Page:Ancient India as described by Megasthenês and Arrian.djvu/172

grows abundantly, and the laurel, and boxwood, and every kind of fruit-tree found in Greece. The remarkable and almost fabulous accounts which are current regarding the fertility of its soil, and the nature of its fruits and trees, its beasts and birds and other animals, will be set down each in its own place in other parts of this work. A little further on I shall speak of the satrapies, but the island of Taprobane^[1] requires my immediate attention.

But before we come to this island there are others, one being Patale, which, as we have indicated, lies at the mouth of the Indus, triangular in shape, and 220^[2] miles in breadth. Beyond the mouth of the Indus are Chryse and Argyre,^[3]

derived from aśva, a horse, signified merely the cavaliers; it was less an ethnic, in the rigorous acceptation of the word, than a general appellation applied by the Indians of the Panjâb to the tribes of the region of the Kophês, renowned from antiquity for the excellence of its horses. In the popular dialects the Sanskṛit word took the usual form Assaka, which reappears scarcely modified in Assakani (Ἁσσακανοί) or Assakêni (Ἀσσακηνοί) in the Greek historians of the expedition of Alexander and subsequent writers. It is impossible not to recognize here the name of Avghân or Afghâns... which is very evidently nothing else than a contracted form of Assakán. Neither the Gandariê of Hekataios nor the Paktyi of Herodotos are known to them [Arrian and other Greek and Latin writers of the history of Alexander], but as it is the same territory [as that of the Assakani], and as in actual usage the names Afghâns and Pakhtûn are still synonymous, their identity is not a matter of doubt."—Etude sur le Géographie Grecque et Latine de l'Inde, pp. 376-8. The name of the Gandhâra, it may here be added, remounts to the highest antiquity; it is mentioned in one of the hymns of the Ṛig-Veda, as old perhaps as the 15th century B.C.—Id. p. 864.

1. Vide ante, p. 62, n. *.
2. CCXX.—v.l. CXXX.
3. Burma and Arakan respectively, according to Yule.—Ed. Ind. Ant.