Page:Sagas from the Far East; or, Kalmouk and Mongolian traditionary tales.djvu/13

Rh i. 22; x. 45), also Ârja-bhûmi, land of the Ârja. The Manu defines rigidly the original boundaries of this sacred country; it lies between the Himâlaja and Vindhja mountains, and stretches from the eastern to the western seas. Though Ptolemy (Geog. vii. 1) calls the people of the west coast, south of the Vindhja, Âriaka, this was a later extension of the original term.

What gives the word a great historical importance is the circumstance which must not be passed over here, that the original native name of the inhabitants of Iran was either the same or similarly derived. Airja in Zend stood both for "honourable" and for the name of the Iranian people. Concerning the Medes we have the testimony of Herodotus that they originally called themselves Ἄριοι, and we owe him the information also that the original Persian name was Ἀρταιοὶ, a word which has the same root as Ârja, or at least can have no very different meaning. They do not seem ever to have actually called themselves Ârja, although the word existed in their ancient tongue with the sense of "noble," "honourable."

The earliest Indian Sagas speak of the Arja as already established in Central India, and give no help to the discovery of when or how they settled there. Like most other peoples of the old world, they believed themselves aborigines, and they placed the Creation and the origin of species in the very land where they found themselves living, nor do their myths bear a trace of allusion