The mystery of Cattigara, the city located at the ends of the ancient world
Today, everyone has at their disposal a magnificent virtual library that allows him to obtain the information are looking for, in all languages, in real time: Google.
In ancient times, there was a place where an immense amount of information was locked up, which, unfortunately, was lost forever: it was the Royal Library of Alexandria in Egypt.
In 296 BC, the Greek Demetrius of Falero traveled to Alexandria, perhaps because King Ptolemy I commissioned him to organize the Library, whose initial objective was to keep Greek culture alive within Egyptian society, which was closed to all types of changes.
Over time, the rulers of the Ptolemaic dynasty made the Library the most important cultural center in the world, not only because they had obtained ancient manuscripts from Greece, Ethiopia, Persia and India, but also because the great sages of the time met there, creating, in this way, a very favorable environment for the development of sciences, technology and the arts.
During the rule of Ptolemy II, Zenodotus of Ephesus and Callimachus organized the Library by subject, cataloging manuscripts by subject, in the same way that a modern library is divided into shelves today.
Over time, the manuscripts, and with them the information coming from the entire ancient world, grew immeasurably: 400,000 were the volumes available in the time of Ptolemy II, while in that of Mark Antony, a few years before the birth of Christ, there were even 900,000 volumes.
One of the most important collections was the History of the World by the Babylonian priest Berossus, which narrated the time from the creation of the Earth to the flood, for him lasting 432,000 years.
Unfortunately, the Library was destroyed in the course of the following centuries.
Most of the information we have today comes from the discovery, at the end of the 19th century, at the archaeological site of Oxyrhynchus, 190 kilometers from Cairo, of thousands of papyri, written in ancient Greek, that described the Library and the scholars who frequented it.
The most famous scientists who often visited the Library were the mathematicians Archimedes and Euclid; Aristarchus of Samos, the first scientist who supported the heliocentric theory; Eratosthenes, the first man to calculate, with surprising precision, the circumference of the Earth; the geographer and astronomer Claudius Ptolemy, among others.
The latter (100-170 AD) was the one who supported the geocentric theory (in contrast to Aristarchus of Samos), which considered the Earth immobile at the center of the universe, with the sun revolving around it.
One of the most important works that Claudius Ptolemy left is Geography, or the description of the world.
His sources were the great Phoenician navigator Marinus of Tire (210-150 BC), as well as messengers from the Roman Empire and ancient Persian manuscripts.
Although the original work has been lost, many copies were made over the centuries, for example, that of the Arab writer Al-Masudi, from 956 BC, which contained the description of some 4,530 cities.
In the map of the world that he had designed, Ptolemy took the equator as a reference point for latitude, just as now, while longitude (with no more than 180 degrees of amplitude) was calculated from the Canary Islands (in that time called Lucky Ones).
Ptolemy's map represented the island of Taprobana (Sri Lanka or Sumatra), the Golden Chersonesos (which some identify with the Malay Peninsula), India Intra Gangem (India), and India Extra Gangem (Indochina and China), and the Simantinus Mountains (Himalayan mountain range). The enormous peninsula that extends beyond India Extra Gangem could be, in my opinion, the representation of the lands of Indochina, Indonesia and the seabeds of the latter, which were not underwater during the glacial period.
At the northeastern end of the lost map, Ptolemy located the land called Serica or Sinae (land of silk, China), while at the southeastern end was the port of Cattigara.
For example, in the medieval map (taken from Geography) by Henricus Martellus in 1489, the Asian continental mass was represented in a huge peninsula, at the end of which was Cattigara.
For Ptolemy, Cattigara was a large port located at the southeastern end of the so-called Sinus Magnus (or, the great gulf).
There was little information about the distant world of China (or Cathay) that reached Alexandria, but it was known that it was a great empire, located at the eastern end of the known world. News about the Middle Kingdom came as early as 230 BC, when the Greco-Hellenistic king of Bactria (present-day Afghanistan), Euthydemus I, sent his emissaries to Kashgar, in modern-day western China. And since then silk began to be imported in increasing quantities into the Greco-Hellenistic world, since, indeed, fragments of silk were found in many European tombs dating back to that period.
According to several historical sources, it is certain that the Romans traveled to India (Pliny the Elder narrates that Annio Plocamo arrived in Taprobana, present-day Sri Lanka).
Probably, it was Hindu and Persian merchants who described those distant lands to Babylonian scholars and priests, who in turn took the information to Alexandria.
Cattigara was therefore described as a port city, situated eight and a half degrees north of the Equator.
According to the classical interpretation, the Sinus Magnus corresponded to the current South Chinese Sea and Cattigara was a port located in current Indonesia or Indochina, while, according to other hypotheses Cattigara was precisely the current Canton (Guangzhou).
In Ptolemy's Geography (Book I, chapter XIV), it is written:
Marino de Tiro does not record the number of stadiums between the Golden Chersonesus and Cattigara. Alexander the Great wrote that the coastline extends southwards and that they, coasting along, reached Zaba after twenty days and that, continuing in a southeasterly direction for another twenty days, they reached Cattigara.
On several medieval maps, all taken from Ptolemy's Geography, Cattigara, on the other hand, was located 8 and a half degrees below the equator and 178 degrees west of the Canary Islands, as for example on the Martellus map of 1489 or in that of Waldseemüller from 1507.
According to some leading researchers, on the contrary, things are not so simple, and Cattigara was located in a place much more distant from current Southeast Asia.
First of all, the Sinus Magnus could be recognized as the Pacific Ocean and the enormous peninsula that extends beyond Cathay would be the New World, crudely represented.
According to these theses, Cattigara (the name could mean city of the Chinese or Catai-gara), was founded by the Chinese shortly before the beginning of the Christian era on the northern coasts of present-day Peru, precisely where the ruins of the city of Chan Chan, capital of the Chimú empire stand today.
However, until today this hypothesis has not been supported by archaeological findings or documents.
Another thesis that would support the idea that the Chinese arrived in Peru in ancient times is given by Marco Polo in his famous book El Millón.
In that book, Marco Polo said that he had visited Cipango and, in addition, he states that Emperor Kublai sent a fleet there (which returned to China in 1269) to conquer it or perhaps just to establish commercial ties.
Upon Marco Polo's return to Venice, towards the end of the 13th century, news spread throughout the Western world of the existence of a land called Cipango, well known to the Chinese.
For many researchers, Cipango was Japan, but, in his relations, Marco Polo stated that Cipango was located 1,500 nautical miles east of Cathay (east of China), and that would not allow Cipango to correspond with Japan, which is located just 100 miles from the Korean peninsula.
The etymology of the name Cipango would be none other than Cipan-guo and, as in Chinese the word guo means "country", Cipan-guo could mean country of Cipan or land of Sipán (or, kingdom of Sipán, the ancient land of the Moche culture in northern Peru).
The distance of 1,500 nautical miles from Cathay would suggest that Cipango was an offshore island and could not be America.
However, it must be remembered that Ptolemy's geographical vision was “flat”, that is, he conceived of a world of only 180 degrees. Marco Polo understood the distance that separated Cathay from Cipango according to this concept, precisely because, according to Ptolemy, it was impossible for the Earth to be wider than 180 degrees.
In any case, in 1540, on one of the first maps showing the American continent as a land mass distinct from the other parts of the world, Cattigara was depicted precisely on the northern coast of Peru, in the place where Chan Chan arose, beginning from the second millennium after Christ
Could it then have been that, unknowingly, Ptolemy really represented the continental mass of the New World, and that Cattigara was actually the Cattigara founded by the Chinese in the first millennium BC, on the northern coasts of Peru?
YURI LEVERATTO
