Art. XX.—Notes on the Early Geography of Indo-China

Extract

Having been for years past engaged in researches on the early history of Siātn and its border countries, I had, as a matter of course, to go into their ancient geography— a hitherto unexplored field—and this naturally led me to a study of the documents that the Western geographers of antiquity left us, more especially Ptolemy, who gives us the first collection of anything like authentic data on the countries in question. Thus it came to pass that I found myself hopelessly entangled in the “selva selvaggia, ed aspra e forte” of Ptolemy's geography of India extra-Gangem. I must confess that the results attending my first attempts at interpreting this portion of the work of the great Alexandrian were far from encouraging. This was, however, to be expected, seeing that even master hands like those of Klaproth, Cunningham, Yule, Lassen, and others, whilst meeting with fair success in identifying Ptolemy's names of places west of the meridian of the Ganges, had failed to evolve the slightest order out of the chaos of his trans-Gangetic geography, and to locate with certainty even a single one of the numerous cities he names beyond the outskirts of the Gulf of Bengal.