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| 0085 |
Southern Tibet : vol.1 |
Citation Information
OCR Text
Saint-Martin does not tell us why Ptolemy, after receiving detailed reports of
the regions traversed by the Brahmaputra, still lets this river flow into the Magnus
Sinus. The Daona and the Bepyrrus may be anything you like and it would be a
waste of time to try and identify them. But as the southern of the two Gangetic
tributaries coming down from Bepyrrus has a situation which happens to correspond
very closely to that of the lower course of the Brahmaputra, and as the nameless river
joins the Ganges below the point where the river spreads into the several branches
of the delta, I cannot find any reasonable cause why this nameless river should not
rather be identified with the Brahmaputra, than a river which belongs to Farther
India and empties itself into the Magnus Sinus. Such a mistake has been made
in a later time, namely by MERCATOR but in this case Ptolemy was better in-
formed than the German cartographer. And as Ptolemy knew the situation of the
Ganges delta remarkably well, why should he not, as Saint-Martin asks, have obtained
information about the great river which joins the delta from the east! Bepyrrus
is, so far as I can see, at least a part of the mountainous region which constitutes
the Eastern Himalaya, namely, the part which is pierced by the Brahmaputra. The
Indus and the Satlej were believed to rise from the southern side of the mountains;
the case may have been the same with the Brahmaputra. If the Hindus already
then derived the Brahmaputra from the sacred lake of Brahmakund, after forgetting
its real origin far west in Tibet, Ptolemy would have had no more reason than
his informants to place the source of the river on the northern side of the Emodus.
Even so late as in the year when the great French geographer printed his third
memoir, or 1860, the continuity of the Tsangpo with the Brahmaputra was not
definitely settled.¹
Regarding the three great rivers, Ptolemy cannot be said to have known,
positively, more than the two western. About the Brahmaputra we must confess
our uncertainty. The source of the Satlej, on the other hand, he positively places
at 132° E. Long. and 36° N. Lat., and he correctly regarded the Zadadros, Satadru
or Satlej as the greatest river of Panjab. The source of the Indus he places at
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