Saturday, August 04, 2007

Indika

(Most of the content here in this post is taken from wikipedia articles)

Indika is a book written by Megasthenes who was a Greek traveler and geographer. He visited India during the 3rd century BCE.

The available copy of Indika is incomplete and only fragments of the entire work are available.

Surviving text of Indika

Megasthenes entered India through the district of the Pentapotamia of the rivers of which he gave full account, and proceeded from there to the royal road to Patliputra.

Indika also have references to the caste system in India.!

I am still searching for what actually Indika means ?

Any clues ?

2 comments:

Chinmu said...

I think the district called Pentopotamia or something is actuallu Pataliputra the capital of Chandragupta Maurya's empire. Chadragupta himself was called Sandrocotus in Greek. Indika is propably the predecessor of the word "India" in English. Certainly isn't the low-grade, low efficiency but swadeshi car (hence purchased by patriotic Indians) which we see on the roads.

anuj said...

Pentopotamia probably stands for the present punjab region of indian subcontinent, like 'mesopotamia: land between the rivers'
punjab is also a region containing 5 (penta) rivers.