# Ancient India as described by Megasthenês and Arrian/Frag. II.

BOOK I.
Fragm. II.
Arr. Exped. Alex. V. 6. 2-11.
Of the Boundaries of India, its General Character, and its Rivers.
According to Eratosthenês, and Megasthenês who lived with Siburtios the satrap of Arachôsia, and who, as he himself tells us, often visited Sandrakottos the king of the Indians, India forms the largest of the four parts into which Southern Asia is divided, while the smallest part is that region which is included between the Euphrates and our own sea. The two remaining parts, which are separated from the others by the Euphrates and the Indus, and lie between these rivers, are scarcely of sufficient size to be compared with India, even should they be taken both together. The same writers say that India is bounded on its ​eastern side, right onwards to the south, by the great ocean; that its northern frontier is formed by the Kaukasos range as far as the junction of that range with Tauros; and that the boundary towards the west and the north-west, as far as the great ocean, is formed by the river Indus. A considerable portion of India consists of a level plain, and this, as they conjecture, has been formed from the alluvial deposits of the river,—inferring this from the fact that in other countries plains which are far away from the sea are generally formations of their respective rivers, so that in old times a country was even called by the name of its river. As an instance, there is the so-called plain of the Hermos—a river in Asia (Minor), which, flowing from the Mount of Mother Dindymênê, falls into the sea near the Æolian city of Smyrna. There is also the Lydian plain of the Kaüstros, named after that Lydian river; and another, that of the Kaïkos, in Mysia; and one also in Karia,—that of the Maiandros, which extends even to Miletos, which is an Ionian city. [As for Egypt, both the historians Herodotus and Hekataios (or at any rate the author of the work on Egypt if he was other than Hekataios) alike agree in declaring it to be the gift of the Nile, so that that country was perhaps even called after the river; for in early times Aigyptos was the name of the river which now-a-days both the Egyptians and other nations call the Nile, as the words ​of Homer clearly prove, when he says that Menelaös stationed his ships at the month of the river Aigyptos. If, then, there is but a single river in each plain, and these rivers, though by no means large, are capable of forming, as they flow to the sea, much new land, by carrying down silt from the uplands, where their sources are, it would be unreasonable to reject the belief in the case of India that a great part of it is a level plain, and that this plain is formed from the silt deposited by the rivers, seeing that the Hermos, and the Kaüstros, and the Kaïkos, and the Maiandros, and all the many rivers of Asia which &Jlinto the Mediterranean, even if united, would not be fit to be compared in volume of water with an ordinary Indian river, and much less with the greatest of them all, the Ganges, with which neither the Egyptian Nile, nor the Danube which flows through Europe, can for a moment be compared. Nay, the whole of these if combined all into one are not equal even to the Indus, which is already a large river where it rises from its fountains, and which after receiving as tributaries fifteen rivers all greater than those of Asia, and bearing off from its rival the honour of giving name to the country, falls at last into the sea.
* ↑ Conf. Epit. ad init.
* ↑ The name of Chandragupta is written by the Greeks Sandrokotfcos, Sandrakottas, Sandrakottos, Androkottos, and (best) Sandrokuptos. Cf. Schlegel, Bibl. Ind. 1. 245.—Schwanbeck, p. 12, n. 6.
* ↑ Strabo, XV. 1. 32, p. 700.—[All the rivers mentioned (the last of which is the Hupanis) unite in one, the Indus.] They say that fifteen considerable rivers, in all, flow into it.