Intercourse between India and the Western World from the Earliest Times to the Fall of Rome c7.19

c7.19

Herodotus, the first Greek writer about India whose account has survived, was born in 484 B.C., at Halikarnassus, not far from Karyanda, the home of Skylax, to whom he may owe not a little of his knowledge. He tells us¹ that the Indians are the last of all the nations on the eastern side of the world; for beyond the Panjāb lay the limitless Rājputāna desert, the *Marusthālī*, or place of death, stretching, as Herodotus thought, to the end of the world. Indians, he says, are of many nations, each speaking a different tongue. He divides them, however, into two broad classes, the dark, barbarous nomads, living in the marshes, and the paler, refined Aryans of the Kaspapura and Pakhtū districts of northern India, whom he appropriately compares to their Iranian kinsmen of Baktria². Besides these, he adds, there are other Indians in the far south, out of the sphere of Persian influence, who resemble the Ethiopians. These are plainly the Dravidian peoples. The aborigines were in his opinion degraded savages. Those of the marshes of the Indus wore clothes made of rushes, lived (like their neighbours, the famous Ichthyophagi of the Mekrān) on raw fish¹, and made rude boats out of a single joint of the gigantic reeds growing near the river². A neighbouring tribe, the Padaei, (who may be the Bhīl and other aboriginal races of central India, where such practices were common till quite recent times³), even killed and ate their sick relatives. This disgusting custom, which originates in a religious superstition, was also carried on by certain Scythian tribes⁴. Herodotus also makes a very interesting reference to a religious sect who killed nothing that had life, lived on a grain like millet, and had no houses. It is impossible to help wondering whether we have not here a reference to the Buddhists. Gautama, it will be remembered, died in 488 B.C., four years before Herodotus was born¹.