The Cambridge History of India, Vol. I: Ancient India v1.c26.232

v1.c26.232

Some confused knowledge of how pearls were procured had come to the Greek writers through the traders’ stories. They knew that they grew in oysters. Two of the companions of Alexander, Androsthenes of Thasos, who had gone in the fleet with Nearchus and wrote a book called Παράπλους τῆς Ἰνδικῆς, and the chief usher Chares, had already some information as to the varieties of pearls and the chief fisheries³. The oysters, Megasthenes understood, were caught in nets; they went in shoals, each shoal with a king of its own, like swarms of bees, and to capture the king was to capture the shoal. The oysters, when caught, were put in jars, and as their flesh rotted the pearl was left disengaged at the bottom¹. The name of the extreme southern point of the peninsula had also travelled to the Greeks before the time of Strabo. He knew it as the country of the Cōliaci²; this was derived from the name in local speech, Kōri. The legend, when it made a woman the sovereign of the south, was probably reflecting the system of mother-right which has to some extent obtained there even to the present day. Some of the physical characteristics of the people of the south were known by report—that they were darker in complexion, for instance, than the Indians of the north. The facts of early maturity and of the general shortness of life were also known. In the legend narrated by Megasthenes, as we saw, the precocious maturity which Heracles had bestowed upon his daughter by a miracle continued to be a characteristic of the women of her kingdom. They were marriageable, and could bear children, Megasthenes said, at seven years old. This exaggeration was presumably due to the real fact of child-marriage. As to the general length of life, forty years was the maximum—again a fact, the relative shortness of life, exaggerated³.