Questions of King Milinda Part 01

Author(s): T W Rhys Davids
Publisher: Oxford

Page 47

xliv
THE QUESTIONS OF KING MILINDA.
the sea coast. The island Alasanda in the Indus, and the town of Kalasi situated in that island, have been discussed above. The country of the Sakas and Yavanas, Gandhâra, Kashmir, Bharukakkha, Surat, and Madhura, explain themselves. Nikumba and Vilâta were probably in the same neighbourhood, but these names have not been met with elsewhere, and I can suggest no identification of them. The places on the sea coast, to which a merchant ship could sail, mentioned on p. 359, are mostly well known. Kolapattana must, I think, be some place on the Koromandel coast, and Suvanna-bhůmi be meant for the seaboard of Burma and Siam. The author mentions no places in the interior south of the Ganges.
At four places he gives lists of famous rivers. In three out of the four he simply repeats the list of five-Garga, Yamuna, Akiravatî, Sarabhū, and Mahî-so often enumerated together in the Pitakas. In the fourth passage (p. 114) he adds five others—the Sindhu, the Sarassatî, the Vetravatî, the Vitamsa, and the Kandabhågå. Of these the first two are well known. Professor Eduard Müller suggests ? that the Vitamså is the same as the Vitastå (the Hydaspes of the Greeks and the modern Bihat). The Vetravati is one of the principal affluents of the Jumna; and the Kandrabhagâ rises in the North-West Himalayas, and is not unfrequently referred to as the Asiknî of the Vedas, the Akesines of the Greek geographers, the modern Kinab 3.
The list is meagre enough. An ethical treatise is scarcely the place to look for much geographical or historical matter. But unless our author deliberately concealed his knowledge, and made all the remarks he put into the mouth of Nâgasena correspond with what that teacher might fairly be expected to have known, the whole list points to the definite conclusion that the writer of the Questions of Milinda' resided in the far North-West of
See pp. 70, 87, 380 of the Pali text. • Journal of the Pali Text Society,' 1888, p. 87.
See Lassen, 'Indische Alterthumskunde,' vol. I, p. 43 (first edition, P. 55 of the second edition), and the passages there quoted.
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