India (Herodotus)

In ancient Greek geography, the basin of the Indus River (in northwestern Indian subcontinent, present-day Pakistan) was on the extreme eastern fringe of the known world. The Greek geographer Herodotus (5th century BC) describes the land as India, calling it ἡ Ἰνδική χώρη (Roman transliteration: hē Indikē chōrē, meaning "the Indus land"), after Hinduš, the Old Persian name for the satrapy of Sindh in the Achaemenid Empire. Darius the Great had conquered this territory in 516 BC. The Greek colonies in Asia Minor (western and central Turkey) were already part of the Achaemenid Empire since 546 BC and, thus, the Greeks and Indians came into contact with each other as subjects of the Empire.^[1]