Notes on the Indica of Ctesias Author:Horace Hayman Wilson Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: one third of the length of the habitable globe. Agreeably to the notions of the Hindus, India would be still more extensive; for Aryavartta, the holy land, the c... more »ountry of the Hindus, is considered, in the Puranas, as bounded both upon the east and the west by the sea. The latter limit would carry India to the Mediterranean; and traces of this notion, although no longer entertained when Ctesias lived, may be discovered in classical as well as Indian authorities ; for there were Indi in Colchis, in Mesopotamia, on the Tigris, and even in Thrace, according to ancient writers quoted by Bryantb. He therefore concludes that Chaldea was the parent country of the Hindus. " The arts and sciences," he says, " imported into India came from the Cuthites of " Chaldea:" and again, " One of the most consider- " able colonies that went from Babylonia was that " of the Indi, or Sindi, who settled between the " Indus and the Ganges: a large body of them " passed to the north, and thence extended them- " selves eastward quite to the ocean0." And this theory has recently received the countenance of an eminent oriental scholar, Col. Vans Kennedy, who traces the origin of the Sanscrit language to the country about Babylond. It seems probable therefore, that ancient tradition, as well as imperfect geographical knowledge, had diffused amongst the Greeks indistinct notions of the vast extent of the Indian world, at a period prior to the more scientific cultivation of geography by the Alexandrian school,which would justify the statements of our author. Of the western limits of India, however, the times of Ctesias were able to form some tolerably correct idea; but to the east the boundary was still unknown ; and even in the days of Pausanias, the country of the Seres, or China was supposed to be an island i...« less