Page:Dictionary of Greek and Roman Geography Volume II.djvu/60

 44 INDIA. 1831), the Indi and the Indus {Fragm. 174 and 178), the Ar^ante {Fragm. 176), the people of Opia on the banks of the Indus {Fragm. 175), the Calatiae, {Fragm. 177 ; Herod, iii. 38 ; or Calantiae, Herod, iii. 97), Gandara and the Gandarii (Frojm. 178) and then- city Caspapyrus {Fragm. 179; Caspatynis, Herod, iii. 102, iv. 44), are mentioned, in company ■with other Eastern places. Further, it appears, from the testimony of Herodotus, that Scylax of Car)'anda, ■who yms sent by Dareius, navigated the Indus to Caspatyrus iu Pactyice, and thence along the Erythraean sea by the Arabian gulf to the coast of Egypt (iv. 44) ; in the course of which voyage lie must have seen something of India, of ivhich he is said to have recorded several marvels (cf. Aristot. Polit. vii. 14; Philostr. Vit. Apoll. Tyan. iii. 14; Tzetz. CM. vii. 144); though Klausen has shown satisfactorily, in his edition of the fragments which remain, that the Periplus usually ascribed to this Scylax is at least as late as the time of Philip of Macedon. The notices preseiTed in Herodotus and the re- mains of Ctesias are somewhat fuller, both having had opportunities, the one as a great traveller, the other as a resident for many years at the court of Artaxerxes, which no previous writers had had. The knowledge of Herodotus (b. c. 484 — 408) is, however, limited to the account of the satrapies of Dareius; the twentieth of which, he states, compre- liended that part of India which was tributary to the Persians (iii. 94), the country of the most Eastern people with whom he was acquainted (iii. 9.5 — 102). To the S. of them, along the Indian Ocean, were, according to his view, the Asiatic Aethiopians (iii. 94) ; beyond them, desert. He adds that the Indians were the greatest and wealthiest people know'n; he speaks of the Indus (on 'whose banks, as well as on those of the Nile, crocodiles were to be seen) as flowing through their land (iv. 44), and mentions by name Caspatyiais (a town of Pactyice), the nomadic Padai (iii. 99), and the Ca- latiae (iii. 38) or Calantiae (iii. 97). He places also in the seventh satrapy the Gandarii (iii. 91) [Gandaexj;], a race who, under the name of Gandharas, are known as a genuine Sanscrit- speaking tribe, and who may therefore be considered as connected with India, though their principal seat seems to have been on the W. side of the Indus, probably in the neighbourhood of the present Can^ daliar. Ctesias (about b. c. 400) wrote twenty-three books of Persica, and one of Indica, with other works on Asiatic subjects. These are all lost, except some fragments preserved by Photius. In his Per- sica he mentions some places in Bactria {Fragm. 5, ed. Biihr) and Cyrtaea, on the Erythraean sea {Fragm. 40) ; and in his Indica he gives an account of the Indus, of the manners and customs of the natives of India, and of its productions, some of which bear the stamp of a too credulous mind, but are not altogether uninteresting or valueless. On the advance of Alexander through Bactriana to the banks of the Indus, a new hght was thrown on the geography of India ; and the Greeks, for the first time, acquired ■with tolerable accuracy some knowledge of the chief features of this remarkable country. A num.ber of writers — some of them offi- cers of Alexander's army — devoted themselves to a description of different jsarts of his route, or to an account of the events which took place during his progress from Babylon to the Hyphasis ; and to INDIA. the separate narratives of Beton and Diognehis, Nearchus, Onesicritus, Aristobulus, and Cailis- thenes, condensed and extracted by Strabo, Pliny, and Arrian, we owe most of our knowledge of India as it appeared to the ancients. None of the original works of these writers have been preserved, but the voyage of Nearchus (the most important of them, though the places in India he names are few in number) has been apparently given by Arrian (in his Jndica') with considerable minuteness. Ne- archus seems to have kept a day-book, in which lie entered the distances between each place. He notices Pattella, on the Indus (from which he started), and Corcatis (perhaps the present Kurdchi). Pliny, who calls this voyage that of Nearchus and One- sicritus, adds some few places, not noticed by Arrian (vi. 23. s. 26). Onesicritus himself considered the land of the Indians to be one-third of the whole inhabited world (Strab. xv. p. 691), and was the first writer who noticed Taprobane (Ce^/t>?^). (Ibid, p. 691.) Both writers appear, from Strabo, to liave left interesting memorials of the manners and cus- toms of the natives (Strab. xi. p. 517, xv. p. 726) and of the natural history of the country. (Strab. XV. pp. 693, 705, 716, 717 ; Aelian, Hist. An. xvi. 39, xvii. 6; Plin. vi. 22. s. 24, vii. 2. s. 2; Tzetz. Chil. iii. 13.) Aristobulus is so frequently quoted by An-ian and Strabo, that it is not improbable that he may have written a distinct work on India : he is mentioned as noticing the swelling and floods of the rivers of the Punjab, owing to the melting of the snow and the rain (Strab. x v. p. 691), the mouths of the Indus (p. 701), the Brachmanes at Taxila (p. 714), the trees of Hyrc.ania and India (xi. p. 509), the rice and the mode of its tillage (xv. p. 692), and the fish of the Nile and Indus, respec- tively (xv. p. 707, xvii. p. 804). Subsequently to these writers, — probably all in the earlier part of the third century b. c, — were some others, as Jlegasthenes, Daimachus, Patrocles and Ti- mosthenes, who contributed considerably to the in- creasing stock of knowledge relative to India. Of these, the most valuable additions were those acquired by Jlegasthenes and Daimachus, who were respectively ambassadors from Seleucus to the Courts of San- drocottus (Chandragupta) and his successor Alli- trochades (Strab. ii. p. 70, xv. p. 702 ; Plin. vi. 17. s. 21), or, as it probably ought to be written, Amitrochades. Megasthenes wrote a work often quoted by subsequent writers, which he called 7a. 'If5i/fo (Athen. iv. p. 153; Clem. Alex. Strom, i. p. 132 ; Joseph, c. Apion. i. 20, Antiq. s. 11. § 1), in which he probably embodied the results of his observations. From the fragments which remain, and which have been carefully collected by Schwan- beck {Megasthenis Indica, Bonn, 1846), it appears that lie was the first to give a tolerably accu- rate account of the breadth of India, — making it about 16,000 stadia (Arrian, iii. 7, 8; Strab. i. p.' 68, XV. p. 689), — to mention the Ganges by name, and to state that it was larger than the Indus (Arrian, V. 6, 10, Indie. 4, 13), and to give, besides this, some notice of no less than fifteen tributaries of the Indus, and nineteen of the Ganges. He remarked that India contained 118 nations, and so many cities that they could not be numbered (Anian, Indie. 7, 10); and observed (the first among the Greeks) the existence of castes among the people (Strab. XV. p. 703; Arrian, Ind. 11, 12; Diod. ii. 40, 41; Solin. c. 52), with some peculiarities of the Indian reUgious system, and of the Brachmanes (or Brah^