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

from Chiamay it seems to be the same which had been called Caor by Gastaldi.
Gastaldi may therefore have known the Brahmaputra, the famous river of Assam.

Christian Sandler has given us a reproduction of Cassini's *Planisphère
terrestre of 1694;* the first edition had appeared in 1682. On this map the Indus
and Ganges are still shown as meridional rivers coming from a range of mountains
running East to West, and north of which is P. Tibet, or Little Tibet, while Grand
Tibet is east of the Ganges at about the same place where Chiamay lacus used to
be, for Cassini has not entered the lake at all. In this he has been wise, but un-
fortunately he has left only one of the four traditional Indo-Chinese rivers. This is
no improvement. The existence of the four great rivers was the important thing;
whether they came from a lake or not was so far of secondary importance.¹

Cantelli's map of 1683, (Pl. XXXIII), is, whatever else its value may be, very
interesting in the history of Lago de Chiamay. He calls it Lago Chimai, and has
four issuing rivers, each with only one head. Their names are: Caor, Cosmin,
Chaberis, and Menan. The Sinus Argaricus of Ptolemy had by Mercator been
identified with the Gulf of Bengal. Therefore Mercator transplanted Ptolemy's Cha-
berus Fluvius to the place where Ganges had been formerly. Now, by some
extraordinary revelation, Cantelli has transplanted this restless river to Lago de
Chiamay where it occupies the place which by Gastaldi had been assigned to Cai-
pumo or the river of Martaban, Salwen. The Caor river he drops halfway to the
junction with the Ganges and places Assen, Assam, on the west side of the lake.

But there are still better surprises! The lake seems to get unquiet. It is
wandering. It has approached Tibet a very great step, so much so, that it has
Regno di Barantola to the east, and Lassa at a great distance S.E. Visscher had
Lassa S.W. of the lake; now it is S.E., which means that the lake has moved west-
wards as compared with its surroundings. At some distance north of the lake is
Redoch, our Rudok.

Disregarding the rest of the orientation, especially the relation of lake Chiamay
to Nupal, Bovtan and Assen, I would ask: which other lake could be practically
situated in Tibet, at a considerable distance south of Rudok, and at a still greater
distance N.W. of Lhasa, than the Manasarovar! And to make perfectly sure of the
identification, the Manasarovar was, since remote antiquity, regarded as the mother of four
great rivers, just as the Lago de Chiamay was called a *Madre dell' aque* by old Barros.

It is hardly possible to think that the quite new surroundings of the lake could
have been brought forward only by a caprice or coincidence. Cantelli has not been
influenced at all by Father Kircher whose map of 1667, (Pl. XI), shows a quite different
type. But we should not forget that Cantelli's map of 1683 was published in Rome,
where Kircher had questioned Father Roth and the convertite Joseph about And-