Ancient Indian Ethnography: Preface

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This article is an extract from ETHNOGRAPHY OF ANCIENT INDIA BY ROBERT SHAFER With 2 maps 1954 OTTO HARRAS SOWITZ . WIESBADEN Indpaedia is an archive. It neither agrees nor disagrees with the contents of this article. Secondly, this has been scanned from a book. You can help by sending the corrected version/ additional information to the Facebook page, Indpaedia.com. All information used will be duly acknowledged.

Ethnography Of Ancient India

Preface

The title of this work is intentionally misleading. There are probably many competent scholars in the world who will be interested in the ethnography of ancient India but who have never heard of the great Indian epic, the Mahabharata, just as there are probably many good scholars in India who would be interested in the ethnography of ancient England but who never heard of the English epic, Beowulf, and who would never pick up a book with that word in its title.

The number of ethnic names in the vedas is extremely limited and unless the names recur in later literature we seldom find a clew to their significance. But the Great Epic of India contains the names of some 300 nations, tribes, or regions, and this work is confined to a study of these names. And since ethnic and linguistic changes were taking place in India during the several centuries that the epic was being composed, attention has been centered as much as possible on the period of the great war of the Mahabharata. The lists of geographical names in the puranas is much more limited and generally much more corrupt than in the Great Epic. However, early Indian literature of all types was utilized here for pertinent data, and conclusions regarding the names in the Mahabharata are based primarily on data to be found in Sanskrit literature.

Much of the Sanskrit literature and much of the later historical and ethnological work published in recent years in India was not available to the author. Under the circumstances it is hardly to be expected that a definitive answer can be offered here to all the problems encounter- ed in such a study. Rather the aim has been to initiate the stud}' of the ethnic composition of ancient India, which it is hoped other scholars will continue as relevant materials come to their attention.

The author wishes to express his gratitude to Professor W. Kirfel of Bonn, who was kind enough to read the manuscript several times and to offer his suggestions for its improvement; to Professor Carl O. Saner of the Department of Geography of the University of California, for having the final maps prepared for the engraver, and for a biblio- graphical reference to the history of the horse; to Professors William Popper and Henry F. Lutz of the University of California for advice on Semitic names for the Greeks; to Prof. N. Poppe of the University of Washington for suggestions on Huna and related problems ; to Dr. Brigham A.Arnold, cartographer at the University of California for the careful preparation of the final maps; and to Drs. Livingstone Porter and Alo Raim for bibliographical references. Indebtedness to other scholars is acknowledged in the text. The author alone is responsible, of course, for any conclusions.