Indian Antiquary Vol 48

Author(s): Richard Carnac Temple, Devadatta Ramkrishna Bhandarkar
Publisher: Swati Publications

Page 24

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THE INDIAN ANTIQUARY
[FEBRUARY, 1919
gives their longitudes (calculated from Ferro in the Canaries) and latitudes (parallel of Rhodes). These scientific features are the causes of his wide celebracy. But his system has many defects:
(1) He placed the equator at a considerable distance from its true geographical position and vitiated his Eastern longitudes by about seven degrees.
(2) He took every degree of latitude and of longitude measured at the equator as equal to 500 stadia instead of 600 stadia (or 60 geographical miles). And thus if he had arrived at the conclusion that two places were 5000 stadia from each other, he would place them at a distance of ten degrees apart and thus, in fact, separate them by an interval of ⚫ 6000 stadia.
(3) As only a few astronomical observations were made in his time, he had to rely (and specially so in the case of India of which he had not even the slightest personal observation) upon second-hand information-reports of travellers, navigators and works of previous writers.
(4) In general shape his countries are narrowed at the north and enormously extended as they approach the south; so that the eastern parts of Asia are carried a long way beyond their true distance from Europe and Africa.
(5) As the result of the above defects, the shape of India is utterly distorted in his map. His results would place Paithan in the Bay of Bengal, make Ceylon an enormous island, make the Ganges flow into the sea somewhere near Canton, make the Mahanadi river run over Siam and Cambodia, carry Pâțaliputra to the east of a line from Tonquin to Pekin, etc.
Thus we see that unless we have a thorough adjustment of Ptolemy's results for India, it is with but little confidence that we can use it with only our present means of applying information given in it towards reconstructing the geography and political divisions of Ancient India.
It is needless to mention the other classical writers [translated by M'Crindle in his Ancient India], though they supply some historical information, they do little more than mentioning a few distorted Indian geographical names without the specification of any distance or direction. Nor was the old classical culture destined to live long after Ptolemy and the author of Peutinger Tables (A.D. 222).
(2) Early Christian.
The spread of Christianity ruined the old "pagan" culture. The Hebrew theory of flat earth surrounded by the ocean and having massive pillars at the edges on which the heaven rests like a roof banished the Greek spheroidal view. While the old classical structure was undermined, little was done to further any knowledge. The only work of this period in which we have any interest is The Christian Topography of the Universe [M'Crindle's translation of the complete work published by the Hakluyt Society, 1897] by the Egyptian monk Cosmas, nicknamed Indicopleustes (Indian traveller), who travelled from Egypt to India and Ceylon (A. D. 547). Reviling the impious old pagans for their spheroidal view, he depicts the world in his map-the earliest Christian map-as a flat rectangular island surrounded by the sea beyond which are other regions. He had no idea of what geography is and his work contributed little to the historical geography of India. All that we can learn from him is the name of certain western and South Indian places and their trade.