Intercourse between India and the Western World from the Earliest Times to the Fall of Rome c7.40

c7.40

The praise accorded to Herodotus for the admirable sobriety and truth of his remarks about India, cannot, unfortunately, be extended to Ktesias. Ktesias made very poor use of his opportunities—he was for twenty years court-physician to Artaxerxes Mnemon at Susa, and retired in 398 B.C.¹ He settled in Greece and there wrote his *Indika*, fragments of which survive in the abridgement of Photius and in other writers. It is full of extravagant stories of monstrous people and strange animals, and adds practically nothing to our knowledge of India. Ktesias is responsible for most of the grotesque legends about India which fill the pages of classical and medieval writers to the days of Sir John Mandeville². It may be stated, in excuse, that these fables are repeated, with additions, even by sober writers like Megasthenes, and are not originally due to Greek invention³. They were coined in the first instance by the Indians themselves, among whom they apparently originated from exaggerated descriptions of the strange features and repulsive customs of the hated Dasyus—aborigines, Dravidian and Mongolian—whom they encountered when the Aryans first invaded India. Thus the Antipodes of Ktesias are the *Paśchāṅgulajas* of the *Mahābhārata*; the Pygmies are the Kirāta—the Mongolian hillmen of Bhotān or the wild tribes of the Assam frontier perhaps. But this plea will not cover all the sins, of omission and commission, of Ktesias. His Indian animals are as fabulous as his Skiapodes and Anthropophagi. And a reference to the fragments of his companion work, the *Persika*, shews that his other writings were equally unreliable and uncritical. Although he had resided for years in Persia and had the opportunity of consulting the royal archives, he adds little, or nothing, to our knowledge of Persian history. To him, for instance, we owe the fable of the invasion of India by Semiramis and the equally absurd romances attached to the story of the Scythian campaigns of Cyrus the Great.