The Geography of the Puranas c7.s4.42

c7.s4.42

(iii) When the Purāṇas describe the world, they mean the ‘inhabitable or inhabited world’. Their ‘world’ is identical with the ‘Ruba-al-Mamūr’ (‘inhabitable quarter of the world’) of the Arabs. It is almost certain that uninhabited, desert or desolate lands did not find a place in their scheme of the regional division of the world—i.e., in their ‘seven dwīpas’. In other words if we want to locate their ‘dwīpas’ on the modern map, we should at once ignore or ‘subtract’ the negative areas from the world map altogether.