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Pactyice (with Caspatyrus) is mentioned in iii. 102. 1 as bordering the north of India. Stein identifies it with North-east Afghanistan; the Afghans still call themselves ‘Pakhtun’ or ‘Pashtun’ (cf. ‘Pathans’); he makes Caspatyrus = Kabul, preferring the form Κασπάπυρος (Hec. fr. 179; F. H. G. i. 12); H., he thinks, confuses the Kabul tributary with the Indus main stream, and so makes (wrongly) the Indus ‘flow east’; this view is shared by Brunnhofer, Urg. Ari. i. 54. But the Kabul river is unnavigable. Wilson makes Κασπάτυρος = city of Casyapa, i. e. Kashmir, which once included much of the Punjaub (Ariana, p. 137); but this seems impossible.

Scylax probably started down the Indus from just above Attock, which lies at the junction of the Indus and the Kabul, about 200 miles almost due east of the town of Kabul; H.'s informant confused the main city of the district with the exact starting-point on the Indus. There is no need to doubt this voyage; H. writes of it from contemporary evidence, and his statement is confirmed by the fragments of Darius' inscriptions on his Nile canal (ii. 158. 1 n.). It is to be noted that he tells of no impossibilities, like the later fiction of Patrocles' voyage round into the Caspian (Pliny, N. H. vi. 58). Berger, however (pp.73-5), is very doubtful of the reality of Scylax' voyage because of (1) H.'s mistake as to the course of the Indus (v. i.). (2) His ignorance of the Persian Gulf; a coasting voyage up this would have brought Scylax nearly to Susa, whence a new voyage was necessary to bring him to the Red Sea. H. makes it only one voyage. [But probably Scylax never went into the Persian Gulf at all; his coasting voyage would bring him to a Persian port at the Isle of Ormuz, thence he would sail across the Straits of Ormuz and resume his voyage to the south and west. This course is so obvious that it was not definitely recorded.] (3) Arrian (Ind. 19 seq., Anab. vii. 20) knows nothing of the voyage of Scylax [but Posidonius (Strabo 100) believed in it], and tells us Alexander's seamen failed to get round into the Red Sea. Myres (G. J., 1896, 623) conjectures the ‘Indian river’ to be the Ganges, and that ‘an expedition . . . doubled C. Comorin, a voyage for which thirty months is not too long, though it is too long for a journey home from the mouth of the Indus’.

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