INFLUENCE OF THE MACEDONIAN CAMPAIGNS. 523 



More certain knowledge was now transmitted to the west 

 from the Macedonian colonies respecting those Indian pro- 

 ducts of nature and art, which had hitherto been only imper- 

 fectly known from commercial intercourse, or from the narra 

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

 court of Persia as physician to Artaxerxes Mnemon. Among 

 the objects thus made known we must reckon irrigated rice- 

 fields, for whose cultivation Aristobulus gives special direc- 

 tions ; 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 

 tola has been preserved in the works of Arrian ;f 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 sesamum (Sanscrit &7a), attar of roses and other 

 fumes; lac (Sanscrit Idkschd, in the vulgar tongue lakkh 

 and lastly, the hardened Indian wutz-steel. 



pamisus. I have explained the reasons in my Asie centrale, t. i. pp. 114- 

 118. (See also Lassen, zur Oesch. der Qriechischen und Indoskyihid- 

 chen Konige, s. 128.) 



* Strabo, lib. xv. p. 717, Casaub. 



t Tola, the name of the palm borassus fldbeliiformis, which is very 

 characteristically termed by Amarasinha, "a king of the grasses;" 

 Arrian, Ind., vii. 3. 



J The word tabaschir is deduced from the Sanscrit tvakkschlra (bark 

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

 tione geographica plantarum, secundum ccdi, temperiem et altitu- 

 dinem montium, p. 215, I drew attention to the fact, that the 

 companions of Alexander learnt to know the true sugar of the sugar- 

 cane of the Indians, as well as the tabaschir of the bamboo. (Strabo, 

 lib. xv. p. 693; Peripl maris Erythr., p. 9.) Moses of Choreiie, 

 who lived in the middle of the 5th century, was the first (Geogr., ed. 

 Whiston, 1736, p. 364) who circumstantially described the preparation 

 of sugar from the juice of the saccharum cfficinarum, in the province of 

 Chorasan. 



Strabo, lib. xv. p. 694. 



|| Ritter, Erdkunde von Asien, bd. iv. 1, s. 437; bd. vi. 1, s. 698; 

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

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

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



U Thus Xdocog xp^artvof in the Peripl. waris Erythr., p. 5 (It 

 i 31C . 



