![]() ![]() ![]() It is towards the middle of the 19 th century that the first Indian scholars approached Dante’s work. and, to the East, as the East coast of India where indeed the Ganges reaches the sea.ĭante, who imagined the mountain of Purgatory as being a solitary island in the centre of the watery hemisphere in the antipodes of Jerusalem, mentions the mouth of the Ganges more than once as being the eastern point of the astronomical horizon, common to both hemispheres, the only difference being that in Jerusalem’s hemisphere, at that point, the sun is seen to rise while in the opposite hemisphere, at the same point, it is seen to set (Purgatory, II, 5 – Purgatory XXVII, 4 – Paradise, XI, 51). And the limits of the inhabited lands were identified to the West as the last edges of the Iberian coastline between Cadiz and Portugal close to the Pillars of Hercules, Indeed, in the 13 th and 14 th centuries European astronomers and geographers and those of the Near East had no doubts about the Earth being a sphere, but they distinguished between the hemisphere of the known lands, with their centre at Jerusalem, and the opposite hemisphere which was believed to be entirely covered by the oceans. In Dante’s time, India, which was almost entirely under Arab domination, was very little known by the Europeans even if Marco Polo had visited some of its centres on the West coast in the course of his return journey (1292–1295) and had then spoken of them in his Milione.Īccording to Dante, India, and in particular the mouth of the river Ganges, was the extreme eastern limit of known lands, a fact that resulted besides, albeit approximately, from the planispheres of his time (in particular, from the Vesconte Planisphere of 1320). ![]()
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