Tribes in Ancient India c5.43

c5.43

With regard to the location of Kāmboja, Rhys Davids says that it was a country in the extreme N.W. of India, with Dvārakā as its capital.² Dr. S. K. Aiyangar places it in the territory answering to the modern Sindh and Gujarat³ and Dr. P. N. Banerjee too in his *Public Administration in Ancient India* (p. 56) assigns Kāmboja to a country near modern Sindh. Both these writers agree with Prof. Rhys Davids in locating the capital at Dvārakā. Kāmboja is mentioned in *Petavatthu* (II, 9, 1), but from the commentary on that passage (*PvA*, 111) it appears that Dvārakā is *not* its capital.⁴ V. A. Smith seems to place the Kāmbojas among the mountains either of Tibet or of the Hindu Kush. He further says that they are supposed to have spoken an Iranian tongue (*Early History of India*, 4th Ed., p. 193 and f.n. 1). According to McCrindle, Kamboja was Afghanisthan, the Kaofu (Kambu) of Hsüan Tsang (McCrindle, *Alexander’s Invasion*, p. 38). In the *Vedic Index*, it is stated that the Kāmbojas were settled to the N.W. of the Indus and were the Kambujiya of the old Persian inscriptions (see also D. R. Bhandarkar, *Carmichael Lectures*, 1918, pp. 54-5). According to Sir Charles Eliot (*Hinduism and Buddhism*, Vol. I, p. 268), the Kāmbojas were probably Tibetans; in another volume of the same work,¹ he calls them an ambiguous race who were perhaps the inhabitants of Tibet or its border lands. M. Foucher in his *Iconographie Bouddhique* (p. 134) points out that the Nepalese tradition applies the name Kambojadeśa to Tibet. Doubtful would be the attempt to connect Cambyses (O.P. Ka(m)bujiya) with the frontier people of Kāmboja.² Dr. H. C. Ray Chaudhuri³ points out that from a passage of the *Mahābhārata* we learn that a place called Rājapura was the home of the Kāmbojas (*Mbh.*, VII, 4-5, ‘*Karṇa Rājapuraṃ gatvā Kamboja nirjitāstyayā’*). The association of the Kāmbojas with the Gāndhāras enables us to identify this Rājapura with Rājapura of Hsüan Tsang (Watters, *On Yuan Chwang*, Vol. I, p. 284), which lay to the S. or S.E. of Punach.⁴