The Greeks in Bactria and India c10.s4.39

c10.s4.39

A word must be said about Ptolemy’s sources and methods.⁴ As a geographer he was extremely painstaking but devoid of critical and historical instinct; he collected or had at his disposal a vast mass of material from every kind of source and of many different dates and set himself conscientiously to work everything in, somehow or other; he illustrates what a nuisance learning divorced from criticism can be. Many of his sources were itineraries compiled by merchants or other people; these he plotted out on his maps, deducting a regular percentage for exaggeration of distances, and located the places named accordingly. But itineraries were seldom exact, and different men may exaggerate differently or not at all; also they were of different dates and might call the same place by different names; he sometimes therefore arrived at the result of the same city existing in two places, and as he knew nothing about inner Asia himself he made two cities of it. Thus he makes Arsacia-Europus⁵ and Bactra-Zariaspa⁶ in each case two different cities, things which have taken in some modern writers; he puts Isagouros near Taxila but the Isagouroi on the Pamir;¹ his finest example is in the well-known Transjordania, where Rabbath-ammon and Philadelphia have become different cities located in different subsections of his list, which shows that he was using two documents of different periods.² Naturally boundaries of provinces or kingdoms varied greatly at different periods, but all periods with Ptolemy go in on one flat plane; so we get things like the Astauenoi located both in Aria and Hyrcania,³ because *at different times* that may have been true. One has therefore, over each separate bit of information, to seek the date of the ultimate source he is using. A good example is his extraordinary Margiane (p. 89), where the first question is, at what date can we find a province or kingdom which may have given rise to his account? Having plotted out the position of his cities from itineraries or what not, he then proceeded to determine the latitude and longitude of the position chosen; in inner Asia, at any rate, the only value of his co-ordinates is to indicate that a place probably stood *somewhere* in that locality or to give very roughly its *relative* position. The idea that he had at his disposal a number of towns whose latitude and longitude had been determined by somebody on the spot, because Hipparchus had expressed a hope that one day this might be done, is, at any rate for inner Asia, quite out of the question.⁴