The Greek geographer and historian Strabo traveled extensively throughout Europe, North Africa, and Asia beginning in 31 B.C.. In the last years of his life, he published Geographia, a book that combined his personal knowledge of these regions with descriptions from Homer, Eratosthenes, and other writers. His Geographia is the only work available to us today that describes the cultures and countries of the Mediterranean world during the early part of the first century A.D.. The excerpt below is his description of the rivers of India.
The whole of India is traversed [crossed] by rivers. Some of these flow together into the two largest rivers, the Indus and the Ganges, whereas others empty into the sea by their own mouths. … they all flow first towards the south, and then, though some of them continue to flow in the same direction, in particular those which flow into the Indus, others bend towards the east, as, for example, the Ganges. Now the Ganges, which is the largest of the rivers in India, flows down from the mountainous country, and when it reaches the plains bends towards the east and flows past Palibothra, a very large city, and then flows on towards the sea in that region and empties by a single outlet. But the Indus empties by two mouths into the southern sea, encompassing the country called Patalene, which is similar to the Delta of Egypt. It is due to the vapours [mists] arising from all these rivers and to the Etesian winds, as Eratosthenes [a Greek scientist] says, that India is watered by the summer rains and that the plains become marshes. Now in the rainy seasons flax is sown [planted], and also millet, and, in addition to these, sesame and rice … and in the winter seasons wheat and barley and pulse and other edibles [foods] with which we are unacquainted. I might almost say that the same animals are to be found in India as in Aethiopia [Ethopia] and Egypt, and that the Indian rivers have all the other river animals except the hippopotamus, although Onesicritus [a Greek military officer] says that the hippopotamus is also to be found in India. As for the people of India, those in the south are like the Aethiopians in colour, although they are like the rest in respect to countenance [faces] and hair (for on account of the humidity of the air their hair does not curl), whereas those in the north are like the Egyptians.