Photos: (L) A sculpture of Pytheas in Marseilles. Credit: Rvalette /Wikimedia Commons/CC BY-SA 3.0; (R) A 1490 Italian reconstruction of the map of Ptolemy of the British Isles, most likely created by using Pytheas’ measurements. Credit: Wikimedia Commons/Public Domain
It is now believed by many historians that a man from Greece was the first Mediterranean to ever reach the island of Great Britain as well as the Arctic Circle and Iceland.
Pytheas of Massalia, a geographer from the Greek colony of Massalia, which is modern day Marseille in France, undertook the epic journey in the third century BC and resulted in knowledge of the north being passed into Ancient Greek society.
Until that time, knowledge of what lay above northern France and Germany was largely speculative and the Greeks named the people who lived there 'Hyperboreans'. Many myths and legends existed as to what lay to the north of the Classical World and these included fantasies and mythological beasts.
Amazingly, using the shipping technology of the time, Pytheas sailed up the coast of Spain and France and soon reached Great Britain where he moved up the west coast, past Scotland and onto Iceland and later Scandinavia. The journey is believed to have taken as long as a year before he returned home. It was then that his expeditions and adventures with his crew were written up.
While the original work is lost, his adventures are found in the works of Strabo, Dicaerchs, Timaeus, Pliny, and Diodorus of Sicily. In these works, it is where the word 'Britain' is first used, 'Bretannike' (Βρεταννική), which is Greek for 'Britannic'. It is suggested that the word came to Pytheas through the Welsh tribes he interacted with.
It is also recorded in these writings that Pytheas also sought to find the mythical land of Thule. Whether such an island was found and named 'Thule' or whether no such place was ever found is unclear. But the legend of such a place remains to this day.
While Pytheas would not have been the first European to reach great Britain, he is most certainly the first Mediterranean to do so, and achieving such a feat almost 2,400 years ago.
[h/t: Greek Reporter]
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