Ancient Indian Ethnography: Location of States and Tribes
This article is an extract from ETHNOGRAPHY OF ANCIENT INDIA BY ROBERT SHAFER With 2 maps 1954 OTTO HARRAS SOWITZ . WIESBADEN Indpaedia is an archive. It neither agrees nor disagrees |
Location of States and Tribes
Before one can attempt to place a country linguistically or racially, often he must first determine its location. Although the geography of ancient India was not the aim of this essay, this preliminary work has probably occupied two-thirds of the author's time. Since only perhaps a third of the "countries" have been placed upon Map 1, the following lists of names from the Mahabharata are offered partly in justification of the positions assigned the countries on the map, partly to give for countries not placed on the map some indication of their probable approximate location by their places in the lists between countries whose position is known or tentatively determined, and partly to provide future investigators with a rough work sheet on which they may note corrections, rectifications, or further indentifications.
The location of the more important kingdoms has been known for some time. For the others the writer has been largely dependent on the work of previous investigators. Most of this work was assembled and condensed by Nundo Lai Dey, who added some identifications of his own. But sometimes the identifications by different authors conflict with each other, sometimes they conflict with identifications of other places, and sometimes they rest upon a very insecure or improbable basis. Then the writer's work has largely consisted in editing out the conflicts or eliminating the identification.
Sometimes scholars have made identifications from sources other than archaeological and later than the Mahabharata, such as the Greek historians, Ptolemy, the puranas, Fa-hsien, Buddhist or Jain literature, or the coins of a country. Sometimes tribes moved between the time of the epic and that of the later sources, or the coins were found a consider- able distance from where the epic indicates that the tribe lived, and in such cases I have taken the evidence primarily from the Mahabharata, secondarily from the Harivamsa and the puranas. That I have not accepted the position assigned to a people by another author does not, therefore, necessarily mean that I think that author wrong, but only that the earliest evidence indicates a different position for epic times.
Fortunately the greater part of the population seems to have been rather well tied down to urban centers by the close of the Mahabharata conflict, except in forest regions and there the people were circumscribed by geographical factors and more powerful enemies so that movement of peoples within India seems to have been relatively minor or infre- quent for some time after the Great Rebellion.
I have been inclined to accept previous identifications if they fit into the frame of reference of known locations and of associations in the Mahabharata. I have made some new identifications on the same basis.
The surest means has been where a list of places in the Great Epic and in one or more puranas both contain some known places and the ' "routes" followed cross each other at an angle, the place to be identified occurring at the intersection.
The authors of the Geography, the digvijayas, and the puranas knew only four ways to locate a people:
1) They could give the general direction in which a country lay, as "in the west" or "in the north." At best such directions are indefinite. Sometimes one will find a country described as in the north and elsewhere as in the west. The authors were not scientific geographers and one cannot hold them too strictly to account. Where I live, near San Fran- cisco, we speak of going south to Los Angeles although it is actually southeast of San Francisco. We speak of both San Francisco and Los Angeles as being in the West because they are both in the West to the greater part of the people of the United States, although Los Angeles is actually to the east of San Francisco.
But some of the directions in the epic seem quite wrong. Thus, in the Geography it is stated that a list of countries are in the north and east when it is obvious that the immediately following countries such as Darada and Kasmira are in the northwest. In the lists in the appendix I have given indications of other errors in direction.
The geographical parts of the puranas give more indications of direction than the Geography, but their lists of countries are much less complete than in the Geography. And most of the purana list may be found in the Geography:
Puranas Geography
Central 9 13 +
NW 774 +, 208214.
Outside countries-
N 223231 +
E 8592 +, 146147 +
S 149, 153 +, 155 +, 156159 +, 180181 +, 161 164. The purana text very corrupt, names of only a few well-known kingdoms being retained and a few added.
W +, 193196 +
On Vindhyas 14-21 +
Numbers are those of entries in the Geography in the appendix,
while directions are from the Markandeyapurana ; + denotes additional
nations not found in the Geography.
It appears that the puranas "lifted" a relatively few lines and names and added more directions and a few countries; or the Geography and the puranas both drew upon another source, the Geography retaining most of the names of countries but omitting most of the directions, while the puranas retained most of the directions and omitted most of the names of the countries. The spelling in the puranas is generally more corrupt than that of the Geography and one needs parallel texts from several puranas to see the parallelism with certain lines of the Geography. The latter is more valuable for correcting the puranas than the puranas are for clarifying the Geography, but the puranas are occasionally useful for the latter purpose.
2) Another means of stating location was by relative position. This is the chief means employed in the Geography. A number of countries are mentioned that are contiguous to each other. One may suspect that the original narrator was giving an itinerary of the countries passed, and that when jumps of some distance occur it is because the itinerary of another traveler has begun. A work on the early roads and sea and river routes of India might help place the countries more accurately on the map, but I have found none.
3) The third means seems to have originated with the puranas. It is most specific when it is stated that a certain country is on the Vindhya range or on the back of the Vindhya range, referring to the whole complex of mountains in central India. It is actually specific when it is stated that certain countries are mountainous, for they are all in or very near the Himalayas.
4) Astrologers prepared lists in which the countries are said to rest on specific parts of a tortoise (Visnu), as the face, right fore leg, etc. Pargiter, who edited his translation of the Markandeyapurana, in which this kurmavibhaga occurs, referred to it as "an absurd fancy. At first it appeared so to me, for I could make little out of it.
Yet a little study reveals that, although these "tortoise geography" lists may be as late as the fourth century A.D., they are survivals of ancient geography anteceding anything in the Mahabharata or the vedas. The head of the tortoise faces the Bay of Bengal, which may represent its open mouth, and the description of the countries on the tortoise begins with those in the middle, then the face (E), then successively the right forefoot (SE), right side (S), right hind foot (SW), tail (W), left hind foot (NW), left side (N), and left forefoot (NE). The parallel part of the Brhatsamhita of Varahamihira * 'modernized' ' the text by abandoning the tortoise and substituting the directions given above in parentheses. But in both texts the middle of the tortoise was centered approximately around the Kuru country, so the tortoise was not facing east but almost exactly southeast. This makes his right forefoot extend considerably below the Vindhyas, and his right hind foot, supposedly the southwest, extend approximately over the Indus and its tributaries, i.e., over the NW and W. This would leave the tail extending to the northwest beyond India, and the whole left side of the body, including the left legs ap- proximately half the countries named in Tibet and the upper Indus valley.
It is evident that this tortoise world conception was composed after Aryans had occupied the foothills above the Ganges, Yamuna, and Sarasvati and while the countries to the north were still well known. 1 If it seems absurd it is no doubt because many countries to the north were dropped and many to the south have been added, leaving the poor animal very lopsided.
The worst distortion of the tortoise geography is that the left side the north of the Brhatsamhita contains the names of mountains in the central north, it is true, but the recognizable countries are in the Panjab ; and the left forefoot the northeast of the Brhatsamhita contains almost entirely mythical peoples: "one-footed," "three-eyed," or descriptive terms: "kingdom of the woods," "gold country," or the countries lie in the northwest of India, or the Markandeyapurana and the Brhatsamhita do not agree on the names.
It is apparent that the Aryans had lost most of their knowledge of central Tibet and at least nearly all memory of eastern Tibet, but retained considerable knowledge of the upper Indus valley beyond the Himalayas. The Aryas' migration down the Indus, and down the Sarayu and then east to the Indus explains why the Indo-Aryans retained the memory of countries on the left hind foot (i.e., along the Indus), but had forgotten nearly all about central Tibet, and practically all about eastern Tibet. They had first lost contact with eastern Tibet, then Central Tibet, and last with the upper Indus valley. Their memory depended upon the length of separation.
The present condition of the text of course does not present its original state. The mythical peoples are no doubt due to sanskritization of foreign words : the names of northwestern countries on the left fore (NE) foot are no doubt due to "editing" by copyists. But, because of the corruption of the text, the amount of geographical knowledge we can gain from the tortoise geography regarding ancient Tibet is limited, and can generally be used only when we have some control from other sources. 2
1 It was the period when Madhyades*a was applied to northern India, for, as Dikshitar astutely observed, if all north India was regarded as the Middle Country, there must have been territory north of there. It does not necessarily follow, as Dikshitar thought, that the Indians recognized it as "being a part of the Indian continent," but only that they knew about it.
2 The astrologers' geography (including the Brhatsamhita and the "short text") is interesting from another point of view. After describing the center, the region best known to the authors, it lists countries of the east and then rotates clockwise about the center. Kama's digvijaya also begins in the foothill region in the center, goes east, then south, west, and north; i.e., it goes clockwise. Karna's digvijaya does have a passing reference to forays to the north before going east,
The Garuda-, Garudamaha-, and Visnudharmottaramaha-puranas follow the Brhatsamhita in giving directions, but the text is very short. 1 It does serve, however, to correct a few errors in the Markandeya and Brhatsamhita. Thus the countries of the south in the "short text" are all near the Vindhyas, such as one might expect for the early tortoise geography. The short text form Navardstra or Nara- (Vdh.) corrects the Mark. Mahdrdstra.
All of these sources together give us the means of identifying perhaps a third of the countries and tribes of the Mahabharata with some degree of probability. I have added some on the map that I believe are located fairly accurately, in the hope that these names will be brought to the attention of some scholar with information which will better define their position. At first I placed question marks after names of tribes whose location was more doubtful, as after Kanka and Tusdra, of which I can only state that these peoples were in the far northwestern part of India or beyond at the time of the Mahabharata, and that these names occur in the texts in a certain sequence which suggests their relative positions to each other and to other tribes and places. They probably were not far beyond the borders at the time of the epic, for, although the tortoise geography indicates that the Aryans were once familiar with the region beyond the Himalayas, the Mahabharata gives evidence of knowledge of only a narrow strip north of the borders of India. I abandoned the original plan of placing interrogation marks after more doubtful locations, since certainty is only relative. Even for well-known kingdoms such as Kuru, Paficala, or Matsya, we cannot define the boundaries by means of treaties or border markers as we often can for European or some
but these were probably considered more as being in the "center." But the Pandava brothers' digvijayas are definitely arranged in the order: N, E, S, W; i.e., our own order of arranging directions. The puranas, as the Markandeya, first list the countries in the center, then in the NW, N, E, S, and W.
All of these, after describing the center, go clockwise around the points of the compass. One may infer from this that the Aryans had sun dials. And it is known they did have something like that; see Burgess, "Suryasiddhanta," JAOS 6 (1860), iii. Iff.; xiii. 24. At that time some scholars contended that the Indians' knowledge of astronomy came from the Greeks, a view Burgess thought did not sufficiently credit native ingenuity. The fact that the tortoise geography was clockwise oriented leads one to infer a very early native origin of the sun dial in India.
That, in naming the points of the compass, one began with the east in the earliest period is indicated not only by the tortoise geography but by the Sanskrit language itself, where dak$ina is "right" or "south," since one must face the east to have the right hand toward the south; or padcima "behind" or "western"; etc.
Chronologically the point of the compass on which one began has rotated counter-clockwise, from the east in the tortoise geography and Kama's digvijaya to the north in the Pandava brothers' digvijayas, to the NW in the puranas. Just what significance this may have is not apparent.
1 See Kirfel, BJiaratavar$a.
Asiatic countries, and there is no country in early India on which more work could not be done in determining boundaries at different times. In the index I have given the names of capitals when known, as providing a fairly accurate idea of the position of the country. On the capitals of countries I have relied entirely on the researches of others.
The position of certain countries has been altered from that generally accepted previously. Thus, Kalinga has been placed closer to Vanga on the map because of the close association of these countries in the minds of the early Aryans as Sylvain Levi has already noticed, 1 and in the minds of the Greeks as Monohan has noted. 2 The Kalingas had probably no more than colonized the coast below the mouths of the Mahanada at the time the greater part of the Mahabharata was composed. I have also altered the position of Anarta; see Index.
In the Pandava brothers' digvijayas or series of conquests in the four quarters we are hindered by mention of places and kings who are unknown, or where it is not known which king of that name is referred to. Moreover, in some parts of the digvijayas there is not much order and, try as we may, there probably never will be. There are several possible explanations:
1.The digvijayas were composed rather late. The tribute list (List 3 below) indicates that the digvijayas were actually more for the sub- jugation of border raiders and were confined to northern India. The very extensive geographical knowledge displayed in the digvijayas also suggests their comparatively late composition. The question arises whether the author of each digvijaya had in mind any campaign at all. Sahadeva's "conquest" looks more as if the itinerary of some traveler had been its basis.
2. If the authors of some digvijayas actually had a campaign in mind, we should remember that military campaigns are not conducted in a straight line ; the exigencies of the situation determine the movement of troops.
3. Each digvijaya covers a vast territory and could obviously not represent a single campaign but a series, and the order has probably often been confused.
4. If the account were taken from someone in a subordinate position, it might be rather jumbled because he knew only his own small sector and not the whole plan. Sometimes one gets the impression that the author at the Pandava capital saw the troops go out and return with prisoners and booty, and that from the tales he heard he pieced together some account of the digvijayas.
5. Original confusion has been increased by insertions and corruption of the text in transmission.
1 Pre-Aryan, p. 73.
2 See "Kalinga" in Index to Appendix.
Despite defects in the accounts, these digvijayas have probably been used more than any other lists in the Mahabharata, and when it can be determined that the campaign is following a certain direction, or even when it is known that it is occurring in a certain region, they are valuable.
Besides the Geography and the digvijayas and the tribute lists, other lists of countries in the Mahabharata have been utilized. Although geographical data from later works, particularly puranas, are referred to in connection with the lists in the Mahabharata, such lists have not been given in the appendix, as the work has been collated by Kirfel.
One of the greatest difficulties in the identifications is the corruption of texts in transmission. Scribes obviously often had more than one manuscript of the same text to assist them. They were among the learned men of their community, but they had lost all knowledge of some of the kingdoms and tribes, and when they conscientiously tried to make sense out of the "nonsense" in the text they often further corrupted the text. Thus by the eleventh century Tamara no longer had any meaning to an Indian scribe, but at that time the Tomaras occupied territory in the same general region that the Tamaras had occupied. Changing Tamara to Tomara made sense to the scribe and to his readers, and we may infer that it was at this time that the change was made. The scribes were, in some degree, "editors."
We see a similar change made today in the Critical Edition of the Mahabharata. In one line of Sahadeva's digvijaya^Professor Franklin Edgerton, my former teacher of Sanskrit, changes Atavl to Antdkhi, so that the line will refer to Antioch, Rome, and the Greeks. Antioch, Rome, and Greece were intimately associated in history and consequently they are still associated in the minds of western scholars, and hence Antdkhi made more sense to Prof. Edgerton in connection with Rome and the Greeks than Atavl. If this line occurred in associations which indicated the western border of India, we might think the author had wandered way off to the west ; but the text at this point is referring to the east coast, and Sahadeva sent messengers, no doubt by ship, from there to Ceylon. Fortunately modern scholarship has progressed so far that Professor Edgerton could warn his readers that the change in the text represented his personal opinion, and that he was expressing it with due reserve.
Since the editors had a wide knowledge of Indology and access to copies of the text not included in the critical apparatus, they may have had ample justification for the forms chosen for the text but could not give the detailed resons for their choice. Hence I have given the editors' forms where differing from my own. Where such differences occur they should not be considered as tacit criticisms of some of the forms in the final text of the Critical Edition, but rather as presenting evidence which calls into question some of the editors' forms which are not clearly supported by the evidence presented in the Critical Edition itself. As correct spelling is important in the identification and location of king- doms and tribes, and hence for the geography and history of ancient India, it is hoped that editors or scholars at the Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute will provide fuller support of the tacitly questioned forms of the text when the data warrants it.
Frequently the tacit "editing* ' of a scribe gives us a clew to the location of a people. Thus a scribe's "correction" ofKundlvisa toPundra- visa in a text of the Western recension leads one to infer that the scribe knew that the Kundivisas lived in Pundra. That this conclusion cannot be far wrong is shown by the two occurrences ofKundlvisa in the lists, once with Pundra and once with Munda or Suhma.
Occasionally the early Indo-Aryans referred to an area that they knew little about by a descriptive term, such as Padu-rdstra "cattle- country," Gopa-rdstra "country of cowherds," Atavl-dikhara "forest- peak," and these descriptive terms, taken in connection with the frame of reference of known locations in the same part of the text, assist in their identification. These early descriptive terms were usually quite matter of fact and unimaginative. In works that have been handed down to us only in later and more corrupt versions, we find a great growth of descriptive terms, ranging from fanciful to fantastic, as Vydghra-mukfia, Dlrgha-grlva, Ekeksana, Adva-keda in the astrological treatises. In the purana lists of a still later date we note degeneration of geographical knowledge in another manner the shortening of the lists and the corruption of the spelling to agree with places then known. In Buddhist times the geographical list appears to have been reduced to a few well-known ancient kingdoms, which did not necessarily re- present the status of India of the Buddhist period. In sum, we may say that in ancient times the vedic Aryans knew little of geography, that knowledge of the geography of India reached its peak during the epic period, that in following centuries India passed through a sort of Middle Ages when "schoolmen" made compendia of the knowledge of the ancients some of which were inserted in the Mahabharata, : and that as knowledge continued to decline these compendia became shorter and more corrupt.
A survey of the geographical knowledge in the Mahabharata and later works shows so much corruption and sanskritization, that it seems probable that many of the national and ethnic names in the epic were originally not Sanskrit, and hence when the name of a country or people makes any sense in Sanskrit or when it refers to some person or thing familiar to Sanskrit speakers, it is suspect unless it is an ordinary descriptive term, and the meaning of a term has often been given below to indicate this scepticism.
In the following appendix I have inclined more toward accepting the spellings of the oldest dated, or approximately dated manuscripts cited for any one passage than have the editors of the Critical Edition, who favor the Kashmirian recension. Professor Edgerton wrote me on this matter: "Practically all Indian manuscripts, and certainly all that I know of, of any parts of the Mahabharata, are so late (the oldest rarely before 1500) that their relative dates are of no practical importance, since they are all much more than 1000 years later than the composition of the Mahabharata. When the editors of the Mahabharata speak of a manuscript as good or bad, these judgements are based on a study of the readings of the manuscript as a whole. A 'good' manuscript is one whose readings, when compared with those of other manuscripts, seem to the editor on the whole to be close to the original." He added his belief that the 6 X manuscript of the Kashmirian recension "is probably the best representative of the common original."
The editors have had many problems to consider, while here the sole interest has been the minor one of determining the spelling of a few hundred geographical names, and on this small point I have not found the Kashmirian recension particularly trustworthy.
Editorial choice of a manuscript as good or bad brings in subjective factors over which one has no control. We shall always have some subjective selection independent of dating, because the oldest manuscripts certainly have some faults. But I think all students of the Mahabharata would be delighted if we only had a copy of the epic from the buried library near Tun-huang, for we would know that no errors or additions or subtractions had been made in the manuscript during the last thousand years. We do not have any such ancient manuscript of the epic. But we do have some dated, or approximately dated, around 1500. Of these we can say that no errors have crept in during the last 450 years. Of a manuscript dated 1750 we can only say that no scribal errors have been made during the last 200 years, and of one dated 1850 during the last hundred years. Consequently I do not see how we can uncritically state that relative dates are of no practical importance. Moreover it is a reasonable inference that often a manuscript has been kept for 450 years because it was itself copied from an old manuscript and hence its owner considered it particularly valuable.
Kashmir has long been highly regarded as a center of learning, and there has probably been much more activity in copying manuscripts there than there has been in a place not so highly regarded, as Nepal, whence some of the oldest dated manuscripts of the epic come. Before 1769 Nepal was ruled by Newars, a Tibeto-Burmic people with a respect for Sanskrit so great that the greater part of their literary vocabulary comes from Sanskrit ; but I doubt if an Indian would think of Nepal as a center of Sanskrit learning comparable to Kashmir, and there would not be a such a great turn-over of manuscripts in Nepal. Moreover I have found that a person established at a great center of learning can often be much more careless than one who is not. And so we may guess that a copyist in Kashmir, with a great reputation, could be less accurate with proper names than one in Nepal. 1
Moreover one can usually trace the corruption of a name from earlier to later manuscripts: through the copyist's mistaking one written letter for another of similar appearance; through substituting one letter for another of similar sound as if the copyist spoke the word to himself while copying, but mispronounced it, as by substituting one cerebral stop for another; through assimilation; through shortening the word; through "editing," substituting a word familiar to Sanskrit speakers for a "senseless" native name; etc. I have sometimes tried to indicate possible development of later forms from earlier through my arrangement of the forms, although this will not always be clear to one not familiar with the script.
Toward the left margin of the lists I have placed the forms that seem the most likely to be correct, judging from the variants cited in the Critical Edition. Often these are the same as those given in the text of the Critical Edition, not always because I am in complete agreement with the editors on that particular word, but because the text is so corrupt or the data cited so insufficient that I could suggest nothing that seemed closer to the original. I have given the forms preferred by the editors when different from those at the left margin. In attempting reconstructions I have taken no account of meter or whether the inferred original conformed to Sanskrit phonetically or semantically, because I doubt if the authors were always good poets and because the majority of the names were probably non-Sanskrit.
Whatever merits the Southern recension may have, the conservation of geographical names is usually not one of them Although there is no absolute uniformity in the transformations, the tendency to change certain Sanskrit phonemes into others could easily be formulated, but to do so would be outside the objective of this essay. The southern forms have seldom been cited here and then usually because they have some bearing on the northern forms.
1 To prevent any misconception, no reference is made here to any living scholar even remotely connected with Sanskrit or India.
