Megasthenes : (c.350– c.290 BC) a Greek explorer historian of Asia Minor, whom, around 302 BC, Seleucus I Nikator sent him as his ambassador to Chandragupta Maurya of Magadha, who ruled from Pātaliputra. Megāsthenes travelled over north & north-eastern India for about four years. His Indica became the firm basis of Europe’s ‘authoritative knowledge’ of India.
... it highly probable that Megasthenes is mixing up two accounts, one about the pearl-producing Tāmraparnī with its island or islands and the other about the Tāmraparnī-island across the sea, we cannot blot Ceylon from his view. However, there is no reason to put Ceylon from Megasthenes into Aśoka's edicts: it is only our present chronology, dating Aśoka after Megasthenes, that suggests for the... modern time-scheme for the Guptas, we have made an appeal to the Indica of Megasthenes, the ambassador sent to the court of Sandrocottus in c. 302 B.C. by Page 229 Seleucus Nicator, the principal successor of Alexander the Great in the Orient. A thorough scrutiny of the information from Megasthenes on the chronological scheme of the Indians contemporary with him has provided... happy "coincidence". On the basis of Megasthenes and some subsequent Classical writers, Strabo has drawn attention to an important point about the royal line of the Prasii (Prāchya= Easterner) kingdom, the rulers of Palibothra (Pātaliputra) in the post-Alexandrine age. He informs us that the reigning king, "as for example, King Sandrocottus to whom Megasthenes was sent on an embassy", had, among other ...
... new-fangled after about 400 A.D. rather than part of an old tradition. Even in the days of Megasthenes, the Greek ambassador to India - c. 302 B.C. - Indian history had rightly or wrongly a hoary antiquity for the Indian mind. Pliny (VI.xxl.4-5), Arrian (Indica I.ix) and Solinus (52.5), 1 reporting Megasthenes, quote the Indians as saying that the line of kings in India - before Alexander and San... Indian king whose name had been mentioned in a Greek form by foreign writers on India soon after the invasion of the Punjāb by Alexander the Great in 326 B.C. Outstanding among these writers was Megasthenes, the ambassador sent to India in c. 302 B.C. by Seleucus Nicator, the chief successor of Alexander in the East. He came to the court of the king whom the Greeks called Sandrocottus and whose capital... up and take sharp notice of the extraordinary coincidence. The situation in general, and still more with our calculations endowing it with particular acuteness, raises the question: "Does Megasthenes, who lived at the court of Sandrocottus, support the Purāna-prompted conclusion?" And it is indeed pertinent to ask: "Has he gathered from Indian sources any chronological information which would ...
... ancient Indian chronology hinges on our decision apropos of the clue from Megasthenes. The Kings from Dionysus to Sandrocottus Naturally, to come to a decision we must consult the Indian sources on which Megasthenes based himself. Where time-periods or king-lists are concerned, the informants of Megasthenes are very likely to have been Purānic pundits. "In fact," says Mankad 1... Kaliyuga sits with fair symmetry within the pattern of unequal and moderate Ages'we have reconstructed as likely in the milieu of Megasthenes in c. 302 B.C. The Evidence of Megasthenes about the Chaturyuga And when we turn to Megasthenes we discover in general terms exactly what we should expect him to gather from the Purānic lore of his day. He would not be able to... derivable from Megasthenes with the aid of the information gained from the Purānas about individual reign-lengths and the lengths of dynasties? A central test-case would be the accession-year obtained from the Purānas and Megasthenes for the modern historians' equivalent of Sandrocottus, Chandragupta Maurya whom we have substituted by Chandragupta I. Do Megasthenes and the Purānas ...
... Maurya to the time of Megasthenes must be outlined and justified in order to give a finishing touch to this substitution. At the end the polity of Megasthenes's India in its characteristic features has to be compared with the administration under the Mauryas and the Guptas. Years ago, it used to be a frequent practice to note the concordances between the account by Megasthenes and the information... the extreme of thinking that Megasthenes and the Arthaśāstra disagree toto coelo: there are points of similarity, some of which are fairly sharp but several are of a very general nature and none of them absolutely crucial. The proponents of a late dating of the book urge, as M.A. Mehendale 4 marks, that in matters of essential detail its author and Megasthenes entirely differ and that the rules... little real success, in finding in the Arthaśāstra passages to prove its Maurya date by comparisons with statements of Megasthenes. Coincidences indeed occur, but many of them are repeated in other ages of Indian history, and the differences are much more striking. Megasthenes finds more corroboration in Manu than in Kautilya." The precise view taken of the Arthaśāstra at present may best ...
... they quote two authorities: (1) Megasthenes (c. 302 B.C.) whose lost book Indica is believed to have been extensively drawn upon by several Classical authors after him; and (2) Ptolemy (c. 130 A.D.), the geographer. Both are taken to be explicit in their indications, leaving little room for controversy. But we submit that the indications seen in Megasthenes are due to a superficial fir... writers themselves and that the indications found in Ptolemy, far from being independent evidence, are actually borrowed from Megasthenes on a misunderstanding of him comparable to that by modern historians. 1 The earliest account based on Megasthenes occurs in Diodorus (1st century B.C.). Referring to the Ganges, he (II.37) 3 writes: "Now this river which at its source is... 1. Ancient India as Described by Megasthenes and Arrian (Calcutta, 1920), pp. 137-38. 2. Op. cit., p. 350, note 8. 3. Op. cit., p. 138. 4. Proceedings of the Indian History Congress, Bombay, 1947, pp. 91-8. 5. Op. cit., p. 135, fn. contd. from p. 134. Page 165 of the Kalinga people. In the time of Megasthenes the Vangas may have been deemed a part ...
... to which Megasthenes bears witness vanished totally - an unbelievable reversal of fortune. And surely Megasthenes remained at Pātaliputra for at least a few years if he was to collect the mass of detailed information he has left us of both fact and fancy prevalent in India? There seems no point in saying that during Sandrocottus's reign a dire shortage afflicted the country when Megasthenes had already... The most obvious and perhaps the most decisive point is the information by Strabo (XV.1.36) 1 from Megasthenes apropos of the Prasii: "...the reigning king must be surnamed after the city, being called Palibothrus in addition to his own family name, as, for example, King Sandrocottus to whom Megasthenes was sent on an embassy." Here two kinds of designations are involved: (1) the name of the city goes... of such power as his predecessor on the throne exerted. The naming of Simhala (Ceylon) reminds us that Megasthenes and other Greek writers of Alexander's time have brought in Ceylon-topics under designations like Taprobane, Palaesimundus and Palaeogoni. Pliny (VI.e.22), 1 referring to Megasthenes, even relates these topics to the people over whom Sandrocottus ruled: "The island in former times...was ...
... attributed to his traditional minister who is named Kautilya or Chānakya. A large number of scholars have discussed the question of this document's tallying with or differing from the account of Megasthenes regarding the administration under Sandrocottus. When we have finished our whole reconstruction of India's ancient history from the starting-point of our equation of Sandrocottus with the... date which would most fit it in our new chronological scheme. We shall look at both the Mauryan and the Guptan administrations and study them in relation to the governmental set-up indicated by Megasthenes. At the moment it is pertinent to make just two points. One defines the general attitude today and the other brings to a head one of the difficulties in favouring the Mauryan candidate for... writers, on the other hand, refer to 'treasurers of the state' or 'Superintendents of the treasury.' " Here Raychaudhuri notes one of the few significant contacts of the Arthaśāstra with the age of Megasthenes but 1."Chandragupta and the Maurya Empire", The Age of Imperial Unity, p. 66. 2. The Political History of India, p. 283. Page 221 dissociates that book from the ...
... ancient Indian chronology in Ancient India in a New Light. 9 To summarise his findings in brief, Sethna marshalls evidence from the Puranas and archaeology to argue that the Sandrocottus of Megasthenes could not have been the Mauryan king, but was the founder of the Gupta Dynasty. I had pointed out to him after he had completed the first part of the work that unless the Asokan epigraphs could... absurdum of the Puranics placing their contemporary monarchs six centuries in the past, Sethna proposes that the Guptas referred to in the Puranas are the descendants of that Chandragupta whom Megasthenes refers to as Sandrocottus, contemporaneous with Alexander. Consequently, the Mauryan Chandragupta and his grandson Asoka needs must recede considerably farther into the past. The... they carry on in the tradition of the realistic treatment of the Indus seals, the assembly hall of Mohenjodaro and the high polish of Harappan jewellery. From the other end of the spectrum, Megasthenes is analysed to reveal that references point to the Bhagavata Vaishnavite cult practised by the Gupta Dynasty, certainly not to what is known of the Mauryas. As in his work on the Aryan ...
... speaking of the huge army credited to the "kings" of the Gangaridai and the 1. The Classical Accounts..., p. 199. 2.Ibid., p. 193. 3.McCrindle, Ancient India as Described by Megasthenes and Arrian (Calcutta, 1920), pp. 9-10. 4. The Classical Accounts.... pp. 198-9. Page 192 Prasii, Plutarch adds: "Nor was this any exaggeration, for not long afterwards... himself and afterwards used to declare that Alexander could easily have taken possession of the whole country..." And, since we know from Strabo (XV.1.36; 2 11.1.9 3 ) that Seleucus's ambassador Megasthenes was sent to Sandrocot-tus's court at Palibothra, we may assume that Sandrocottus before his confrontation with Seleucus was already king of the Prasii no less than of the Indians who dwelt about ...
... Ram, India of Vedic Kalpaiutras (Delhi, 1959) Gordon, D. H., The Prehistoric Background of Indian Culture (Tripathi, Bombay, 1957) Goyal, S. R., Kautilya and Megasthenes (Kusumanjali Prakashan, Meerut, 1985) Gray, John, Archaeology and the Old Testament (Harper Torchbooks, New York and Evanston, 1965) Page 610 Grenet, M., ... Imperical History Mankad, D. R., Kālidāsa and the Guptas (Ahmedabad, 1947) Purānic Chronology (Anand, 1951) McCrindle, J., tr. Ancient India as Described by Megasthenes and Arrian (Calcutta, 1920) The Invasion of India by Alexander the Great (Westminister, 1893) Ancient India as Described by Ptolemy, edited by S.N. Majumdar Page 613 ... 9, 202, 478-9, 489, 553-4 mayura, 262 Mazdean religion and practice, 247, 255-6, 307, 308, 314, 324, 325, 592 Medes (Madai), 333, 467 Megallae, 166 Megasthenes: Indica, vii, i, 14, 15, 16, 17, 60, 71, 91, 92, 94-105, 116, 145-7, 153, 202, 214, 218, 219, 226, 229, 241, 242, 245, 312, 322, 336, 338, 375, 437, 446, 447, 479, 541, 542, 546, 551-8, 574, 575 ...
... horse-riding like kings and princes. During the Maurya dynasty, it is certain that there existed women warriors. Megasthenes, the Greek traveller, who visited India at that time, speaks of armed women who served the king as his body-guards and escorted him while he went hunting. Megasthenes must have marvelled at this custom, as Greek women were expected chiefly to look after their household. Let ...
... societies in which the king was only a military head or civic chief; we find the democratic element persisting in the days of Buddha and surviving in small States in the days of Chandragupta and Megasthenes even when great bureaucratically governed monarchies and empires were finally replacing the free earlier polity. It was only in proportion as the need for a large organisation of Indian life over ...
... Ancient India in a New Light -008_ The Traditional Puranic Chronology, Explicit or Implicit, found by Megasthenes and the reconstructed Sequel to it.htm ...
... studentship - in the Rigvedic epoch. The period was 48 years. Old books mention several periods - 12 years, 24, 36 and finally the extreme I have mentioned. I remember reading in the Indica of Megasthenes, the Greek ambassador to the court of the Indian king whom the historians of Alexander the Great called "Sandrocottus" (= Chandragupta), that the age of marriage for the Brahmins was 37. Evidently ...
... conditions in India which make it impossible to consider his age the age preceding that of the great Buddhist emperor Asoka who also has supplied us with information on the same subject. From Megasthenes we gather too a count of kings going hack from "Sandrocottus", to a primal ruler whose reported achievements can be precisely matched with those of as Indian monarch whom tradition honours ...
... could a Pythagoras or a philosopher of the Neo-platonist school, an Alexander or a Menander understand with a more ready sympathy the root ideas of Asiatic culture, but an average man of ability, a Megasthenes for instance, could be trusted to see and understand, though not inwardly and perfectly, yet in a sufficient measure. The mediaeval European, for all his militant Christianity and his prejudice against ...
... copy below: "After reading your elucidating, a friend of mine was wondering whether the spiritual bases has any material bases or not? Or exists simply in air?" The first two parts of my Megasthenes are almost ready. They have been enlarged now and can very well make the first push of a battering ram against the strong-hold of the current chronology. If my effort has the Divine's blessings, ...
... conjuring up any such towns. He forgets also that in the period of the Vedic Index (1912), the extensive area and massive fortification of ancient Pataliputra were known from the notes left by Megasthenes in c. 300 B.C. as well as from the Pali texts and that Macdonell and Keith (I, p. 539) rejected the hypothesis of Pischel and Geldner that the Rigveda's forts resembled this old capital of "Sandrocottus" ...
... Marya, 32 Maryanni, 2, 32, 67, 85-7, 88, 89 Mattiwaza, 31, 86, 87, 88 Meadow, Richard H., 5fn. Mediterranean, Miditerranids, 18, 19, 21, 22, 23 Megasthenes, 86, 103 Mehi, 38 Mesopotamia, 32, 35, 54, 68, 73, 74 Mirza, Hormazdyer K., 83 Mitanni, 2, 31, 32, 84, 85, 88 Mithra, Mithro, 86 "Mithra-Ahura", 34 ...
... earliest is considered to be Mauryan and hence very much post-Rigvedic. Strabo (born c. 63 B.C.), in his Geography (XV. 718), cites a writer who, referring evidently to the time (c. 300 B.C.) of Megasthenes - the Greek ambassador to the court of the Indian king whom the Greeks named "Sandrocottus" - tells us that the Indians worshipped Zeus Ombrios, "Zeus of the Rain-storms", who can only be Indra ...
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