1886,] of tJie Panjah and Us Blucrs. 323 



I. On the Ancient Course of the Indus through Bind. — It is generally 

 supposed, and the supposition is supported by authority, that the Eastern 

 Narra marks an old course of the Indus, and that it was down this now 

 deserted channel that the fleet of Alexander sailed. This supposition has 

 been adopted by General Cunningham in his ' Ancient Geography of 

 India,' where the capital of the king Musikanus according to Strabo, 

 Diodorus, and Arrian, or of the Musikani according to Curtius, is 

 identified with the town known in more modern times as Aror or 

 Alor. He says that the ruins of Aror are situated '^ to the south of 

 a gap in the low range of limestone hills, which stretches from Bhakar 

 towards the south for about twenty miles, until it is lost in the broad 

 belt of sand hills which bound the Nara, or old bed of the Indus, on 

 the west. To the north-east it was covered by a second branch of the river 

 which flowed nearly at right angles to the other at a distance of three 

 miles. At the accession of Rajah Dahir in A. D. 680 the latter was 

 probably the main stream of the Indus which had been gradually 

 working to the westwards from its original bed in the old Nara." 



Leaving his fleet at Alor, Alexander* marched against Oxycanus or 

 Portikanus, or, according to General Cunningham's identification, Larka- 

 na, andSindomana or Sehwan, and from Sindomana he " marched back 

 to the river where he had ordered his fleet to wait for him. Thence de- 

 scending the stream he came on the fourth day to " a town which the 

 General identifies with Brahmanabad, notwithstanding that by his own 

 confession this lies twenty miles west of the Eastern Nara down which he 

 has just declared that Alexander sailed. General Cunningham's identi- 

 fication of this town, the Harmatelia of Diodorus, with Brahmanabad 

 seems to be satisfactory, but the more thoroughly this is the case the 

 less likely does it seem that the Eastern Narra can mark the course 

 of the Indus when Alexander sailed down it. 



But there are more important objections than this. After leaving 

 Harmatelia, Alexander sailed down the river to Pattala, which General 

 Ci^nningham identifies with the modern Haidarabad, and from thence he 

 sailed to the sea by two different courses, one of which took him to near 

 Karachi, the other to the Ran of Kachh. It seems clear that Alexander's 

 historians placed the head of the Delta at or near Patala, which cannot 

 have been much further from the sea than Haidarabad, for Onesikritus 

 says that all three sides of the Delta were equalf ; in any case it was 

 below Harmateleia. But as Harmateleia and Brahmanabad are the same, 

 and, as this place lay twenty miles west of the Eastern Narra, the Indus 

 must in some manner have broken westwards from the bed of the Narra 



* Cuuningliain, Ancient Geograjphij of India, p. 267 et seq. 

 t Cuuninghaiu, ojp. cit., p. 283. 



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