Source: TW
Scylax of Caryanda is perhaps the first “Greek-adjacent” individual to set foot in the subcontinent. Although the Periplus of Scylax appears to have been known in antiquity, the original text hasn’t survived till the modern day. The extant Periplus of Pseudo-Scylax is a different work composed centuries later. The accounts concerning Indians from the writings of Hecataeus of Miletus, Herodotus, Ctesias, and other early Greek authors are clearly filtered through secondary sources like Persians. Only a handful of select passages in those sources are reliable (e.g. references to cotton, or rather, “wool growing on trees”). It’s not until Megasthenes (a contemporary of Alexander) that we get a semi-reliable, first-hand Greek view of India. His accounts (or rather, the fragments that exist) are more realistic than earlier sources, though even his India was populated with fantastical creatures like sciapodes (i.e. a tribe of men who used their massive single feet as parasols) & astomi (i.e. a tribe of men with no mouths who lived solely off smells).