Tribes in Ancient India c58.3

c58.3

That the Kirātas were located in the Uttarāpatha seems also to have been attested to by Ptolemy who includes the Kirrhadai (or Kirrhodoeis) among the tribes of Sogdiana (present-day Soghd), which was divided from Baktriana by the river Oxus (see McCrindle, *Ancient India*, p. 277). Kirrhadia, the country of the Kirrhadai, is mentioned in the *Periplus of the Erythraean Sea* as lying west from the mouth of the Ganges. This reference seems to suggest that the Kirātas had settlements in the eastern region as well. Ptolemy’s Kirrhadoi or Airrhadoi spread widely not only over Gangetic India, but also over countries farther east. The *Mahābhārata*, too, seems to point to a settlement of the Kirātas in Kāmarūpa; we are told that Bhagadatta, the powerful ruler of Prāgjyotiṣa (= Kāmarūpa), led a mighty *Mleccha* army of Kirātas and Cīnas in the battle of Kurukṣetra. For further remarks on the location of the Kirātas or Kirrhadoi, see Lassen’s *Indisches Alterthum*, Vol. III, pp. 235–7. L. Pliny and Megasthenes also mention the tribe under the name Skyrites. According to Megasthenes, they were a nomadic people ‘who instead of nostrils have merely orifices’. They were probaly a flat-nosed people of primitive origin dwelling in forests and mountains and living by hunting.