Foreign Notices of South India

From Megasthenes to Ma Huan

Edited by K.A. Nilakanta Sastri

A comprehensive collection of historical accounts from foreign travelers and writers who visited or wrote about South India, spanning from ancient Greek historians to medieval Arab and Chinese travelers.

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Details

Year Published

1939

Publisher

University of Madras

Location

Madras, India

Pages

584

Chapters

Language

English

Reading Time

8-10 hours

Historical Period

Ancient to Medieval

About This Work

This remarkable compilation brings together foreign accounts of South India spanning nearly two millennia. From the ancient Greek ambassador Megasthenes to the Chinese voyager Ma Huan, these accounts provide unique perspectives on South Indian kingdoms, trade, culture, and society.

Original Source

I've made this book readable using AI (Claude Haiku 4.5, Gemini Flash 2.5, and Gemini 3) to extract text from scanned PDFs. In my experience, accuracy is typically around 85–95%. Since I run Akshara entirely on my own, I can't promise perfection, but I do run multiple passes to catch as many errors as possible.

A few things to keep in mind:

I maintain this project solo, so full manual verification just isn't feasible.
Someday I hope to make Akshara crowdsourced, so readers can help improve things.
Each book goes through 2–3 processing passes. I have no backers or sponsors, so I pay for all the API costs myself.

Known issues:

Text: missing chunks, repeated paragraphs, footnotes in wrong places, occasional AI hallucinations
Formatting: tables may be missing or poorly formatted, poetry may lose its structure
Languages: Sanskrit, Hindi, or other Indian language text may be missing or corrupted
Sections: indices, appendices, or end matter may be incomplete

If something feels off, please check the original PDF on Archive.org.

This book is also on Google Docs. If you spot errors, leave a comment there and I'll fix it.

Thanks for reading, and thanks for visiting Akshara.