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MEGASTHENES, ERATOSTHENES, HIPPARCHUS.   25

and scholars just mentioned. The next step forwards, an immense step, was taken by ALEXANDER and his generals, which, amongst other parts, embraced the land of the Paropamisadæ or Kabulistan and India to the Ganges.' Alexander twice crossed the Hindu-kush. To him and his contemporary historians the system which we know as the Himalaya, went under the designation of Emodus, which was, however, and correctly, regarded as a part or rather continuation of the Paropamisus or Indian Caucasus.2 In this Emodus all writers agreed in placing the sources of the Indus. They appear to have supposed the sources to have been not very remote from the point where the Indus issued from the mountains, at the gorge of Derbend (about 6o miles above Attock) where it first became known to them. Of its real origin in the remote valleys of Tibet they had of course no idea.»3

Megasthenes was probably the first Greek who ever reached the banks of the Ganges and gave an account of the river from personal observation. »Of its sources he had of course no definite knowledge, but was correctly informed that it took its rise in the Indian Caucasus (the Himalaya), and after flowing at first to the south, then turned eastwards.» His direct information was confined to the Indus and the Ganges and their surroundings; of the mountains to the north he seems to have had no knowledge. He enumerates 19 tributaries to the Ganges by name, though their identification is uncertain. The work of Megasthenes has perished, but considerable and very important extracts have been preserved to us in the works of STRABO and ARRIAN, whose description of India is taken from Megasthenes.

ERATOSTHENES was born at Cyrene in 276 B. C. He supposed the range of Imaus that bounded the country to the north to have its direction from west to east, while the Indus flowed from north to south. Eratosthenes believed that a great range, under different names for different sections, Taurus, Paropamisus, and Imaus, traversed the whole of Asia from west to east.

HIPPARCHUS gave India an enormous length from south to north and had therefore to remove the mountain barrier, which is its northern boundary, much too far to the north. He also made the Indus flow to the south-east. About 1 oo B. C.

I FORBIGER : Handbuch der alten Geographie. Band II. Leipzig 1844, p. 41.

2 According to BUNBURY ,Hindu-kush, is nothing more than a corruption of »the Indian Caucasus,. Thus natives of Asia should have got an Asiatic name from a European designation, which seems more than doubtful. Bunbury has probably taken this idea from VIVIEN DE SAINT-MARTIN, who says in his great Memoir on the Greek and Latin geography of India: >Au nord, une chaîne de montagnes neigeuses, dont le nom indigène (c'est Eratosthène qui le dit expressément), était Paropamise, et à laquelle les Grecs appliquèrent la dénomination de Caucase indien, nom qui se retrouve dans la nomenclature persane sous la forme de Hindou-koh, que l'usage des musulmans a changé en Hindou-kousch.»

3 BUNBURY, op. cit. p. 449. He has a special note ,Source of the Indus», in which he quotes VIVIEN DE SAINT-MARTIN, RENNELL and D'ANVILLE, and correctly adds that in criticising ancient geographers we should not forget our own imperfect knowledge of many parts of Asia in a very recent period, and how readily even the ablest modern writers have been led into false geographical combinations by imperfect information. Ibidem p. 511. When he published his History, the source of the Indus had not yet been reached by Europeans.

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