India as Known to Panini: A Study of the Cultural Material in the Ashtadhyayi c7.s1.1

c7.s1.1

The most important contribution of the *Ashṭādhyāyī* to the history of ancient India is its geographical information. The country, its mountains and ocean, forests and rivers, natural and territorial divisions (*janapadas*), towns and villages receive their full share of attention in the linguistic material dealt with by Pāṇini. It is here that the grammarian can be credited with having created his material in a very real sense by undertaking an original survey of the place-names in the vast area of the country stretching from Kamboja (Pamir region) and Kāpiśī (Begrām in Afghanistan) to Kaliṅga (Orissa) and Sūramasa (Sūrmā Valley in Assam). The question may be asked as to the *raison d'etre* of the rich geographical information that a work proclaimed to deal with grammar contains.