Note 218 — Chapter IX · —Description of India

Herodotos (iii. 106) says that gold was produced in great abundance in India, some of it washed down by the streams, and some dug out of the earth, but the greater part of it being the ant-gold surreptitiously procured. The heavy tribute levied by Darius on the Indian provinces (chiefly west of the Indus) was paid in gold-dust. We learn, notwithstanding, from Arrian that the companions of Alexander found that the Indian tribes they met with, which were numerous, were destitute of gold. The ant-gold produced in Dardistan seems therefore to have found its way rather to the provinces west of the Indus than to the Panjâb. Strabo (XV. i. 57), quoting Megasthenes, says that the rivers in India bring down gold-dust, a part of which is paid as a tax to the king. By the king is here meant Chandragupta (Sandrokottos), at whose court Megasthenes for some years resided. As the river Sôn, which in his time entered the Ganges at Palibothra (now Patna), was called poetically the Hiranyavâha—i.e. “bearing gold,”—we may assume that gold was found in the sands of that river. The grandson of Chandragupta, Aśôka, as is stated in the Mahavansâ, sent missionaries to preach Buddhism into the gold district of Suvarnabhûmi, a region which Turnour identified with Burma, but which Lassen took to be a maritime district situated somewhere in the west (v. his Ind. Alt. ii. pp. 236, 237; also i. 237, 238). Strabo (XV. i. 30) says that in the country of Sopeithês there were valuable mines both of gold and silver among the mountains.