Note 114 — CHAPTER 7
Reading edition
"To my foe, salutation! This foe how shall I describe? Of the race of Jat Kathida, whose ancestor, the warrior Takshak, formed the garland on the neck of Mahadeva." Though this is a figurative allusion to the snake necklace of the father of creation, yet it evidently pointed to the Jat’s descent from the Takshak. But enough has been said elsewhere of the snake race, the parent of the Scythic tribes, which the divine Milton seems to have taken from Diodorus’s account of the mother of the Scythac:
“Woman to the waist, and fair;
But ended foul in many a scaly fold!”
Paradise Lost, Book ii. 650 f.
Whether the Jat Kathida is the Jat or Getae of Cathay (da being the mark of the genitive case) we will leave to conjecture [?]. [Ney Elias (History of the Moghuls of Central Asia, 75) suggests that the theory of the connexion between Jāts and Getae was largely based on an error regarding the term jatah, ‘rascal,’ applied as a mark of reproach to the Moguls by the Chagatai.]