Page:Ancient India as described by Ptolemy - John Watson McCrindle.djvu/7

 tV PREFACE. not, however, on this account cease to be of high interest and value as an antiquarian re- cord, if we may judge from the multiplicity of the learned disquisitions which have from time to time been published in elucidation of many points of Ptolemaic Geography. There is perhaps no part of the contents which has received more attention from scholars than the chapters relating to India, where the tables abound to a surprising extent with names which are found nowhere else in classi- cal literature, and which were doubtless ob- tained directly from Indian sources, rather than from reports of travellers or traders who had visited the country. On glancing over these names one cannot fail to remark how very few of them have any but the most distant resem- blance to the indigenous names which they must have been intended to represent. Philo- logists, however, have made persistent efforts to penetrate the disguise which conceals the original forms of the names so much dis- torted by Ptolemy, and have succeeded in establishing a great number of satisfactory identifications, as well as in hitting upon others which have a balance of probability in their favour — a similar service has been rendered by the archseological investigations which have now for many years been systematically prose- cuted under the auspices of the Indian Government.