Page:The Periplus of the Erythræan Sea.djvu/240

, long before the Aryan invasion of southern India; while a passage in the Rāmāyana suggest the ships of those whom the invaders contemptuously called "monkeys". When Rāma was dispatching his messengers to the four winds in search of Sītā, it was the maligned Hanumān who "flew" across the Gulf of Manār to Ceylon and discovered her. Who can doubt that the wings he used were sails, or that the Dravidians ferried across to Ceylon a force of Aryan landsmen, who later turned and crushed them under the caste-system and established the dynasties of Drāvida-dēsam? Stern must have been the subjection that brought them to worship one of their own race under the guise of a monkey, and to carry the cult of the monkey-god Hanumān in their own ships to the vales of oman, where monkeys are unknown and where it has outlived the memory of its founders, to the confusion of the modern observer. (Gen. S.B. Miles, in Geographical Journal, VII, 336.)

Signficant also is the fact that Lieutenant Speke, when planning his discovery of the source of the Nile, secured his best information from a map reconstructed out of the Purānas. (Journal, pp.27, 77, 216; Wilford, in Asiatic Researches, III). It traced the course of the river, the "Great Krishna," through Cusha-dvīpa, from a great lake in Chandristhān, "Country of the Moon," which it gave the correct position in relation to the Zanzibar Islands. The name was from the native Unya-muézi, having the same meaning; and the map correctly mentioned another native name, Amara, applied to the district bordering Lake Victoria Nyanza.

"All our previous information," says Speke, "concerning the hydrography of those regions, originated with the ancient Hindus, who told it to the priests of the Nile; and all those busy Egyptian geographers, who disseminated their knowledge with a view to be famous for their long-sightedness, in solving the mystery which enshrouded the source of their holy river, were so many hypothetical humbugs. The Hindu traders had a firm basis to stand upon through their intercourse with the Abyssinians." (See §14.)

Altogether it must be supposed that the navigation of the Indian Ocean began from the Persian Gulf and Arabia; that Western India claimed its share at an early date; and that this community of interest long excluded their customers of the Mediterranean world, from whose standpoint Hippalus was quite as great a discoverer as if he had really been

57. Throw the Ship's head.—The text is trachēlizontes, which is a wrestlers' term meaning literally "throwing by the neck."