The Greeks in Bactria and India c10.s4.62

c10.s4.62

Ptolemy’s third province, Abiria, northward of Patalene, is also a good Greek form and is named from the Abhīras. Patañjali locates this people, about the end of the second century B.C. (p. 146 n. 3), in Sindhudeça,⁶ the ‘country of the Indus’, which supplies an additional proof that the list of provinces behind Ptolemy’s sources refers to the second century, for at a later time the Abhiras moved much farther southward and founded a kingdom in Avanti.¹ Ptolemy’s Abiria must have corresponded in main outline to the later province of Middle Sind. But this only takes us part of the way up the Indus, and there must have been another Greek province between Abiria and the confluence of the Punjab rivers with the Indus, corresponding to the later province of Upper Sind. The name of this province has, I think, been preserved by Pliny (VI, 71), doubtless ultimately from the same list which lies behind Ptolemy’s sources: he says that the Indus formed two islands, a very large one called Prasiane and a smaller one called Patala; and Prasiane, a properly formed eparchy name, should be the name of the Indus province north of Abiria. The explanation of this ‘island’, which only means a piece of land between two pieces of water,² is given by Aristobulus,³ who says that when he was there the Indus had recently changed its course into ‘the much deeper channel’ to the eastward—doubtless the Hakra channel—and that an enormous tract of country was perishing for want of water. Presumably therefore, at the date of Pliny’s information, the Indus was running in *both* channels and a long tract of country between them was fertile; Prasiane means ‘the eastern country’, *i.e.* east of the Indus channel proper, but the province would include far more than the actual ‘island’. The strange view sometimes put forward,⁴ that during the Greek period the Indus and its tributaries ran precisely as they do to-day, hardly requires mention; Aristobulus and Pliny’s source are evidence enough of changes within the period itself, which is all that concerns me here. Prasiane has of course nothing to do with the Prasii, the ‘Easterners’ of Magadha on the Ganges, whose country Ptolemy (VII, 1, 53) calls Prasiake.