The Ancient Geography of India. I. The Buddhist Period, including the Campaigns of Alexander, and the Travels of Hwen-Thsang c6.s1.t11.5

c6.s1.t11.5

Unfortunately, this part of the Delta has not yet been minutely explored; and to this cause I would attribute our ignorance of the remains of an ancient city, which were noticed by Ibn Batuta in A.D. 1333 in the very position which I have assigned to Debal.¹ As his statement is of great importance, I will quote the passage at full length:—"I then proceeded by the Sind to the city of *Láhari*, which is situated upon the shores of the Indian Sea, where the Sind joins it. It has a large harbour, into which ships from Persia, Yemen, and other places put. At a few miles from this city are the ruins of another, in which stones in the shape of men and beasts almost innumerable are to be found. The people of this place think that it is the opinion of their historians that there was a city formerly in this place, the greater part of the inhabitants of which were so base that God transformed them, their beasts, their herbs, even to the very seeds, into stones; and indeed stones in the shape of seeds are here almost innumerable.” This large ruined city, with its stones in the shape of men and beasts, I take to be the remains of the once great emporium of Debal. According to M‘Murdo, the people of Debal moved to Lâri-bandar,* and according to Captain Hamilton, Lâri-bandar possessed “a large stone fort,” for the protection of merchants against the Biluchis and Makrânis. It is, I think, a very fair and legitimate deduction that the people who deserted Debal removed the materials of their old city for the construction of the new one, and therefore that the stones of the fort of Lâri-bandar were brought from the deserted city of Debal, the remains of which excited the curiosity of Ibn Batuta in A.D. 1333.