Ichthyophagi

Latin Ichthyophagi and Greek ichthyophagoi (Ancient Greek: Ἰχθυοφάγοι, "fish-eaters") are the names given by ancient geographers to several ethnically unrelated coast-dwelling peoples in different parts of the world.^[1]

• Herodotus (book i. c. 200) mentions three tribes of the Babylonians who were solely fish-eaters, and in book iii. c. 19 refers to Ichthyophagi in Aethiopia.^[1] Diodorus Siculus and Strabo also referred to them all along the African coast of the Red Sea in their descriptions of Aethiopia.
• Ptolemy speaks of fish-eaters in the Persian Gulf coasts, coast of the Red Sea, on the west coast of Africa^[1] and on the coast of the Far East near the harbour of Cattigara.
• Pliny relates the existence of such people on the islands in the Persian Gulf.^[1]
• According to Arrian, Nearchus mentions such a race as inhabiting the barren shores^[1] of the Gwadar and Pasni districts in Makrān. During the homeward march of Alexander the Great, his admiral, Nearchus led a fleet in Arabian Sea along the Makrān coast and recorded that the area was dry and mountainous, inhabited by the Ichthyophagoi or Fish-Eaters.^[2]
• Pausanias locates them on the western (African) coast of the Red Sea.^[1]
• They are a people group identified on the 4th century Peutinger Map, as a people of the Baluchistan coast. The existence of such tribes was confirmed by Sir Richard F Burton (El-Medinah, p. 144).^[1]
• It is the name Laskaris Kananos used for the Icelanders in the 15th century.^[3]
• They are described in the Liber Monstrorum as fully naked and covered in hair, inhabiting streams and ponds near the Indian Ocean in India. ^[4]

See also

• Troglodyti
• Huteimi
• Solluba
• Eskimos
• Anthrophagi