The History of Antiquity, Vol. 4 (of 6). Duncker Max

In the epos of the Indians the daughter of the king of the Gandharas is married to the king of the Bharatas, who lie between the Yamuna and the Ganges, and the Buddhist writings speak of the Brahmans of the Gandarii as the worst in India.17 In the campaign of Xerxes, Herodotus separates the Gandarii from the rest of the Indians who are subject to the Persian kingdom. The first, he says, were armed like the Bactrians; with the rest marched the Ethiopians of the East, equipped almost like the Indians; but on their heads they had the skins of horses' heads, with the ears and mane erect, and their shields were made from the skins of cranes. These Ethiopians of the East were not distinguished from the others in form and character, but by their language and hair. The Libyan Ethiopians, i. e. the negroes, had the curliest hair of all men; but the hair of the Eastern branch was straight.18 We have already observed that now, as in the days of Xerxes, remains of the dark-coloured pre-Aryan population of India are found on the right bank of the Indus (p. 10).

      Of the Indians "who never obeyed Darius,"19 Herodotus tells us that they lived the furthest to the east of all the nations about which anything definite was known. Still further in that direction were sandy deserts. The Indians were the largest of all nations, and the Indus was the only river beside the Nile in which crocodiles are found (they are alligators).20 The remotest parts of the earth have always the best products, and India, the remotest inhabited land to the east, was no exception. The birds and the quadrupeds were far greater in size here than elsewhere, with the exception of the horse; for the Nisæan horses of the Medes were larger than the horses of the Indians. Moreover, India possessed an extraordinary abundance of gold, of which some was dug up from mines, and some brought down by the rivers, and some obtained from the deserts. The wild trees also produced a wool which in beauty and excellence surpassed the wool of sheep; this the Indians used for clothing. There were many nations of the Indians, and they spoke different languages. Some were stationary; some dwelt in the marshes of the rivers, and lived on raw fish, which they caught in canoes made of reeds, and every joint of the reed made a canoe. These Indians wore garments of bark, which they wove like cloths, and then drew on like coats of mail. Eastward of these dwelt the Padæans, a migratory tribe, who ate raw flesh; and when any one, even the nearest relative, among them was sick, they slew him, in order to eat the corpse. This custom was also observed by the women. Even the few who attained to old age they killed, in order to eat them. Other Indian nations lived only on herbs, which they ate cooked, and troubled themselves neither about their sick nor their dead, whom they carried out, like the sick, into desert places. All the nations spoken of were black in colour.21

      These, the oldest accounts from the West on the ancient pre-Aryan population of India, and on the black-skins of the Rigveda, we owe to Herodotus. His statements about their physical formation are correct; those on their savage life may be exaggerated; but even to this day a part of these nations live in the marshes and mountains in a condition hardly removed from that of animals.

      The contrast between the light-coloured and dark population of India, between the Aryas and the ancient inhabitants, did not escape Ctesias. India, he maintained, was as large as the rest of Asia, and the inhabitants of India almost as numerous as all the other nations put together. The Indians were both white and black. He had himself seen white Indians, five men and two women. The sun in India appeared ten times as large as in other lands, and the heat was suffocating. The Indus was a great river flowing through mountains and plains; in the narrowest places the water occupied a space of 40 stades, or five miles, in the broadest it reached 100 stades.22 The river watered the land. In India it did not rain, and there were no storms there, though there were violent whirlwinds which carried everything before them.23 On the Indus grew reeds small and great; the stoutest reeds could not be spanned by two men, and the height of the largest was equal to the mast of a ship.24 The fruit of the palms also in India was three times as large as in Babylonia, and the sheep and goats there were equal in size to asses elsewhere, and had such enormous tails that they had to be cut off to enable them to walk. Ctesias goes on to describe the large cocks of India, with their beautiful combs, and broad tails of gold, dark-blue, and emerald; the peacocks, the many-coloured birds with red faces, dark-blue necks, and black beards, which had a human tongue, and could speak Indian, and would speak Greek if they were taught; the little apes with tails four cubits long.25 He was the first to describe the elephant to the Greeks.26 He had seen these animals, and had been present in Babylon when the elephants of the Persian king had torn up palm trees with their roots out of the ground. These animals could even throw down the walls of cities. In war the king of India was preceded by 100,000 elephants, and 3000 of the strongest and bravest followed him.27

      After the army of Alexander of Macedon had encamped in the Panjab, the Greeks could give more accurate accounts of India. Megasthenes assures us that India reached in breadth, from west to east, an extent of from 15,000 to 16,000 stades (1940 to 2000 miles), while the length, from north to south, was 22,000 stades (2750 miles);28 and in these distances he is not very greatly in error, for, measured in a direct line, the breadth is 13,600 stades (1720 miles), and the length 16,400 stades (2050 miles). To the north India was bounded by lofty mountains, which the Greeks called Caucasus, and the Indians Paropamisos (Paropanishadha29), and Emodos, or Imaos. Emodos, like Imaos, is the Greek form of the old Indian name for the Himalayas, Haimavata (Himavat).30 In India there were many great mountains, but still greater plains; and even the mountains were covered with fruit-trees, and contained in their bowels precious stones of various kinds – crystals, carbuncles, and others. Gold also and silver, metals and salt, could be obtained from the mines,31 and the rivers carried down gold from the mountains.32 The streams of India were the largest and the most numerous in the world. The Indus was larger than the Nile, and all the rivers of Asia; the Ganges, which took an easterly direction on reaching the plains, was a great river even at its source, and reached a width of 100 stades, or 12½ miles. In many places it formed lakes, so that one bank could not be seen from the other, and its depth reached 20 fathoms.33 The first statement is exaggerated, the second is correct for the lower course of the river. The Indus, according to Megasthenes, had 15 navigable affluents, and the Ganges 19, the names of which he could enumerate.34 In all there were 58 navigable rivers in India.

      This abundance of streams in India the Greeks explained by the fact that the lands which surrounded the country – Ariana, as the Greeks call eastern Iran, Bactria, and the land of the Scythians – were higher than India, so that the waters from them flowed down, and were collected there.35 The water was also the cause of the great fertility of India, which the Greeks unite in extolling. The rivers not only brought down, as Nearchus observes, soft and good earth into the land from the hills,36 but they traversed it in such a manner that, from the universal irrigation, it was turned into a fruit garden.37 Onesicritus tells us that India is better irrigated by its rivers than Egypt by its canals. The Nile flows straight on through a long and narrow land, and so is continually passing into a different climate and different air, while the Indian rivers flow through much larger and broader plains, and continue long in the same region. Hence they are more nourishing than the Nile, and the fish are larger than the fish in the Nile;38 they also refresh the land better by their moist exhalations.39 Besides, there were the inundations caused by the rivers; and the land was also watered by the heavy rains, which fell constantly each year at

17

"Mahavança," ed. Turnour, p. 47.

18

Herod. 7, 66, 70.

19

Herod. 3, 101.

20

Herod. 3, 94; 4, 44.

21

Herod. 3, 96, 98 ff.

22

Ctes. "Ecl." 1.

23

"Ecl." 1, 8.

24

"Ecl." 6.

25

Ctes. "Ecl." 3; Aelian, 16, 2.

26

Herodotus only makes a passing mention of the elephant in Libya, 4, 191.

27

Ælian 17, 29. Arrian also ("Anab." 4, 14) maintains that the Indus is 100 stades in breadth, and even broader; Megasthenes also relates that the elephants tore down walls, and that the bamboo was a fathom in thickness. Strabo, p. 711. That Ctesias followed Persian-Bactrian accounts is clear from the fact that the scene of all his history is the north-west of India. He knows that India is a civilised land, though he also believes that it obeys only one king; he knows the veneration of the Indians for their kings, their contempt of death, and some products of Indian industry. The fabulous stories of the Pygmæans, Dog-heads, Shovel-eared, Shadow-feet, and Macrobii he did not invent, but copied. Similar marvels of men with dogs' heads, and without a head, and of unicorns, are narrated by Herodotus, only he ascribes these stories to the western Ethiopians, not to the eastern (4, 191). Homer had already sung of the Pygmæans ("Il." 3, 6). Hecatæus had spoken of the Shovel-eared and Shadow-feet (fragm. 265, 266, ed. Klausen), and also Aristophanes ("Aves," 1553). Of the griffins, the one-eyed Arimaspians, the long-lived, happy Hyperboreans, Aristeas of Proconnesus had told and Æschylus had sung long before Ctesias (above, III. 232). Megasthenes repeats the legends of the Pygmæans, Shovel-eared, Shadow-feet, Dog-heads, and adds accounts of men without mouths, and other marvels. Ctesias, therefore, had predecessors as well as followers in these stories. The fantastic world with which the Indians surrounded themselves, the nicknames and strange peculiarities which they ascribed to some of the old population and to distant nations, reached the Persians, and through them the Greeks. "Kirata" of small stature in the Eastern Himalayas, against which Vishnu's bird fights, Çunamukhas (Dog-heads), "brow-eyed" cannibals, "one-footed" men, who bring as tribute very swift horses, occur in the Indian epics, and in other writings. On the divine mountain Meru, according to the Indians, dwell the Uttara Kuru, i. e. the northern Kurus, who live for 10,000 years, among whom is no heat, where the streams flow in golden beds, and roll down pearls and precious stones instead of gravel. Lassen, "Ind. Alterth." 1, 511; 2, 653, 693 ff.; Muir, loc. cit. 22, 324 ff. According to the cosmology of the Buddhists, whose Sutras also knew these Uttara Kuru, Mount Meru is the centre of the world. To the south of Meru is Yambudvipa, to the north the region of the Uttara Kuru, who live for 1000 years, while the inhabitants of Yambudvipa only live for 100 years. Burnouf, "Introduction à l'histoire du Bouddhisme," p. 177; Koppen, "Buddh." p. 233. Ptolemy, obviously following Indian sources, puts the Ὄττορα Κόῤῥα to the north of the Imaus, beyond the highest range, which with the Indians is a spur of the divine mountain Meru. This land and nation is obviously the garden of Yima and his elect, whom the myth of Iran places on the divine hill. These are the long-lived Hyperboreans of the Greeks, who dwell in the remote north beyond the Rhipaean mountains – one of the old common myths of the Aryan and Greek branch of the Indo-Germanic stock.

28

Megasthenes and Eratosthenes in Strabo, pp. 689, 690; Arrian, "Ind." 3, 8.

29

Lassen explains Paropamisus as Paropa-nishadha, "lower mountain," in opposition to Nishadha, "high mountain," by which the high ridge of the Hindu Kush is meant, loc. cit. 12, 27, n. 4.

30

Muir, "Sanskrit Texts," 22, 324, 328.

31

Strabo, pp. 690, 691.

32

Diod. 2, 35; Strabo, pp. 700, 717.

33

Megasthenes in Strabo, pp. 690, 702; cf. Arrian, "Ind." 4. Diodorus allows the upper Ganges a breadth of 30 stades, at Palibothra a breadth of 32 stades – 2, 37; 17, 93.

34

Arrian, "Ind." 4.

35

Diod. 2, 37.

36

Strabo, p. 691.

37

Diod. 2, 37.

38

Strabo, p. 695.

39

Diod. 2, 37.