Indian Antiquary Vol 10

SR No.: 032502
Original Sutra Author: N/A
Author: Jas Burgess
Publisher: Swati Publications
Publication Year: 1984
Total Pages: 440
Language: English
Classification: Book_English
File Size: 19 MB

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THE INDIAN ANTIQUARY.
[OCTOBER, 1881.
There oozes from them an oib in drops, which are wiped off from the stem with wool, from which they are afterwards wrung out and received into alabaster boxes of stone. The oil is in colour of a faint red, and of a somewhat thick consistency. Its smell is the sweetest in all the world, and is said to diffuse itself to a distance of five stadia around. The privilege of possessing this per- fume belongs only to the king and the members of the royal family. A present of it was sent by the king of the Indians to the king of the Persians, and Ktêsias alleges that he saw it himself, and that it was of such an exquisite fragrance as he could not describe, and he knew nothing whereunto he could liken it.
29. He states that the cheese and the wines of the Indians are the sweetest in the world, adding that he knew this from his own experience, since he bad tasted both.
30. There is a fountain" among the Indians of a square shape and of about five ells in circumference. The water lodges in a rock The depth downward till you reach the water is three cubits and the depth of the water itself three orguiai. Herein the Indians of highest distinction bathe (both for purification and the averting of diseases) along with their wives and children; they throw themselves into the well foot foremost, and when they leap in the water casts them up again, and not only does it throw up human beings to the surface, but it casts out npon dry land any kind of animal, whether living or dead, and in fact anything else that is cast into it except iron and silver and gold
and copper, which all sink to the bottom. The water is intensely cold and sweet to drink. It makes a load babbling noise like water boiling in a caldron. Its waters are a cure for leprosy, and scab." In the Indian tongue it is called Balladét and in Greek openlun (i.e. usefal).
31. On those Indian mountains where the Indian reed grows, there is a race of men whose number is not less than 30,000, and whose wives bear offspring only once in their whole lifetime. Their children have teeth of perfect whiteness, both the upper set and the under, and the hair both of their head and of their eyebrows is from their very infancy quite hoary, and this whether they be boys or girls. Indeed every man among them till he reaches his thirtieth year has all the hair on his body white, but from that time forward it begins to turn black, and by the time they are sixty, there is not a hair to be seen upon them but what is black. These people, both men and women alike, have eight fingers on each hand, and eight toes on each foot. They are a very warlike people, and five thousand of them armed with bows and spears follow the banners of the King of the Indians. Their ears, he says, are so large that they cover their arms as far as the elbows while at the same time they cover all the back and the one ear touches the other."
32. There is in Ethiopia an animal called properly the Krokottas, but vulgarly the Kyno. lykos. It is of prodigions strength, and is said to imitate the human voice, and by night to
to its Arabic name kerfat, kirfah." This resemblance must, I think, be accidental, seeing that Herodotus considered 'cinnamon' alone as a foreign word. The word mentioned by Ktesias seems however to have a real resemblance to the Arabic word and also to a Dravidian one. Ktesias describes an odorous oil produced from an Indian tree having flowers like the laurel, which the Greeks called pupopoda, but which in India was called Kápriv.. From Ktérias's description making allowance for its exaggerations) it is evident that cinnamon oil was meant, and in this opinion Wahl agrees. Uranius, a writer, quoted by Stephen of Byzantium, mentiong kiptaboy as one of the productions of the Abaseni, the Arabian Abyssinians, by which we are doubtless to understand, not so much the products of their country as the articles in which they traded. From the connexion in which it is found kipafov would appear to be cinnamon, and we can scarcely err in identifying it with kerfat or more properly kirfah, one of the names which cinnamon has received in Arabia. Some Arabian scholars derive kirfah from karafa decortavit,' but Mr. Hassoun does not admit this derivation, and considers kirsah a foreign word. We are thus brought back to Ktégias's káparlov, or the Iudian word which káptriov represented. As this is a word of which we know the antiquity, the supposition that the Greeks or the Indians borrowed it from the Arabs is quite inadmissible. What then in the Indian word Ktesias referred to ? Not, as has been supposed, kurundhu, the Singhalese
name for cinnamon derived from the Sanskrit kurunta, but the Tamil MalayAlam word karuppu or kárppu, e. g. karappa.(t)tailam, Mal, oil of cinnamon. Other forms of this word are karappu, karuva and karuva, the last of which is the most common form in modern Tamil. Rheede refers to this form of the word when he says that "in his time in Malabar oils in high medical estimation were made from both the root and the leaves of the karua or wild cinnamon of that country." There are two meanings of karu in Tamil Malayalam, 'black,' and 'pungent', and the latter doubtless supplies us with the explanation of karuppu 'cinnamon'..... I have little doubt that the Sanskrit karpira, 'camphor,' is substantially the same as the Tamil Malay lam karuppu, and-Ktisias's kápar LOV, seeing that it does not seem to have any root in Sanskrit and that camphor and cinnamon are nearly related. The camphor of commerce is from a cinnamon tree, the camphora officinarum.
#Conf. frag. Ixxvii. #3 Conf. Frag. xxvii.
** Bilada in Sank. means 'giving strength': and is applied to a bullock, and a medical plant: balada is the Physalis flexuosa.-ED.
For an account of the various fabulous Indian races mentioned by the classical writers, and for their identification with the races mentioned in Sanskrit writings, see Ind. Ant., vol. VI, pp. 133-135, and footnotes.
of emphor and in to have any ass kápty,