How does this refer to India? India today if anything is three-sided in plan. More triangular. Pakistan on the other hand is four-sided with all these features. Also, your quotes are from Wikipedia, which could easily be wrong. What is the link for your "Arrian" quote?
A plain examination of the envoy's quotes is the first part that you need to take up, in case you need clarification.
The second part is to look up maps of India which belong to those times, to the times of Scylax the navigator, of Strabo the geographer, of the unknown author of the Periplus of the Erythraean Sea, and of all ancient maps of India. Those were not maps which look as the South Asian peninsula looks today, but maps which distorted the position and the shape of the sub-continent, and which reflected the partial and imperfect knowledge of the Europeans of those times about India.
Unfortunately, as is only to be expected with amateurs unfamiliar with their subject, every piece of evidence available in ancient times is interpreted in the light of modern knowledge, which leads to the misunderstandings and errors in the statements made.
Try again.
You seem to think you've hit upon something amazing here. All your quotes that include geographical modern India as "India" are from around the 1st century AD onwards. Do you know that "Ind" and the Indus were given to the name of ancient Pakistan since 2000 BC? So for 4,000 years people have been referring to Pakistan as India, whilst only 2000 years has India been included with the Ganges. And this being only what foreigners have been saying. Pakistan, or the ancient Pakistani people never agreed to accept you guys as part of the original India or Sindhu.
There was no question of Pakistan or the ancient Pakistani people never agreeing to accept anybody as part of the original India or Sindhu, as there was in fact no Pakistan or ancient Pakistani people to do all this agreeing and accepting. There was not even a name that such an ur-Pakistan called itself. It was certainly not Sindhu; neither the Arachosians or the hillmen or the residents of the Punjab as we know it today called themselves Sindhis, for instance, which presumably they would have done if they had that sense of proto-Pakistani identity that you think they did. Nor did they call themselves Indians; as you yourselves have pointed out in numerous comments, this was a name applied to the entire sub-continent by the Europeans.
There are precedents galore; just at random, the province of Roman Africa donated its name to the entire continent; the province of Asia donated its name to the entire continent, and subsequently, after this extension of the name to the entire land mass lying behind it, came to be known as Asia Minor. In identical fashion, the Iranians referred to the great river as the Hindu, as there is a linguistic rule that names east of the river, derived from the Indo-Aryan branch of the language group Indo-Iranian, used S, and the same names, pronounced by the Iranian side of the language division, changed the S to an H. Thus, Sapta Sindhu, land of the seven rivers, the five of the Punjab plus the dried up Saraswati, plus the Indus, became Hapta Hindu. The Greeks, unable to manage their aspirates, named the Hapta Hindu the Indus, the people Indioi.
The reason for repeating this when it has been said so many times before is to point out that the origin of the name Indus and Indioi was from Greek times. As we already know from history, and not from your personal opinion rooted in a desperate desire to prove what is not provable, the Greeks knew the Persians with the invasion of Greece in 499 BC. It was only when they encountered Indian soldiers with the other provincial soldiers that they realised that that there was more to Persia than Persia and Medea. And it was only when the initial wave of Greeks travelled to the frontier under the auspices of the Persian empire that they realised that there was a vast land behind the great river, and came in due course to name it India, and the inhabitants Indioi, well before Alexander's much advertised march.
It is difficult to understand, among a myriad of other things difficult to understand with your statements, how you get 2,000 years BC as a date for the coinage of Indus and Indioi.
Why on earth name your country after someone elses river? It's like naming your country "Rhineland" even though the Rhine flows through Germany.
Why on earth name your country on what foreigners (who werent very good at geography) called your country?
Unfortunately, the tribes and people bordering the Indus were counted among the Indians by the rest of the world, unaware when they did so how greatly they had offended you in the year 2010.
When we refer to Ancient Indian History, we think of things like the Indus Valley Civilization, or certain Mathematics and Astronomy, or certain other civilizations. All these important parts of Ancient Indian History are not part of modern day India, they are part of modern day Pakistan's history.
The day that universities, learned societies and associations for the advancement of science and learning offer you the privilege of defining what you mean when you refer to ancient India, and of making this definition the one proper definition of the concept, it will be possible to accept your assertions.
Until then, please consult scholars in a department of history in any country which is not busy re-writing its own history, like Pakistan seems to be.
Until then, regrettably, in the eyes of the world at large, Ancient Indian history will continue to be the history of the Indus Valley Civilisation, the Vedic civilisation, the growth of the Mahajanapadas, the rise of Buddhism and Jainism, the growth of Magadha, the Alexandrine invasion of the north-west, the first Indian empire the Maurya Empire, the Sungas, the Saka Pahlavas, the Kushanas, the Satavahanas, the Rastrakutas, the Gupta Empire, the kingdoms of Kanauj, Thanesar and Gauda, the growth of the Rajputs, the tripartite rivalry between Rastrakuta, Pala and Pratihara, the Senas; and in the South, starting from the Satavahanas, the Rastrakutas, the Chozhas, the Chalukyas, the Cheras, the Pandyas, the Vakatakas.
That is as far as politics goes. As far as science and knowledge, or philosophy, mathematics and astronomy, literature, or dance or sculpture is concerned, it is the development of these that people refer to.
The Chinese, ever a clear-headed people, and historical to a fault, called India Shendu - I hope that there is no reason to rub anyone's face in it by explaining what that word was derived fro. When Hiuen Tsang visited India in search of manuscripts, and visited the emperor Sri Harsha, he was never under any illusion that it was anything but Shendu that he was visiting. So too for Fa Hien, and other recorded travellers. Nobody, in fact, had any problem with the name India, or its equivalent extending to the entire country, other than modern-day revisionist historians, revising the vicissitudes of recent military misadventures through the columns of this forum.
You could use this energy to better purpose examining the thesis of Aitzaz Ahsan about the Indus Man, rather than mistakenly chasing the wild goose of the application of the name India mistakenly to 'Bharat' rather than to Pakistan. That horse won't run, except on PakDef; it is recommended that you follow up on the Indus Man.
Indeed the Mauryan Empire did exist, but the powerhouse of the Mauryan Empire was in the northwest of the subcontinent.
Where do you get these concepts from? It is clear that these are from no standard textbook; even one steeped in the most potent intoxicants could not possibly have yielded such de Quincey-like results.
The Mauryan Empire was of Magadhan origin, its soldiery were derived from the Gangetic plains, and it conquered the north-west as a consequence of its confrontations of the failing power of Seleukos. As for its north-west being a power-house, nothing could be further from history; we only have to refer to the records of two distinct, different revolts in Taxila which had to be put down with force to understand that the power-house was hardly in the north-west.
It certainly is something shared between India and Pakistan, but it really is an irrelevant Empire in global history. The Magada certainly did exist, and this was wholly a part of the history of modern day India, and not Pakistan. You can see the pattern here I hope.
It was not in fact shared; Pakistan completely owns the whole of Indian history, being an equal heir of the Indian heritage, just as Bangladesh is. It was not, for example, the Roman empire, or the Empire of Charlemagne, or the Holy Roman Empire, or the Ottoman Empire, to have a sovereignty divisible among several of its constituent units; it was unmistakably an empire based on Magadha, and it lived and died by the power of Magadha.
And Buddhism was developed to a greater extent in what is now Pakistan. Buddhists generally were persecuted in India, but all the important Buddhist Laws and customs came about in the land mass of what is now Pakistan. Swat is one of the most important historical Buddhist centers in the world, and various places in Afghanistan.
This passage is a complete fabrication.
Buddhists were persecuted in India in the earliest times, during the life of the Buddha and intermittently and with decreasing strength thereafter, until the Ashokan adoption of the religion completely overwhelmed the opposition.
Thereafter Buddhism grew and flourished, with brief falls from patronage, which were far from persecution, for instance under the Sungas, and continued strongly until as late as 600 AD. Most of the developments in Buddhism took place in what you apparently refuse to call India any more; the greatest scholar after the Buddha himself was Nagarjuna, from the land of the Andhras. All major development of Buddhist doctrine took place in the great councils and in the monasteries and learning centres, such as that at Nalanda.
Other than the introduction of iconography to India, which was not present before, I am at a loss to understand what you are referring to by stating that all important Buddhist laws and customs were developed in what is present day Pakistan.
Nothing could be further from the truth.
, the people of the Indus.
