George Nedungatt: India Confused with Other Countries in Antiquity?OCP 76/2 (2010) 315-337In several writings of antiquity India is a rather vague term and may refer to a range of countries which wereidentified with geographical precision only later. Greek etymology played no little role in this ancientgeographical confusion. A recent book by Pierre Schneider has documented this confusion between India andEthiopia in particular from the 8th century B.C. till the 6th century A.D.1 Schneider demonstrates his thesisabout confusion with ample citations of texts from ancient writers. But he does not cite texts in which Indiaand Ethiopia are seen or are presented as 2 different countries. Concerned to record only the confusionbetween India and Ethiopia, Schneider does not cite Perumalil either, who had collected much evidence toshow that the ancients knew that India and Ethiopia were 2 different countries.2 Already at the close of the17th century Tillemont had adverted to the difficulty caused to historiography by uncertain geography. Hewrote:Several ancients have said that St. Thomas took the faith to Ethiopia and to India, but we are not obliged to believethat he preached outside the country of the Parthians. For we know that the ancients knew very little of what occurredbeyond the borders of the Roman Empire. They often gave the name of India and Ethiopia to countries that lay faraway from the eastern and the southern frontiers.3The problem formulated thus by Tillemont has been expressed or repeated ever since by scholars with orwithout an explicit citation. As regards the perception of the Syriac writers in particular Alphonse Minganaasserted:Speaking exclusively of Syriac authors, we find that the majority of them classify the Indians among Hamitesalongside the Ethiopians. This is done by Michael the Syrian in his general history (I, 18 and 32), by the anonymousand early writers of the different races of mankind on the earth,4 and by Barhebraeus,5 to mention only 3 o...