Studies in the Geography of Ancient and Medieval India c13.22

c13.22

One of the *dvīpas* (literally, ‘an island’ or ‘a land lying between two rivers’) constituting the Puranic *sapta-dvīpā* Vasumatī (i.e. the earth consisting of seven *dvīpas*) is called by the name Śaka-dvīpa or Śāka-dvīpa.² This land is generally identified with the country inhabited by the Śaka people, which was called Scythia by the Greeks, the Greek name for the people being ‘Scythian’. Three different settlements of the Śakas are mentioned in the old Persian inscriptions, one of which lay in the plains of the rivers Jaxartes or Syr Darya and Oxus or Amu Darya in Central Asia and these Śakas are believed by some scholars to have settled later in the valley of the Helmund in the eastern part of Iran.³ Both these old and new homelands of the Śaka people were called Scythia, while East Iran is known to have been called Sakastān (modern Seistān, medieval Sijistān) by the Persians and Śaka-dvīpa or Śāka-dvīpa by the Indians. But Śaka-dvīpa or Śāka-dvīpa in the original Puranic conception of the *sapta-dvīpā* Vasumatī may have indicated the Śaka