130 



The Antiquities of the 



[No. 



the modern historical writers upon the successors of the GrjEco-Bac- 

 trian monarchs of Central Asia have bestowed upon the descendants 

 of the later Getae the appellation of Indo-Scythians. At a period 

 subsequent to the conquests of Alexander the Great, a tribe of Getae 

 bearing the name of Gotoe or Goths migrated to Europe, and were 

 the ancestors of one of the great German families. These Goths 

 carried with them a language replete with ancient Persian words, 

 which if not the Pahlevi, was at any rate a sister tongue ; whence we 

 find so many words of Persian origin in the German language. The 

 god of these Goths at that time was Woden, whose resemblance to 

 Buddha is so great as to have induced many antiquaries to identify 

 them. The learned Mr. Schmid wrote a paper in the Madras Jour- 

 nal, contributing to prove that some of the ancestors of the Germans, 

 the same as the Scandinavian Goths, were Buddhists. The celebrat- 

 ed modern Hungarian traveller, Khosma-de-Koros, was so persuaded 

 that the ancestors of his countrymen (Slavonic Scythians) were Budd- 

 hists, that he travelled into Central Asia on purpose to confirm his 

 opinions. The discoveries of Lieutenant Pigou in the caves of Bah- 

 rabad in AfFghanistan, indicate that Buddhism prevailed so far West- 

 ward in Asia as the country of the Indo-Scythians, and we know how 

 extensively it has been diffused to the North and East of the Hi- 

 malayah. 



The Wednesday or Wodensday of the Goths, corresponds with the 

 Puddovam or day of Buddn of the Thautawars. 



The Thautawar week consists of eight days, which was also the 

 case amongst the ancestors of the Germans. 



The name of the Thautawar temple near Picarra is called Godima- 

 na, which may be read God-i-mund, or Got-i-mund, i. e. the place 

 of God or Got (Gothic) ; mund being the Thautawar name of a vil- 

 lage or place. Godimana or Gotimana, a name of Buddha, was pro- 

 bably carried by the Goths into Europe, and from it they derived the 

 name of the deity — Got or God. 



To any one entertaining the belief that the advent of the Thauta- 

 wars was subsequent to that of the Hindus, all this would present a 

 strong temptation for not only conceiving that the ancestors of the 

 Thautawars were connected with the Getae or Goths, but also that 

 the tinge of Buddhism was acquired by them before they migrated 

 to India. But as I have relinquished this theory, and am now more 



