What societies would be on the edge of the known world for a Roman (early imperial era)?

by Aurevir

I am thinking in terms of how Herodotus describes Ethiopia- it's understood to be a real place, but contacted only indirectly, and what facts are known about it are tied up with plenty of myth and supposition (about people with their heads in their chests, for example). Information about both primary and secondary sources related to such would be also appreciated.

rosemary85

A lot depends on context. When the 1st century BCE poet Catullus wants to chart a route throughout the world from east to west (poem 16), he lists off

  1. India
  2. Hyrcania
  3. Arabia
  4. Scythia
  5. Parthia
  6. the Nile (Egypt, Aethiopia)
  7. the Alps
  8. the Rhine (border of Germania)
  9. Britain ("remotest of men").

India is effectively the far east, Scythia the far north, and Britain the far northwest.

In a more stolid frame of mind, the 2nd century CE geographer and scientist Claudius Ptolemy, who lived in Alexandria, Egypt, came up with a thorough atlas of the world inasmuch as information about it was available to him. The boundary regions in his atlas are:

  1. to the south: Aethiopia Interior in Africa (Geographia 4.6, covering the entire width of the continent);
  2. to the east: India beyond the Ganges, and the Sinai (7.2, =Qin China);
  3. to the north and northeast, heading east from Germania: Sarmatia (5.9, =modern Ukraine), Scythia (6.9-14, =southern Russia, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan), and Serica (6.14, =NW China?).

Here's an interactive map where you can zoom in (point and click; no dragging or scrolling, sorry) and look at the locations that Ptolemy charts in his atlas. The longitudes are very imprecise, and don't actually reflect the surveying information that Ptolemy had access to, because of problems in his own calculations and problems in the transmission of his text (recent work has increased our understanding of Ptolemy's data significantly); but even so, if you zoom in two levels you can see what individual locations and peoples he assigned to each region.

Another 2nd century writer, Strabo, also wrote a detailed account of peoples of the world, but he's not as thorough and careful as Ptolemy, doesn't include some of the more distant locations, and doesn't include longitudes and latitudes.