The Greeks in Bactria and India c10.s4.185

c10.s4.185

‘Babylon child of a god’ or ‘of the god’. I understand that there is nothing about this in Babylonian legend or literature. But the Greeks had invented for the city an eponymous nymph, Babylon, who was mother of a certain Arabos,¹ and there was another version which made the mother of Arabos a nymph named Thronia, who is called a daughter of the supreme god of Babylon, Bel;² there is no doubt therefore that Thronia and Babylon were the same nymph—Babylon ‘of the throne’ or ‘enthroned’ (see p. 188)—that Babylon consequently was the daughter of Bel, and that this was the story to which Herodicus alludes,³ treating the nymph as the personification of the city—the sort of recondite allusion dear to some Alexandrians. In the same way Ptolemy must witness to some lost story about a nymph Modoura who personified Mathurā and was really an Indian Yakshi.⁴