Iambulos
Sign in to save__NOTOC__ Iambulus or Jambulus (, Iamboulos) was an ancient Greek merchant and the likely author of a utopian novel about the strange forms and figures of the inhabitants of the "Islands of the Sun". His name seems not to be Greek and reveals a Semitic or an Arabic origin.
Wikidata facts
- Instance of
- human
- Gender
- male
- Occupation
- mythographer
- Languages spoken
- Ancient Greek
Show 5 more facts
- date of birth
- 0250-00-00
- described by source
- Pauly–Wissowa
- date of death
- 0300-00-00
- writing language
- Ancient Greek
- floruit
- 0300-00-00
Sources (1)
via Wikidata · CC0
~2 min read
Encyclopedic overview
3 sectionsContents
- See also
- References
- Further reading
__NOTOC__ Iambulus or Jambulus (, Iamboulos) was an ancient Greek merchant and the likely author of a utopian novel about the strange forms and figures of the inhabitants of the "Islands of the Sun". His name seems not to be Greek and reveals a Semitic or an Arabic origin.
His work did not survive in the original, but only as a fragment in Diodorus Siculus' Bibliotheca historica (II, 55–60). Diodorus, who seems only to have transcribed lambulus in his description of the Indians, relates that lambulus was made a slave by the Ethiopians, and sent by them to a happy island in the eastern seas, where he acquired his knowledge. The whole account, however, has the appearance of a fiction, and the description which lambulus gives of the east, which he had probably never seen, consists of absurd statements.
Excerpted from Wikipedia’s “Iambulos” article, available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.