Ancient India as Described by Ptolemy: Being a Translation of the Chapters Which Describe India and Central and Eastern Asia in the Treatise on Geography Written by Klaudios Ptolemaios, t

From the Preface. PTOLEMY'S "Treatise on Geography," like his famous work on astronomy to which it formed the sequel, was destined to govern the world's opinion on the subject of which it treated, from the time of its publication until the dawn of the modern era, a period of about 1,300 years, This treatise must have been composed in the interests of chartography rather than of geography, for the author's aim is not so much to describe the earth's surface as to lay down the principles on which maps should be constructed, and to determine the latitude and longitude of places with a view to their being mapped in their proper positions. The principles he here laid down have proved of permanent validity, and are still practically applied in the art of map-construction, but his determinations of the position of places, owing to the paucity and imperfection of the astronomical observations on which, in combination with the existing measurements of terrestrial distances his conclusions were based, are all, with very few exceptions, incorrect. The work lost, of course, much of its old authority as soon as the discoveries of modern times had brought its grave and manifold errors to light. It did not, however, on this account cease to be of high interest and value as an antiquarian record, if we may judge from the multiplicity of the learned disquisitions which have from time to time been published in elucidation of many points of Ptolemaie Geography. There is perhaps no part of the contents which has received more attention from scholars than the chapters relating to India, where the tables abound to a surprising extent with names which are found nowhere else in classical literature, and which were doubtless obtained directly from Indian sources, rather than from reports of travellers or traders who had visited the country. On glancing over these names one cannot fail to remark how very few of them have any but the most distant resemblance to the indigenous names which they must have been intended to represent. Philologists, however, have made persistent efforts to penetrate the disguise which conceals the original forms of the names so much distorted by Ptolemy, and have succeeded in establishing a great number of satisfactory identifications, as well as in hitting upon others which have a balance of probability in their favour -- a similar service has been rendered by the archaeological investigations which have now for many years been systematically prosecuted under the auspices of the Indian Government....