Age of the Nandas and Mauryas c9.s14: 2. Scylax
Age of the Nandas and Mauryas c9.s14
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2. Scylax
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The first Greek to write a book on India was the sea-captain Scylax of Caryanda whom Darius sent out c. 509 B.C. on a voyage of exploration to find out where the Indus emptied itself into the sea. He is said to have started from the city of Kaspatyrus in the Paktyikan district, sailed down the stream to the sea, and after a voyage of thirty months, reached the place whence the Egyptian king Necho sent the Phoenicians to sail round Libya. ‘After this voyage was completed’, says Herodotus, ‘Darius conquered the Indians, and made use of the sea in those parts’. Scylax’s voyage might have taken him through the lower Kabul valley, parts of Kashmir and the bulk of the Indus country. We know little of Scylax’s book; we do not hear of it as being a guide to Alexander in his voyage. It is certain however that Scylax started some of the fables about Indian peoples which coloured Greek traditional beliefs about India for many centuries; there is a reference in Philostratus’ Life of Apollonius of Tyana, to ‘men that are shadow-footed or have long heads’ and ‘the other poetical fancies which the treatise of Scylax recounts’ about peoples who ‘didn’t live anywhere on the earth, and least of all in India.’ Aristotle cites Scylax’s statement that in India kings had a marked superiority over those they governed.¹
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¹ The chief reference to Scylax is Herodotus, IV 44. See Philostratus, The Life of Apollonius of Tyana, III, 47 and Aristotle, Politics, VII, 14, 3.
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The antiquarian and geographer, Hecataeus of Miletus (B. C. 549-486)², might have used Scylax; he opens one of his works, Inquiries, with the admirable statement: ‘What I write here is what I consider true; for the tales of the Greeks appear to me to be many and ridiculous.’ From his other work, the Geography, some Indian names have survived: they are those of the river Indus; of two cities, Kaspapyros, a city of Gāndhāra, Multan according to another view, probably the same as Herodotus’ Kaspatyrus, and Argante, a city in the valley of the Indus; and of some peoples, viz., the Opiai, the Kalatiai, the Sciapodes (the shadow-footed people of Scylax) and perhaps also the Pygmies. Beyond the Indus was a sandy waste, a statement in which Hecataeus is followed by Herodotus, their knowledge of India being mostly limited to the Persian part of it.
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² For Hecataeus of Miletus see Cambridge Ancient History. IV, pp. 518-19: Lassen, Ind. Alt., ii, pp. 635-36. Foucher, Ancient Multan, in Woolner Commemoration volume (Lahore 1940) pp. 89-105 argues that Kaspapyros must be identified with Multan.