Studies in the Geography of Ancient and Medieval India c8.22

c8.22

The geographical informations derived from the *Saṭṭañcāśaddeśavihāga* are very interesting, and in many cases they throw welcome light on some problems.¹ But the difficulties in dealing with the text are also numerous. The sources of the author's informations are works like the epics, the Purāṇas and the Tantras and above all travellers' or pilgrims' tales. The author might have himself visited some of the places on pilgrimage. The manuscripts he relied on may have misled him in some cases with their wrong readings and many such mistakes may be also due to the copyists of his work.² Moreover the author, like many of the Tantric writers of his time, seems to have only an insufficient knowledge of Sanskrit. Partly due to this fact and partly to the inadvertence of the copyists, a great confusion has been created with reference to the actual position of many countries and others bordering on them. As will be indicated below in the notes on the countries, many of these mistakes can be quite easily corrected.³ It must, however, be admitted that we cannot expect in all cases accurate geographical knowledge from our author who had to depend on a pilgrim's knowledge and had no opportunity of consulting any scientifically compiled text on geography or a scientifically prepared map. In some cases therefore, we find that the position of one country given in relation to another is only partially true or even wrong.⁴ Owing to the same reason, some countries are given as abutting on each other, though they are actually separated by other countries.⁵ The author generally mentions places, usually those sacred to Śiva and Pārvatī, as boundaries of the countries. Some of these places are difficult to identify, and in many cases the name of a god or god dessin a particular temple actually indicates the whole district round the shrine.² This difficulty is enhanced by the fact that, while in some cases the boundary mentioned is to be included in the country, in others it is to be excluded from it.¹ In many cases again, more than one country are mentioned in the same area and they overlap one another.² In view of the above observations, it will be seen that the *Ṣaṭpañcāśaddeśavibhāga* only attempts a rough estimate of the extents of countries, and sometimes the extents recorded are wider or narrower than they are actually.