Page:Ancient India as described by Megasthenês and Arrian.djvu/172

 153 grows abundantly^ and the laui^I, and boxwood, and every kind of fruit-tree found in Greece. The remarkable and almost fabulous accounts which are current regarding the fertility of its soil, and the nature of its fruits and trees, its beasts and birds and other animals, will be set down each in its own place m other parts of this work, A little further on I shall speak of the satrapies, but the island ofTaprobaae§ requires my immediate attention. But before we come to this island there are others, one being P a t a 1 e, which, as we have indicated, lies at the mouth of the Indus, triangular in shape, and 220 |j miles in breadth. Beyond the mouth of the Indus are C h r y s e and A r g y r e,^ derived from a^va, a horse, signified merely the oa/valiers ; it was less an ethnic, in the rigorous acceptation of the word, than a general appellation applied by the Indians of the Paigftb to the tribes of the region of the Koph^B, renowned from antiquity for the exceUence of its horses. In the popular dialects the Sanskrit word took the nsnal form Assaka, which reappears scarcely modified in Assakani (*A(rcra*caj/oi) or Assak^niCAo-o-aKiywt ) in the Greek histori- ans of the expedition of Alexander and subsequent writers. It is impossible not to recognize here the name of Ayghftn or Afghfins. . . which is yery evidently nothing else than a contracted form of Assakui. . . Neither the 6andari4 of Hekataios nor the Paktyi of Herodotos are known to them [ Arrian and other Greek and Latin writers of the history of ALexanderl, but as it is the same territory [as that of the Assakani], and as in actual usage the names Afghfins and Pakhtiin are still synonymous, their identity is not a matter of doubt." — Ftude sv/r le Q^ographie Orecque et LtiUne de Vlnde, pp. 376-8. The name of the Gandhftra, it may here be added, remounts to the highest antiquity ; it is mentioned in one of the hymns of the Itig-Yeda, as old perhaps as the 15th century B.C. — Id. p. 864. § Vide anU, p. 62, n. ». || CC&-Y. I OXXX. 1 Burma and Arakan respectively, according to Yule,^ Ed. Ind. Ant, Digitized by Google