Wiktionary
n. 1 A circumnavigation; a sea voyage around a coastline. 2 A record of such a voyage.
Wikipedia
A periplus is a manuscript document that lists the ports and coastal landmarks, in order and with approximate intervening distances, that the captain of a vessel could expect to find along a shore. It served the same purpose as the later Roman itinerarium of road stops; however, the Greek navigators added various notes, which if they were professional geographers (as many were) became part of their own additions to Greek geography. In that sense the periplus was a type of log.
The form of the periplus is at least as old as the earliest Greek historian, the Ionian Hecataeus of Miletus. The works of Herodotus and Thucydides contain passages that appear to have been based on peripli.
Usage examples of "periplus".
The Periplus of Arrian is addressed to the emperor Hadrian, (in Geograph.
With favoring winds it is wafted past the site of the fabulous islands of Atlantis and the Hesperides, makes the periplus of Hanno, and, floating by Ternate and Tidore and the mouth of the Persian Gulf, melts in the tropic gales of the Indian seas, and is landed in ports of which Alexander only heard the names.
One hint is in an ancient book of sailors' directions, the Periplus of the Erythrean Sea, written by an anonymous merchant living in Egypt around a.