in mysterious, unexplored interior Africa: not true. 3 HUGE lakes somewhere in unexplored interior Africa: turned out to be true.

lets talk more, i LOVE geographic history

How did the Greeks know about West Africa?

You type obnoxiously.

The Romans have been sending expeditions into West Africa since Augustus' time.

I'm not sure how many people in this thread know this, but Ptolemy the Geographer lived in 2 century AD and was a Roman citizen. This is not Alexander's world we're talking about here.

Carthaginians problably had a better map thanks to hanno the navigator

Egypt, Arabs, and Phoenician. The Red Sea was used considerably.

>Slavers would actually give black slave women gifts, money or even their freedom once they gave them a certain amount of black children
I do not know if the Slavers themselves or the women who agreed were more fucked up.

"""Direct""". There's a number of intermediaries. Depending on the era a roman could visit Sri Lanka, it just doesn't make sense for him to do so. So it may have happened since people someone do things without a proper reason but it wasn't normal.

Arabs castrated their black male slaves and continuously imported more. All this work was done to avoid importing the satanic creature known as the black woman into their country.

Most colonies prefered to import more slaves rather than have them breed. It was actually economically cheaper.

The women obviously. For the slavers the kids were nothing more than commodity, there was no bond between them. The women however were selling their own children to slavery for trinkets. And the evilness of black females continues to this day, the main reason why black communities in America are so fucked up is because the men are being raised by these sociopathic cunts.

>The Red Sea
He said WEST

Arab slavers castrated the men and benised the women.
Of course they imported female slaves, they wanted harem meat m8.

Nobody wants to fuck those things, not even black men. There's a reason why they're so crazy about white and hispanic women.

>egyptians
>sea traders

You're kidding? The Nile is extremely easy to navigate and it made the egyptians absolutely shitty sailors.

My bad

The phoenicians. They colonized areas in modern day Morocco.

It's certainly worth reading, but get an edition that's well annotated because he alludes to a lot of things that might not be clear to you. A lot of it is a chronicle of stories people told him, there are some pretty saucy ones in there.

Did you break up with a black girl or something?