The stories about Scylax that survive from the deep past were fragmentary and conflicting enough to allow me a free hand in fiction Where there’s an archaeologist there must be an artefact. It was on the basis of this reasoning that I set about researching the history of Peshawar for A God in Every Stone – at that point a novel-in-the-making about which I knew very little beyond the fact that it would include archaeologists in Peshawar in the early 20th century. Fairly quickly I stumbled upon a name that sounded as if it came right out of a fantasy novel – Scylax. This Scylax, it transpired, had been sent by the Persian emperor, Darius, to chart the course of the River Indus in 515 BC, and started his voyage from a place called Caspatyrus, which some historians have identified as modern-day Peshawar. Darius’s interest was in the navigational information Scyalx brought back; mine was in the fantastical tales he wrote down, which shaped the Greek and Persian imagination about India for the next two centuries – until Alexander’s admiral, Nearchus, wrote his own (more accurate, less colourful) version of his own journey down the Indus. Continue reading...
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