Zend Avesta Part 03

SR No.: 007673
Original Sutra Author: N/A
Author: L H Mills
Publisher: Oxford
Publication Year: 1887
Total Pages: 2618
Language: English
Classification: Book_English
File Size: 49 MB

Page 653

NOTES. I, 19, 7.
59
the Månavas is called Brahmavarta. In the Satras which supplied the material to the authors of the metrical lawbooks, the Vinasana is mentioned for the first time in the Baudhayana Satras, 1, 2, 9, Aryavarta lies to the east of the region where the Sarasvati) disappears, to the west of the Black-forest, to the north of the Paripátra (mountains), to the south of the Himalaya.' The name of the Sarasvatiis not mentioned, but no other river can be understood. What is curious, however, is, that in the Vasishtha Satras where the same frontiers of Aryavarta are given (1,8), the MSS. read originally pråg adarsát, i.e. east of the Âdarsa mountains, which was afterwards changed into prag adarsanat, and interpreted east of the invisibility, or of the disappearance of the Sarasvati.' Vasishtha quotes another authority, a Gåthå of the Bhallavins, which says: 'In the west the boundary river,'i.e. sindhur vidharani. This sindhur vidharani is another name of the old Sarasvatî, and in Baudhayana I, 2, 12, the same verse is quoted, though the reading of vidhârani varies with vikarani and visarani. See Bühler, 1. c. Madhyadesa is mentioned in one of the Parisishtas (MS. 510, Wilson) as a kind of model country, but it is there described as lying east of Dasarnaa, west of Kampilya”, north of Pâriyâtra, and south of the Himavat, or again, in a more general way, as the Duab of the Gangå and Yamuna
It is very curious that while in the later Sanskrit lite
See Wilson's Vishnu-purâna, ed. Hall, pp. 154, 155, 159, 160.
See Wilson's Vishnu-purâna, ed. Hall, p. 161. c L. c., pp. 123, 127. Instead of Pâriyâtra, other MSS. read Pâripâtra ; see Bühler, Vasishtha I, 8.
d Prag dasârnât pratyak kâmpilyâd udak pâriyâtrâd, dakshinena himavatah. Gangayamunayor antaram eke madhyadesam ity akakshate. Medhâtithi says that Madhyadesa, the middle country, was not called so because it was in the middle of the earth, but because it was neither too high nor too low. Albiruny, too, remarks that Madhyadesa was between the sea and the northern mountains, between the hot and the cold countries, equally distant from the eastern and western frontiers. See Reinaud, Mémoire sur l'Inde, P. 46.
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