The Indian Ocean is home to many literary texts, from Greco-Roman times to "One Thousand and One Nights", the matrix of many narratives, which portrays Sinbad the Merchant through a fantastic and popular twist of the mind, and which is based on real details of navigation in this first ocean of globalisation. Combining Indian and Chinese literatures, among the oldest on the planet, this can be characterized as the most fictionalized ocean, having been the backbone of many tales, novels and poetic work.