XbS coSxMos. 



Mere certain kiiovledge was now transmitted to tlie We^ 

 iVom the Macedonian colonies respecting those Indian producti 

 ot' nature and art which had hitherto been only imperfectly 

 known from commercial intercourse, or from the narration3 

 of Ctesias of Cnidus, who lived seventeen years at the court 

 :)f Persia as physician to Artaxerxes Mnemon. Among the 

 objects thus made known we must reckon irrigated rice-fields, 

 for whose cultivation Aristobulus gives special directions ; the 

 cotton-tree, and the fine tissues and the paper for which it* 

 furnished the materials ; spices and opium ; wine made from 

 rice and the juice of palms, whose Sanscrit name of taia has 

 been preserved in the works of Arrian ;t sugar from the sugar- 

 cane,! which is certainly often confounded in the Greek and 

 Roman writers with the tabaschir of the bamboo reed ; wool 

 from the great Bombax-tree ;^ shawls made of the Thibetian 

 goat's hair; silken (Seric) tissues ;|| oil from the white sesa- 

 mum (Sanscrit tila) ; attar of roses and other perfumes ; lao 

 (Sanscrit lakscha, in the vulgar tongue lakkha) ;ir and, last- 

 ly, the hardened Indian wutz-steel. 



Besides the knowledge of these products, which soon be- 

 came objects of universal commerce, and many of which were 

 transported by the Seleucidse to Arabia,** the aspect of a rich- 



1829, s. 150; Droysen, Bildung des Hellenist. Staatensy stems, s. 614.) 

 I write Paropauisus, as it occurs in all the good codices of Ptolemy; 

 and not Paropamisus. I have explained the reasons in my Asie Centrale, 

 t. i., p. 114-il8. (See, also, Lassen, zur Gesch. der Griechischen und 

 Indoskythischen Konige, s. 128). * Strabo, lib. xv., p. 717, Casaub. 



t Tala, the name of the palm Borassus jJabelliformis, which is very 

 characteristically termed by Amarasinha " a king of the grasses." Ar- 

 rian, Ind., vii., 3. 



X The word tabaschir is deduced from the Sanscrit tvahkschird (bark 

 milk). In 1817, in the historical additions to my work De distribu- 

 iione Geographicd Plantarum, secundum coeli, temperiem et altitudinem 

 Montium, p. 215, I drew attention to the fact that the companions of 

 Alexander learned to know the true sugar of the sugar-cane of the In- 

 dians as well as the tabaschir of the bamboo. (Strabo, lib. xv., p. 693 ; 

 Peripl. Maris Erythr., p. 9.) Moses of Chorene, who lived in the mid- 

 dle of the fifth centuiy, was the first {Geogr., ed. Whiston, 1736, p. 364) 

 who circumstantially described the preparation of sugar from the juice 

 of the Saccharum officinarum, in the province of Chorasan. 



^ Strabo, lib. xv., p. 694. 



II Ritter, Erdkunde von Asian, bd. iv., 1, s. 437; bd. vi., 1, s. 698; 

 Lassen, Ind. AUerthumskunde, bd. i., s. 317-323. The passage in Aris- 

 totle's Hist, di Animal., v. 17 (t, i., p. 209, ed. Schneider), relating to 

 the web of a. great horned caterpillar, refers to the island of Cos. 



^ Thus TiuKKor ^pufiuTivog in the Peripl. Maris Erythr., p. 5 (Las 

 den, s. 316). 



** Plin., Hist. Nat., xvi.. 32. (On the introduction of rare Asiatis 

 plants into Egypt by 'he Ptolemies, set; Pliny, x i., 14 and l''".\ 



