Knidoslu Agatharkhides

Born in Knidos, Agatharchides worked in Alexandria, the great centre of Hellenistic learning, in the circle of the Ptolemaic court. His masterpiece "On the Erythraean Sea" is the oldest surviving extensive account of the Red Sea and the lands around it — the geography and peoples of the coasts of northeast Africa and Arabia — describing in detail the gold mines, the coastal tribes and the region's natural history. The original is lost; it survives through the abridgements of Diodorus, Strabo and Photius.

He represents Knidos's seafaring and scholarly tradition in the Hellenistic age: his fellow townsman Eudoxus mapped the sky, while he mapped distant seas. His writing became the foundation of every later ancient account of Red Sea and Indian Ocean trade — the reach of a curiosity born on this peninsula extended to the coasts of Africa.