[206] These are the mountains of the peninsular part of India.
[207] By the Red or Erythraean Sea is meant the Indian Ocean, which included both the Red Sea proper and the Persian Gulf. Curtius here makes the two great Indian rivers flow into the same sea. His conception of the configuration of India perhaps resembled that of Ptolemy, in whose map India is so misrepresented that it appears without its peninsula, but with a point (a little below the latitude of Bombay) whence the coast bends at once sharply to the east instead of pursuing its actual course southward to Cape Comorin.
[208] “Iomanes, a clever conjectural insertion due to Hedike. Foss had suspected some such omission, as the old attempt to make the Acesines run into the Ganges by finding some other modern name for it was preposterous” (Alexander in India, by Heitland and Raven, p. 90). The Iomanes appears in Ptolemy’s Geography as the Diamouna—that is the Yamunâ or Jamnâ, the great river which, after passing Delhi, Mathurâ, Agrâ, and other places, joins the Ganges at Allâhâbâd. It rises from hot springs not far westward from the sources of the Ganges. Arrian, who in his Indika calls it the Jobares, says that it flows through the country of the Sourasenoi, who possess two great cities, Methora (Mathurâ) and Kleisobara (Krishnapura?). Pliny (vi. 19) states that it passes through the Palibothri to join the Ganges. At its junction with the Jamnâ, and a third, but imaginary river, the Sarasvatî, the Ganges is called the Trivênî, i.e. “triple plait,” from the intermingling of the three streams.
[209] This river is most probably that which is called the Doanas in Ptolemy’s Geography, where it designates the Brahmaputra. The Doanas was probably also the Oidanes of Artemidôros, who, according to Strabo (XI. i. 72), described it as a river that bred crocodiles and dolphins, and that flowed into the Ganges. If the first two letters in Doanas be transposed, we get almost letter for letter the Oidanes of Artemidôros, and we get it again, though not so closely, if we discard r from the Dyardanes of Curtius. That these two writers had the same river in view is confirmed by their mentioning the very same animals as bred in its waters.
[210] No satisfactory identification of this river has as yet, so far as I am aware, been proposed. The river called by Arrian (iv. 6) the Erymandros, and by Polybios the Erymanthus, and now known as the Helmund, has a name pretty similar, but it does not discharge into the sea. It enters the inland lake called Zarah, in the province of Seistan in Afghanistan. According to Arrian it disappears in the sands.
[211] These statements about the north wind as it affects India have no basis in fact, and those that immediately follow reach the very acme of absurdity. The cold season occurs in India as in Europe during winter, but snow never falls on the plains. During the hot season, however, hailstorms occasionally occur and inflict more or less damage on the crops. I have myself witnessed in Calcutta a thunderstorm accompanied with a descent of hail, commingled with large pieces of ice, and this in one of the hottest months of the year, June or July, I forget which.
[212] Agatharchides, a writer of the second century B.C., begins his work on the Erythraean Sea by inquiring into the origin of its name. On this point four different opinions were held, and of these he adopted that which fathered the name on King Erythrus. He then tells the story of this king (who was a Persian) as he had learned it from a Persian called Boxos who had settled in Athens. Strabo (xvi. 20) gives a brief summary of this passage, and Pliny (N. H. vi. 28) a still briefer. Nearchos, as we learn from Arrian’s Indika (c. 37), in the course of his memorable voyage put into an island called Oärakta (now Kishm), where the natives showed him the tomb of the first king of the island. They said that his name was Erythrês, and that the sea in those parts was called after him the Erythraean. Opinions still differ as to the origin of the name. According to some it was given from the red and purple colouring of the rocks which in some parts border the sea, according to others from the red colour sometimes given to the waters by the sea-weed called Sûph. Fresnel, however, rejecting such views, interprets the name as meaning the sea of the Homêritai, i.e. Himyar or Hhomayr, or red men, whose name and the Arabic word ahhmar (red) have the same root. The people here indicated occupied Yemen, and were called red men in contrast to the black men of the opposite coast. Others again attribute the name to Edom (Idumea), which bordered the Gulf of Akaba, the eastern arm of the Red Sea, at its northern extremity. Edom signifies red. Further references to this subject will be found in Mela (III. viii. 1), Solinus (c. 36), Dio Cassius (lxviii. 28), and Stephanos Byz. s.v. Ἐρυθρά.
[213] As the dress of the natives was made in ancient times as at present, chiefly from cotton, this perhaps may be the substance meant here by flax. The valuable properties of the wool-like product of the cotton plant (Gossypium herbaceum, the Karpâsa of Sanskrit) were early known, as in one of the hymns of the Rig-veda mention is made of female weavers intertwining the extended thread. “The dress worn by the Indians (says Arrian, citing Nearchos) is made of cotton, a material produced from trees. They wear an under-garment of cotton which reaches below the knee half-way down to the ankles, and also an upper garment which they throw partly over their shoulders, and partly twist in folds round their head” (Indika, c. 16). This costume is mentioned in old Sanskrit literature, and is carefully represented in the frescoes on the caves of Ajanta. We learn from the Periplûs of the Erythraean Sea that muslin (othonion) was imported into the marts of India from China, and exported thence along with Indian muslin and coarser cotton fabrics to Egypt.
[214] Strabo (XV. i. 67) states on the authority of Nearchos that the Indians wrote letters upon cloth, which was well pressed to make it smooth, but adds that other writers affirmed that the Indians had no knowledge of writing. They were, however, acquainted with writing for some centuries before Alexander’s time, but whence they got their alphabet is a question not yet quite settled, though the weight of opinion inclines to assign it a Himyaritic origin. We learn from Pliny (xiii. 21) that paper made from the papyrus plant did not come into common use out of Egypt till the time of Alexander the Great. He then goes on to say that for writing on, the leaves of palm-trees were first used, and then the barks (libri) of certain trees. Some of the Egyptian papyrus-rolls are as old as the sixth dynasty.
[215] Nearchos, as we learn from Arrian’s Indika, c. 15, was taken with surprise when he heard in India parrots talking like human beings. Pliny says (x. 58) that India produces this bird, which is called the Septagen, and that it salutes its masters, and pronounces the words it hears. If it fails to do so it is beaten on the head, which is as hard as its bill, with an iron rod, until it repeats the words properly. Ovid (Amores, ii. 6) calls the parrot the imitative bird from the Indians of the East. Another Indian bird, the Maina, which in size and appearance somewhat resembles the thrush, can be taught to speak with great distinctness. It is probably the bird which Aelian (Hist. Anim. xvi. 3) describes under the name of the Kerkiôn.