Indica (Ctesias)

Author:Laxman Burdak, IFS (R)

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Indica (Greek: Ἰνδικά Indika) is a book by the classical Greek physician Ctesias purporting to describe the Indian subcontinent.

Variants

• Indica of Ctesias

Period

Written in the fifth century BC, it is the first known Greek reference to that distant land. Ctesias was the court physician to king Artaxerxes II of Persia, and the book is not based on his own experiences, but on stories brought to Persia by traders, along the Silk Road from Serica, a land north of China and India where domesticated silk originated.

Contents

The book contains the first known reference to the unicorn, ostensibly an ass in India that had a single 1.5 cubit (27 inch) horn on its head, and introduces the European world to the talking parrot, and falconry, which was not yet practiced in Europe.

Among the information apparently conveyed in the book (mostly according to second-hand accounts of its contents):

• The Indus river is identified, and described as being up to twenty miles across.
• India is heavily populated, more than the rest of the world combined
• Indian elephants are first described, generations before Alexander the Great faced them while conquering part of India.
• While monkeys were well known in the Mediterranean, unusual types are described for India, including a tiny breed with a tail six feet in length
• Indian dogs the size of lions
• Gigantic mountains
• The martikhora (manticore), a red creature with a face like a man's, three rows of teeth, and a scorpion's sting on its tail. This is the earliest known Western reference to the manticore.
• Detailed descriptions of Indian customs, proclaiming them very just and honorable.

• Short, black men called pygmies, who live in the middle of India, who were two cubits tall. They raised livestock that was similarly small, and had a war going on with some cranes. These pygmies had grown their hair out to their knees and their beards past their feet, so long that they did not require any other clothing. When their body is thus entirely covered with hair they fasten it round them with a girdle, so that it serves them for clothes.
• Palm and date trees three times the size of those in Babylon

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