(W.E.Talk) Greece and China: the earliest historical testimonies of contact between two ancient cultures
By Georgios Steiris, Professor of Philosophy National and Kapodistrian University of Athens
Greece and China, though geographically distant and seemingly isolated from one another, each stand as the cradle of great and enduring civilizations. These two cultures—pillars of the Western and Eastern worlds, respectively—are justly regarded in contemporary scholarship as classical. The foundational principles and values they cultivated continue to underpin the architecture of the modern global order.
For centuries, the prevailing belief—shared even among specialists—has been that these civilizations remained entirely unconnected until the advent of modernity, following the great explorations of the15th and16th centuries. Yet recent research suggests otherwise. The evidence indicates that the Greeks and Chinese were aware of each other’s existence as far back as antiquity.
One of the earliest such testimonies comes from Ctesias of Cnidos, a physician and historian of the late 5th and early 4th centuries BCE, who served at the court of the Persian emperors. Drawing on Persian archives as well as reports from merchants and diplomats from the East, Ctesias authored works on the Persians and Indians. Within them, he makes reference to the Chinese—whom he calls Seres, meaning silk-producers—describing them as physically large and attributing to them extraordinary longevity, reportedly living beyond two hundred years.
In ancient Greek geographical thought, Sēres referred to the northwestern reaches of China and its inhabitants, a name derived from the Greek word for silk, signifying "those of silk" or "the land from which silk comes." To the south of this region lay the domain of the Sīnae, a term used by the Greeks to designate the people dwelling at the easternmost limits of the known world, corresponding to the area around present-day Chang’an.
Strabo, writing in the first century AD in his Geography, recorded that the Seres were reputed to live longer lives than even the Indians of Musicanus, whose longevity, according to Onesicritus, reached up to130 years.
Claudius Ptolemy, the eminent second-century Greek geographer, situated the Seres and Sinae at the far eastern bounds of Asia Major. In his Geography, he writes:
“The inhabited part of our earth is bounded on the east by the Unknown Land which lies along the region occupied by the easternmost nations of Asia Major, the Sinae and the nations of Serica… The eastern extremity of the known earth is limited by the meridian drawn through the metropolis of the Sinae, at a distance from Alexandria of 119.5 degrees, reckoned upon the equator, or about eight equinoctial hours.”
In the 4th century AD, Marcian of Heraclea reiterated this view, noting that“the nations of the Sinae lie at the extremity of the habitable world, and adjoin the eastern Terra Incognita.”
These classical attestations illustrate not only the ancient Greeks' awareness of far eastern regions but also the mythical and cosmological boundaries they imposed upon the edge of the known world, where commerce, wonder, and the limits of human habitation converged.
Several centuries later, Eustathius of Salonica, one of the Byzantine Empire’s most erudite scholars, commented on a work by Dionysius of Alexandria, which offered a geographical description of the known world. According to Eustathius, the Chinese were noted for their remarkable longevity, echoing the earlier account of Ctesias and suggesting a continuity of knowledge—however mythologized—about the East within the Greek tradition.
Equally significant is the testimony of Symeon Seth, an 11th-century Greek officer, physician, astronomer, and translator of Arabic texts, born in Antioch and later active in Constantinople. In his Conspectus rerum naturalium, he writes:
“These Chinese inhabit the easternmost regions of the world. They are all Greek in doctrine, though extremely righteous.”
By referring to the Chinese as “Greek in doctrine,” Seth likely meant they were pagan—non-Christian—a common usage in Byzantine parlance, where “Greek” could denote a pre-Christian or polytheistic worldview. Nevertheless, his statement is striking, as it marks one of the earliest explicit attempts to draw a conceptual parallel between the Greek and Chinese peoples and their respective belief systems.
From the Chinese side, intriguing evidence has emerged thanks to the work of Professor Xu Xiaoxu of Renmin University, who has identified a compelling reference in the writings of Gan Ying, a 1st-century CE diplomat and scholar. Dispatched on a mission to the Roman Empire by the Han general Ban Chao, Gan Ying never reached Roman territory. The Parthians—seeking to preserve their commercial monopoly—dissuaded him from crossing the Persian Gulf by invoking tales of sea monsters, a tactic also used to discourage Roman and Greek emissaries from venturing eastward.
Nevertheless, during his sojourn in the Persian Gulf region, Gan Ying evidently encountered aspects of Hellenic culture, including, quite possibly, Homeric poetry. According to Professor Xu, one verse in Gan Ying’s surviving report bears a strong resemblance to a line from Homer’s Odyssey. Gan Ying’s stated goal had been to reach Alexandria—a major center of Greek learning—further suggesting his deep interest in the intellectual and cultural traditions of the Hellenistic world.
Taken together, these accounts offer compelling evidence that contact—if not direct, then certainly indirect and intellectual—between the Greek and Chinese civilizations may have occurred far earlier than commonly assumed. The affinities between them, in terms of science and philosophical curiosity, merit far deeper scholarly attention.
Greek and Chinese researchers alike have a shared responsibility to deepen the investigation of Greco-Chinese cultural and intellectual intersections from antiquity onward. The field holds immense promise—and it seems likely that many more revelatory discoveries await us.
Georgios Steiris's profile:
Georgios Steiris is Professor of Medieval and Renaissance Philosophy at the Department of Philosophy of the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens. He previously taught at the University of Peloponnese, the Hellenic Open University, and in Study Abroad Programs of the University of Connecticut and Boston University. He has been Visiting Professor at Jyväskylä University (Finland) and Visiting Fellow at Bogazici University (Turkey) and Macquarie University (Australia). He is a member of the 7th Council (2025-2030) of the International Confucius Association. He has served as Secretary-General of the Greek Philosophical Society (2015-2016). He was awarded the Golden Jubilee Medal ‘80 years of Al-Farabi Kazakh National University’. Recent works: Maximus the Confessor as a European Philosopher (Wipf & Stock, 2017), The Oxford Handbook for Dionysius the Areopagite (Oxford University Press, 2022), Long Platonism: The Routes of Plato’s Reception to the Italian Renaissance (Berlin/New York: De Gruyter, 2025, forthcoming).
