Ancient India as described by Megasthenês and Arrian / being a translation of the fragments of the Indika of Megasthenês collected by Dr. Schwanbeck, and of the first part of the Indika of Arrian, by J.W. McCrindle ; with introduction, notes, and map of ancient India.

  • Megasthenes
Date:
1877
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Ancient India as described by Megasthenês and Arrian / being a translation of the fragments of the Indika of Megasthenês collected by Dr. Schwanbeck, and of the first part of the Indika of Arrian, by J.W. McCrindle ; with introduction, notes, and map of ancient India. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    distrust what we are told regarding the Indus and the Ganges, that they are beyond com- parison greater than the I s t e r and the Nile. In the case of the Nile we know that it does not receive any tributary, but that, on the contrary, in its passage through Egypt its waters are drawn off to fill the canals. As for the I s t e r, it is but an insignificant stream at its sources, and though it no doubt receives many confluents, still these are neither equal in number to the confluents of the Indus and Kabul; others, however, with the Panjkora, while Cun- ningham: takes it to be the Bara, a tributary which joins the Kabul from the south. With regard to the name K o p h e s this author remarks :—“ The name of K o p h e s is as old as the time of the Vedas, in which the K u b h a river is mentioned [Roth first pointed this out;—conf. Lassen, ut sujo.'] as an affluent of the Indus; and, as it is A. not an Aryan word, I infer that the name must have been applied to the Kabul river before the Aryan occupation, or at least as early as B.c. 2500. In the classical writers we find the Choes, Kophes, and Choaspes rivers to the west of the Indus ; and at the present day we have the K u n a r, the Kuram, and the G o m a 1 rivers to the west, and the Kunihar river to the east of the Indus,—all of which are derived from the Skythian leu, ‘ water.’ It is the guttural form of the Assyrian hu in ‘Euphrates9 and ‘ Eulaeus,’ and of the Turk! su and Tibetan chu, all of which mean ‘ water’ or ‘ river.’ Ptolemy the Geogra- pher mentions a city called Kabura, situated on the banks of the Kophen, and a people called Kabolitee. P areno s.—Probably the modern Burindu. S a p a r n o s.—Probably the A b b a s i n. S o a n u s represents the Sanskrit Suvana, ‘ the sun/ or ‘ fire’—now the S v a n. The Abissarseans, from whose country it comes, may be tho Abisara of Sanskrit : Lassen, Ind. Alt. II. 163. A king called Abisares is mentioned by Arrian in his Anabasis (iv. 7). It may be here remarked that the names of the Indian kings, as given by the Greek writers, were in general the names slightly modified of the people over whom they ruled. Y