Iambulos

Iambulos (also: Iambul; Greek: Ἰαμβοῠλος ) is an ancient author of a possibly autobiographical work, which can be classified as literary utopian travel novel. On the person of the Iambulos almost nothing is known: He lived in the Hellenistic period; if the work is autobiographical, he was Merchant. Maybe he was an Arab from the tribe of the Nabataeans. His work was not recorded and is only as a fragment in Diodorus obtained ( Diod. 2.55 to 60 ).

Iambulos reported that he had been captured as a dealer in southern Arabia of Ethiopians. They had then also sent him as a kind of atonement in a ship on the sea. He came - to the Indian Ocean towards the east sailing - to an unknown island. In the current scheme of the Greek Utopia, the island is described as climatically ideal and extremely fertile. The inhabitants of the island have ( literally ) a forked tongue, so that they could manage two calls at the same time. After seven years on this island Iambulos is banished for an unspecified crime, and finally passes through India and Persia back to Greece.

Due to this approximate geographical indication Iambulos ' island is identified by some authors with today's Sri Lanka, with a large part of the description is pure fiction.

Lucian of Samosata mentioned it in the introduction to his travel novel True Stories, a parody of unreliable travel reports, fictitious author as typical descriptions of foreign countries.