Age of the Nandas and Mauryas c9.s19: 7. India : Size
Age of the Nandas and Mauryas c9.s19
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7. India : Size
c9.s19.1
The statements of all ancient writers on the size of India and the length of its boundaries are but random guesses, and Strabo who has collected most of them, comments on their discrepancies and on the difficulty of being confident or precise in treating of Indian matters. Patrocles said that it was 15,000 stadia (1,724 miles) from the southernmost point of India to the most northerly, and this happy guess—it could not have been anything more—comes very near the truth, the real distance being 1800 miles. Other guesses are not so happy and need not be mentioned, though it may be noted that Megasthenes puts the length of the royal road he travelled by from the north-west to Pāṭaliputra at 10,000 stadia, and adds 6,000 stadia to it to arrive at the total breadth of the country, making a computation from the time taken in voyages from the sea up the Ganges to Pāṭaliputra. Eratosthenes, the President of the Alexandrian Library from 240 to 196 B.C., was the first real geographer of the Hellenistic age, who studied and arranged systematically all the geographical knowledge available in his day; but his conclusions on the position and configuration of India were far from correct. He thought that the country was of the shape of an irregular rhomboid with the Indus and the Himalayas for its shorter Western and Northern sides, measuring respectively 13,000 and 16,000 stadia; the longer sides each exceeded its opposite by 3,000 stadia. His orientation was completely wrong and he put the southern extremity of the peninsula farther east than the mouth of the Ganges. Some idea of the exaggerated notions entertained of the size of India may be had from Ctesias' opinion that India was not less than the rest of Asia; he was excelled by Onesicritus who regarded it as the third part of the habitable world, while Nearchus gathered that to traverse the plains only occupied a journey of four months.¹ The existence of Ceylon was vaguely known to Onesicritus.
c9.s19.2
¹ Patrocles in Strabo, II, 1.2 (Falconer, i, p. 106): other writers in XV, i. 10-2 (Anc. Ind. in Class. Lit. pp. 15-19). See also Megasthenes and Arrian. Frags IV ff. Strabo, XV, 1, 15 (pp. 20-21) for Onesicritus on Ceylon (Taprobane).
c9.s19.3
Megasthenes greatly exaggerated the length of India from north to south, and put it at 22,300 stadia at its shortest.² But he is right in noting that India well nigh embraced the whole of the northern Tropic zone of the earth and in the extreme south the gnomon of the sundial may frequently be observed to cast no shadow or cast it to the southward (in summer) while the constellation of the Bear is by night invisible.³
c9.s19.4
² Frag. VIII (p. 52).
c9.s19.5
³ Frag. I (Diod. II, 35), p. 30.
Linked texts (1)
- Patrocles, Υπομνήματα — Πατροκλῆς, Ancient Greek