Periplus of The Erythraean Sea - Date/Authorship

Date/Authorship

One historical analysis, published by Schoff in 1912, narrowed the date of the text to 60 A. D. Though narrowing the date down, from 1912, to a single year roughly 2000 years earlier might be considered remarkable by modern standards, a date of 60 A. D. nevertheless remains in perfect agreement with present day estimates of in the middle of the 1st century. Schoff additionally provides an historical analysis as to the text's original authorship and arrives at the conclusion that the author must have been a "Greek in Egypt, a Roman subject," and by Schoff's calculations this would be during the time of Tiberius Claudius Balbilus (who coincidentally also was an Egyptian Greek).

John Hill maintains that the "Periplus can now be confidently dated to between 40 and 70 CE and, probably, between CE 40 and 50."

Schoff continues by noting that the author could not have been "a highly educated man" as "is evident from his frequent confusion of Greek and Latin words and his clumsy and sometimes ungrammatical constructions." Because of "the absence of any account of the journey up the Nile and across the desert from Coptos," Schoff prefers to pinpoint the author's residence to "Berenice rather than Alexandria." Though Schoff is unclear about which "Berenice" he is referring to and several possibilities exist for "Berenice", it is actually Berenice Troglodytica which is documented, discussed at length and vividly described within the periplus text itself.

One peculiarity noted by Schoff while translating from the original Greek version is that "the text is so vague and uncertain that seems rather to be quoting from someone else, unless indeed much of this part of the work has been lost in copying."