Indian Antiquary Vol 62

Author(s): Richard Carnac Temple, Charles E A W Oldham, S Krishnaswami Aiyangar, Devadatta Ramkrishna Bhandarka
Publisher: Swati Publications

Page 104

92
THE INDIAN ANTIQUARY
(MAY, 1933
ground of its being the only Western notice of the channel through which passed in classical times the most important of the trade links between the Far East and the Mediterranean regions. This record has accordingly been much discussed by scholars even before there was adequate knowledge available of the ground through which the route led.
The notice is contained in an introductory chapter where Ptolemy takes occasion learned. ly to discuss statements advanced by the geographer Marinus as to the length of the inhabited world.30 With regard to a certain measurement as to the distances between Hierapolis on the Euphrates and Sêra the metropolis of the Sêres,' i.e., of the Chinese, Marinus is quoted as having stated that "one Maën, a Macedonian, called also Titianus, who was a merchant by hereditary profession, had written a book giving the measurement in question which he had obtained not by visiting the Sêres in person, but from the agents whom he had sent there." Marinus is known to have flourished about the close of the first century A.D., and the record of Mads, a merchant probably from one of the Macedonian colonies established in Syria or Mesopotamia, being approximately contemporary, belongs to the period of the Later Han dynasty, when the silk trade flourished and was favoured by Chinese control of the Târîm basin.
Marinus' account of the route followed by Maēs' agente shows it to have passed through Mesopotamia, north-western Persia and the present Transcaspia to Antiochia of Margiana' or Merv, and so on to Bactria, the present Balkh," whence it turns towards the north in ascending the mountainous tract of the Kômédoi. And then in passing through this moun. tainous tract it pursues & southern course as far as the ravine which adjoins the plain country." Subsequently, after referring to certain assumptions as regards bearings on sections of the route and to detours made by it, Ptolemy quotes Marinus as saying: "The traveller having ascended the ravine arrives at the Stone Tower, after which the mountains that trend to the east unite with Imaus, the range that runs up to the north from Palimbothra." Another passage of Ptolemy, derived from Marinus, places the station or Sarai 'whence traders start on their journey to Séra 'to the east of the Stone Tower and in the axis of Mount Imaus itself.31
It is the merit of Baron Richthofen, the great geographer, and of Sir Henry Yule to have clearly demonstrated that the route followed by Maès' agents must have led up the Alai and on to Kashgar,39 and that by the mountains of the Komédoi' is meant the longstretched Kara-tegin tract in the main valley of which the Kizil-ou or Surkh-ab (the 'Red River ') draining the Alai makes its way to the Oxus east of Balkh. This location is definitely proved by the name Kumedh, which early Arab geographers apply to Kara-tegin and the position which Hsian-toang indicates for the territory of Chii-mi-t'o, this being the Chinese transcription of a similar form of the name.
In the summer and early autumn of 1915 Fate in the shape of the alliance with Imperial Russia gave me the long and eagerly wished-for chance of following in person the greater part of this ancient silk route' from the Alai down to the submontane plain of the Hisar region, then under the Amir of Bukhara. Fourteen years before, on returning from my first Central Asian expedition, I had been able to see the eastern portion of the route from Kashgar right up to the western extremity of the Alai where it passes under the flank of Mount Imaus, i.e., the great meridional range forming the eastern rim of the Pamirs. I am thus able to speak with some personal knowlege of the ground over which the route passed between Kashgar and Hisar.
30 C4. Ptolemy, Geographia, I, Chap. xi; for a translation, ace McCrindle, Ancient India as described by Ptolemy, pp. 8 sqq.
91 See Ptolemy, Geographia, VI, (Chap. xiii ; McCrindle, loc. cit., p. 284.
83 For references to Richthofen's and Yule's works, as well as to other publication dealing with the route of Mača, see my Anciens Khotan, i, pp. 64 99.; Innermost Asia, ii, pp. 849 sq.