A few comments

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Back after three weeks I will briefly comment a few messages:

 

On Sanskrit botanical names see also the long appendix in G. J.

Meulenbeld's MAdhavanidAna (Orientalia Rheno-Trajectina 19. Leiden

1974), with some additions given in an appendix to R. P. Das, Das Wissen

von der Lebensspanne der Bäume. Alt- und Neuindische Studien 34.

Stuttgart 1987. And don't forget Meulenbeld's monumental five-volume

handbook of Ayurveda literature.

 

Narayan R Joshi wrote:

> Persians knew Shaka and Hun and Tokharians around 500 BCE.

Saka, yes, but where are Huns and Tocharians mentioned?

> By what name the Greeks are referred to in Mahabharat? If they are referred by

the

> name Yavana, it has nothing to do with Alexander of 326 BCE . This is so

because

> Persians in 500 BCE knew Yavanas, so Indians also knew Yavanas before

Alexander.

It has nothing to do with Alexander, true, but it does not necessarily

put the Mbh earlier than him. Yavana indeed comes through Old Persian

Yauna from Greek Ionian, the earliest occurrence in Sanskrit apparently

being in PANini. But the word was used ever since, e.g. for the

Indo-Greeks and for the merchants from Roman Egypt, and later

transferred to Muslims.

 

In another message:

> in the original book Pariplus (not the one substituted-Pariplus of Erythrian

Sea, around

> 1 AD) written by the naval admiral Skylax

The Periplus of Skylax and the Periplus of Erythraean Sea are two

different works. The first was lost early; there are no more than half a

dozen rather uninformative brief fragments found in Greek literature

(and these do not mention Phoeniceans). The main source on the man is

Herodotus 4, 44. I have discussed this in my India in Early Greek

Literature (1989), 65ff. The second text is preserved in one single

manuscript, erroneously ascribing it to Arrian (who wrote a Periplus of

the Black Sea). It was edited by Frisk and Casson, translated by

McCrindle, Schoff, Huntingford and Casson (to quote the latest only).

There is further a late work actually going under the name of Skylax,

but containing information that cannot come from 6th century B.C. It is

in Greek and was long ago (1855) translated into Latin in the Geographi

Graeci Minores, but I do not know of an English version. Of India it has

very little to say.

 

Regards

 

Klaus

 

 

--

Klaus Karttunen, Ph.D.

Docent of Indology and Classical Ethnography

Institute of Asian and African Studies

PL 59 (Unioninkatu 38 B), 00014 University of Helsinki, FINLAND

phone 358-0-19122188, fax 358-0-19122094