Page:Ancient India as described by Megasthenês and Arrian.djvu/171

 152 making the rirer Cophe^s its furthest limit; though others prefer to consider all these as be- longing to the Arii. Many writers further include in India even the city N y s a and Mount M e r u s, sacred to Father Bacchus, whence the origin of the fable that he sprang from the thigh of Jupiter. They include also the A s t a c a n i,^ in whose country the vine part, and of which it is sometimes used as the equivalent, was a wider district, which comprehended nearly the whole of ancient Persia. In the Persian part of the Bisntun inscription Aria appears as Hariva, in the Babylonian part as Arevan. Regarding Paropamisos and the Cophes see Ind. Ant vol. V. pp. 329 and 330. % Other readings of the name are Aspagani and Aspa- gon89. M. de St.-Martin, whose work has so often been referred to, says : — " We have seen already that in an extract from old Hekataios preserved in Stephen of Byzantiom the city of Kaspapyros is called a Gandaric city, and that in Herodotos the same place is attributed to the Paktyi, and we have added that in onr opinion there is only an apparent contradiction, because the district of Paktyike and Grandara may very well be but one and the same country. It is not difficult, in fact, to recognize in the designation mentioned by Herodotos iJie indigenous name of the Afghfin people, Pakhtu (in the plural Pakh- tAn), the name which the greater part of the tribes us© among themselves, and the only one they apply to their national dialect. We have here, then, as Lassen has noticed, historical proof of the presence of the Afgh&ns in thear actual fatherland five centuries at least before the Christian era. Now, as the seat of the Af^h&n or Pakht national- ity is chiefly in the beudn of the Koph^s, to the west of the Indus, which forms its eastern boundary, this further confirms what we have already seen, that it is to the west of the great river we must seek for the site of the city of Kaspapyros or Kasyapapura, and consequently of the GandanS of Hekataios. The employment of two different names to designate the very same country is easily explained by this double fact, that one of the names was the Indian designation of the land, whilst the other was the indigenous name applied to it by its inhabitants. There was yet another name, of Sanskrit origin, used as a territorial appellation of GancUi&ra— that of Asvaka. This word,