And now, gentlemen, we have come to what I thought was the end of my paper, but only a day or two ago I was discussing it with my friend Mr. Sykes and he drew my attention to the marvellous story of Brother Lustig which the great brothers Grimm found in Germany. In it we find most of the elements of our stories. We find the Pir as St. Peter, we find a ribald soldier who practises white magic, who eats the heart of the lamb, which St. Peter particularly wanted, but most important of alļ we find the cooking of the corpse and the resurrection of the body. "St. Peter told the king that he would restore his daughter to life. He was taken to her and said, Bring me a kettle and some water," and when that was brought he bade every one go out, and allowed no one to remain with him but Brother Lustig. Then he cut off all the dead girl's limbs and threw them in the water, lighted a fire beneath the kettle and boiled them. And when the flesh had fallen away from the bones, he took out the beautiful white bones, and laid them on a table, and arranged them together in their natural order. When he had done that, he stepped forward and said three times, "In the name of the holy Trinity, dead woman arise." And at third time, the princess arose, living, healthy, and beautiful. 66 I need not proceed further with the story as to how Brother Lustig tried to emulate his Pir and as to how he finally reached Heaven. It is a marvellous story and will well repay the reading. The story indicates, I think, that the iron crock-pot was the magic pot, that the eating of the flesh was a mere incident in the general idea. I trust that I have sufficiently illustrated the obscure passage in the Satapatha Brahmana and elucidated the Avextan injunction against eating the nasu. We shall require the evidence of this paper when we come to deal with the geography of the first chapter of the Vendidad. REFERENCES. The Seven Headless Men of Hilaya....traditional....from Burton's Sind Revisited. A tale of Gawain....the High History of the Holy Graal. A cannibal oath....Herodotus III. 11. cf also IV. 26 and I. 216. cf. also Exodus 24.8. A tale of Guru Nanak....from Macauliffe's The Sikh Religion. The tale of Gogo Chohan.... Sindhi, traditional. The rasayana....from Alberuni's India, tr. E. Sachau. The tolapurs....Sindhi, traditional, from the Tuhfat-ul-kiram: The magic caldron....Macbeth IV. The mabinogion....by Lady Quest. The Asuras....from the Satapatha Brahmana II. 2.2. A Rajput tradition....from Tod's Rajasthan II. 356. Semitic lore....from Deuteronomy....the Koran....Alberuni's Indi c. VII. The Lernean Hydra....vide Enc. Brit. art Hydra. Azi Dahaka....from the Zend Avesta, S. B. E. Aban Yast IX; 34 A bestial Trinity....Revelations XII-XIII, tr. R.F. Weymouth. The Bene-Israel....Tribes and castes of Bombay, p. 73. PTOLEMY'S MAP OF SIND. By G. E. L. CARTER, ESQ., I. C. S. (Read on 30th August ) 1922. "It would be just as reasonable to try to read Virgil by means of French dictionary and with no grammar as to try to translat ancient British names by means of a Welsh dictionary." BRADLEY. Before attempting to elucidate the problems connected with the Stone Age in Sind it will be advisable to obtain as clear a picture as possible of as early a period as possible. Such a map tor the 7th and 8th Centuries A.D. could be prepared from the scattered details available in the Chachnama and in Hiuen Tsiang's travels. Fortunately, however, one can go back still further and find in Ptolemy's work not only sufficient material for filling a map but reasonably accurate and professedly very accurate details not only of Sind but of the highlands bordering it on the West. Ptolemy drew his information from various sources and allowance must be made for : (a) the reliability of his informants, (b) the extent to which he understood what he was told, (c) the error arising from attempting to fit his information into a general theory regarding the shape of the world, (d) his own mistakes in scales, identifications and other errors as a draughtsman and map maker. Ptolemy, too, was writing for geographers, not for archæologists, on information supplied by travellers not by archaeologists. He must therefore be interpreted primarily in terms of permanent unchanging physical features rather than supposed identifications of village sites. By following the geographical method we shall avoid such errors as the following: (a) Ptolemy does not mention Sehwan. If his Oskana is the Oxykanos of Alexander's march, then either Piska or Pasipeda must be Sehwan. So wrote Cunningham. But it is more than possible Sehwan is not mentioned because it was not founded. Concurrent Sindhi legend clearly fixes the Gupta period for the founding of Shivistan, as this place appears to have been first called. Piska is, compared with the divarication of the river towards the Arbita Mounts, rather south of the site of Sehwan. (b) Nothing can be identified because the constant westing of the river has swept the country clean. So again wrote Cunningham and others have accepted the same conclusion. This error is grievous. The age of the Indus is to be counted by geological periods and had the force of the westing been as powerful as is thus assumed one might reasonably expect the Indus by now to be flowing across Baluchistan. The Indus does indeed modify its course constantly, consequent upon the regime of its bed being disturbed by perennial deposits of silt. The principal results are that the Indus is continually straightening bends and making new ones. Its flood canals for the most part tend to silt up, the one exception that I know of being the Fuleli Canal, which is said to have been blessed by a fakir with the words Guni unhi, the deep Guni, Guni being an old name for the canal. Except for towns stated by Ptolemy to be actually on the river and any town destroyed by the opening of a new flood canal there is no reason therefore why the site of every town mentioned by Ptolemy should not be discovered after a careful survey. The general attitude is well summed up in the words of Ptolemy's latest critic :-He is unfortunately of little use for our purpose for his great work is mathematical, not descriptive, and throws little or no light upon the condition of India in his day. (H. G. Rawlinson, Intercourse between India and the Western World, page 136.) The italics are mine and I shall attempt to disprove the dictum. II. SOME PHYSICAL FEATURES OF THE INDUS. 1. From Sehwan to near Karachi the flood plain of the Indus is sharply defined on the west by a limestone region beyond which or across which the Indus cannot by any means flow. Its structure is slightly complicated, the strata being partly folded and partly uplifted in massifs. This almost rainless region is now known as the Kohistan; it is in the Karachi district and is continuous in all respects with Mekran except that it is marked off very sharply from it by the precipitous Pabb Mts. Running diagonally across the Kohistan are the Black Mts. from Gadap to Sehwan, which to the inhabitants of the Indus valley appear as black as the Blue Mts. did blue to the first settlers in Virginia. 2. Except in the flood season, April-September, the Indus does not bring down sufficient water to keep open more than two main mouths, with minor adjacent creeks. We may thus distinguish between two deltas: (a) the flood season delta, which extends from where the first large channel takes off water and discharges it into the sea, (b) the true delta, which is enclosed by the streams dis charging the water of the cold season. At present delta (a) begins at Hyderabad at the Fuleli head but it is reasonable to assume that in earlier times, when the river was not restrained by large bunds and the force of the flood was less owing to the greater diffusion of the water in its upper reaches, it was still nearer the sea than at present. Delta (b) the true delta, begins at the bifurcation of the Hydari and the Ochito, about 30 miles fom the sea, but their mouths are constantly changing and the very name Ochito (sudden) is an index of what happens in this area. With the river not restrained by artificial embankments the apex of the true delta would tend to be farther from the sea than at present. It may indeed happen occasionally that owing to some temporary cause there is no true delta. From Ptolemy and the Periplus it would appear that in their time the Indus had only one cold weather mouth, or perhaps better, that only one mouth was recognised as the true mouth of the Indus. If, however, historical corroboration of the mechanical distinction between the two deltas is necessary we can find it in the Ferip us. |