The Cambridge History of India, Vol. I: Ancient India v1.c26.73

v1.c26.73

When the Greeks looked round upon the features of the country itself, India seemed, before anything else, to be the land of immense rivers³. If, in discussing the topography of Alexander’s expedition through Sind, one has to reckon with the fact of great changes in the course of the rivers, that characteristic of these rivers did not escape Aristobulus. On one occasion, he told, a commission on which Alexander sent him took him to a region left desert by a shifting of the Indus to the east; there he saw the remains of over a thousand towns and villages once full of men⁴. Megasthenes got his informants to give him a list of the navigable rivers of the peninsula, 58 in all. Of this list 35 names are preserved⁵, and in spite of distortions, due either to the Greek’s mishearing of the native sounds or to the various transcriptions through which they have come down to us, some are still recognisable to-day.