1886.] of the Punjah and its Rivers. 327 



appear to have inhabited the shores of the Indns Delta and Kachh ; but, 

 however this may be, the Mers are well-known as a tribe formerly in- 

 habiting the south-west corner of the Indian Desert to the north of the 

 Ran of Kachh, which doubtless is the great lake referred to in the 

 tradition. 



Neither the historians of Alexander the Great's invasion of India 

 nor the classical geographers throw any real light on this question. 

 Ptolemy is doubtless the fullest and most complete in his list of localities, 

 but the modern representatives of most of his towns are as yet a matter of 

 dispute. If General Cunningham is right in identifying the Mousikanos 

 of Arrian with Aror, it would support the generally-accepted theory, for 

 Ptolemy places Sousikanos, which is evidently the same place, west of 

 the Indus ; it seems to me, however, more probable that the Kamigara 

 of Ptolemy, which he places east of the Indus, occupied the position 

 known in later days as Aror. The ruins of this city are still known in 

 the neighbourhood as Kaman, and this with the affix nagar might easily 

 be corrnpted into Kamigara.* 



From the date of Ptolemy's geography we lose all sight and know- 

 ledge of Sind until the advent of the Arab geographers and historians 

 in the eighth century, from whom some information can be gained as to 

 the course of the rivers in their times. 



Unfortunately, the works to which one would naturally first turn 

 are useless, or, worse still, misleading. The Arab geographers had all 

 a very vague and general idea of Indian geography, indeed their works 

 compare ill with our modern knowledge of Central Africa or of that terra 

 incognita Central Thibet, their distances are vague and often incon- 

 sistent, their bearings are seldom correct, and, to make confusion worse 

 confounded, they were constantly confusing places which had similar 

 names though distinct and distant from each other — a mistake ren- 

 dered easy by the character in which their books were written, and which 

 betrays itself constantly in the fact that hardly ever do two different 

 authors spell the same name similarly. 



Of all the geographers quoted in Sir H. Elliot's History of India 

 but two mention on which side of the Indus the town of Aror was situated : 

 Al Masudi says that it was on the west bank of the Indus,t and Al Idrisi 

 says that the Mihran runs to the west of Dur (Aror). J The contra- 

 diction here is apparent, not real, for strangely enough all the bear- 

 ings given by Al Idrisi have been reversed, § yet I cannot help thinking 



* Ancient India as descriled hy Ptolemy, &c., by J. W. MoCrindle, M. A., M. R. 

 A. S., London, Calcutta and Bombay 1885, p. 151. 



t Elliot's History of India, edited by Prof. Dowson, I, 23. 



X Elliot, op. cit, I, 79. 



§ Thus he places the Persian Gnlf east of the Delta of the Indus and Bewestan 

 or Seistan, north of Turan. 



