making the river Cophes its furthest limit; though others prefer to consider all these as belonging to the Arii.
Many writers further include in India even the city Nysa and Mount Merus, sacred to Father Bacchus, whence the origin of the fable that he sprang from the thigh of Jupiter. They include also the Astacani,[1] in whose country the vine
- ↑ Other readings of the name are Aspagani and Aspagonæ. M. de St.-Martin, whose work has so often been referred to, says:—"We have seen already that in an extract from old Hekataios preserved in Stephen of Byzantium the city of Kaspapyros is called a Gandaric city, and that in Herodotos the same place is attributed to the Paktyi, and we have added that in our opinion there is only an apparent contradiction, because the district of Paktyikê and Gandara may very well be but one and the same country. It is not difficult, in fact, to recognize in the designation mentioned by Herodotos the indigenous name of the Afghân people, Pakhtu (in the plural Pakhtûn), the name which the greater part of the tribes use among themselves, and the only one they apply to their national dialect. We have here, then, as Lassen has noticed, historical proof of the presence of the Afghâns in their actual fatherland five centuries at least before the Christian era. Now, as the seat of the Afghân or Pakht nationality is chiefly in the basin of the Kophês, to the west of the Indus, which forms its eastern boundary, this further confirms what we have already seen, that it is to the west of the great river we must seek for the site of the city of Kaspapyros or Kaśyapapura, and consequently of the Gandariê of Hekataios. The employment of two different names to designate the very same country is easily explained by this double fact, that one of the names was the Indian designation of the land, whilst the other was the indigenous name applied to it by its inhabitants. There was yet another name, of Sanskṛit origin, used as a territorial appellation of Gandhâra—that of Aśvaka. This word,
part, and of which it is sometimes used as the equivalent, was a wider district, which comprehended nearly the whole of ancient Persia. In the Persian part of the Bisutun inscription Âria appears as Hariva, in the Babylonian part as Arevan. Regarding Paropamisos and the Cophes see Ind. Ant. vol. V. pp. 329 and 330.
