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It has been recognized long ago that Ptolemy's topography of Cis-Gangetic India was based on trade-routes. Nearly a century ago Vivien de Saint Martin spoke of “the almost exclusive employment of itineraries of merchants and caravans indicating on each route the series of daily stations”. We may compare the lists of stations inserted in books on India of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. One of the earliest examples we find in Joannes de Laet's little volume De Imperio Magni Mogolis (Leiden, 1631), p. 57. The author evidently derived his lists from the itineraries of the English merchants Richard Steel and John Crowther. The French jeweller and traveller Jean-Baptiste Tavernier has included full lists of stations along the principal trade-routes in his Indian Travels (ch. iv–xii). In the first place he deals with the two routes from Surat to Agra, all-important to European traders, the one by the Tāptī valley and Mālwā, the other by way of Aḥmadābād and Rājpūtānā. If we keep in mind that Ptolemy must have used similar lists, it will go far to explain the disconcerting fact that so many among the localities in his tables are not known from indigenous sources, either literary or epigraphical, whereas famous towns have been omitted. His tables are fundamentally lists of stages, and this must be our guiding principle in unravelling the riddle of Ptolemy's topography. The present note is an attempt to demonstrate this in some detail.
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- Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies , Volume 14 , Issue 1 , February 1952 , pp. 78 - 86
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- Copyright © School of Oriental and African Studies 1952
References
page 78 note 1 Etude sur la géographie grecque et latine de l'Inde. Mém. Acad. des Inscr. et Belles-Lettres, ser. i, vol. v (1858), 2nd pt., p. 62.Google Scholar
page 78 note 2 Foucher, A., Etudes asiatiques E.F.E.O., vol. i, 1925, p. 257Google Scholar. Tarn, W. W., The Greeks in Bactria and IndiaGoogle Scholar, passim.
page 79 note 1 BSOAS., xii, p. 122.Google Scholar
page 79 note 2 Cunningham identifies it with Khāndwā in the Nimar district, C.P.
page 79 note 3 The name Tiagoura, which comes after Ozēnē, is an exact rendering of Skt. Cakora. In literature cakora occurs as the name of a people (Harṣacarita, Bombay, 1897, p. 199, 1. 16)Google Scholar and of a mountain. In the Nāsik cave inscription, no. 2, Siri Sātakaṇ[ṇ]i Gotamīput[t]a is called the lord of a string of seven mountains, headed by Vijha (Skt. Vindhya) and ending with Cakora.
page 80 note 1 Cunningham, , A.S.R., vol. 1 (1871), p. 255.Google Scholar
page 81 note 1 McCrindle, J. W., Ancient India as described by Ptolemy, 1885, p. 133.Google Scholar
page 81 note 2 Can the word be connected with Sunderbunds, the well-known name of part of the Ganges delta nearest the sea ? Cf. Hobson-Jobson (1886), p. 660.Google Scholar
page 81 note 3 On account of the evident identity of the routes followed in §§ 53–4 and §§ 72–3, it is tempting to take Tamagis for a corruption of Tamalitēs. See beneath p. 82.
page 81 note 4 The position assigned to Sambalaka in Prasiakē ia 132° 15′ E. and 31° 50′ N.; the Sambalaka of § 73 is located at 141° E. and 29° 30′ N. We may perhaps conjecture that Ptolemy's informant(s) heard the term maṇḍala applied to the province whose capital was Palibothra and mistook it for the name of the people inhabiting that region.
page 82 note 1 I wish to express my indebtedness to Dr. Kern for the above information.
page 82 note 2 Dr. J. H. Thiel, professor of classical history at Utrecht, gave me several examples, the nearest approach being ⋯ρεομ⋯κης “mountain-high”.
page 83 note 1 Lévi, S., J.A., 1915, p. 95.Google Scholar
page 83 note 2 It is mentioned as “Ambulima” in the Buddhist Sanskrit text Mahāmāyūrī (92, 4)Google Scholar. Cf. Lévi, S., op. cit., pp. 73 and 103.Google Scholar
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page 83 note 4 Cf. Pañcapura, now Panjor or Pinjor, 40 miles east of Sirhind.
page 84 note 1 Cf. Tarn, op. cit., passim.
page 85 note 1 Ep. Ind., xxiv, pp. 104 fGoogle Scholar. Cf. Mirashi, V. V., Ind. Hist. Quart., xxii, pp. 309 ff.Google Scholar, and xxiii, pp. 320 f.
page 85 note 2 The term nagna-parṇa-Śabara (Bṛhats., xiv, 50)Google Scholar is rendered “naked śabaras and Parṇa Śabaras” by Kern, who adds in a footnote: “i.e. leaf-savages, meaning those that feed upon leaves. They are manifestly the Phyllitae of Ptolemy.” It seems more likely that the use of leaves (or feathers) refers to dress than to food.
page 85 note 3 Another instance of a tribe being mentioned by Ptolemy twice under different names we have in the Kirātas, who figure as “Kirradeoi” in vii, 2, 2Google Scholar, and as “Tiladai” in vii, 2, 15Google Scholar, the latter term being derived from Pali, cilāta (Milindapañha, pp. 327, 331)Google Scholar. Cf. Ep. Ind., XX, pp. 8, 22 f., 35)Google Scholar, Ptolemy describes the Tiladai as shaggy dwarfs, flat-faced but of a white complexion.