National Institute of Informatics - Digital Silk Road Project
Digital Archive of Toyo Bunko Rare Books

> > > >
Color New!IIIF Color HighRes Gray HighRes PDF   Japanese English
0215 Southern Tibet : vol.1
Southern Tibet : vol.1 / Page 215 (Grayscale High Resolution Image)

New!Citation Information

doi: 10.20676/00000263
Citation Format: Chicago | APA | Harvard | IEEE

OCR Text

Taurus for the mountains north. The great rivers are only mentioned in his letters:
³The Rivers are innumerable; but those of greatest fame are Indus and Ganges, the
latter not only for its many Navigable Streams . . ., but for its Purity in the esteem
of the most Religious . . .³

In the previous pages I have only picked out a few amongst the numerous
East Indian travellers, and my object has only been to show how very little they
really knew of a region, which even in our own days makes such a desperate re-
sistance against European exploration. The Indus, the Satlej, and the Ganges were
even better known by Greek and Roman antiquity, and even by the travellers of the
16th and 17th centuries Ptolemy was regarded as the greatest authority on these
matters. The Arab geographers at least knew of the existence of a country called
Tibet, while many of the Europeans hardly mention its name. Only the musk ap-
pears as a connecting link between Arabs and Europeans. Some travellers, however,
knew that Tibet was the southern part of Great Tartaria. But as a whole, the
mysterious country remained hidden under impenetrable clouds even after the jour-
neys of Andrade and Grueber.

20—131387 I