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and included the land on both sides of the Gulf of Cambay. Ptolemy also gives the name Larica. An inscription of Asoka mentions Latica. The earliest form seems to have been Rastika or Rashtrika, ‘ ‘belong- ing to the kingdom. ” This word appears also in Syrastrene. The Prakrit form of this word Rashtra survives also in the modern Maratha (. Maharashtra ). (Lassen, I, 108.) Another explanation derives Ariaca from Aparantika, an old name for the western seaboard.
( Pandit Bhagvanlal Indraji, in Indian Antiquary , VII, 259-263. )
According to Reclus (Asia, III, 165) both Cutch and Kathiawar (Baraca and Syrastrene) were originally islands. This whole area has been raised in historical times. The land connecting Kathiawar with the mainland is not over 50 feet above sea-level and is full of marine remains.
Its position seaward made it early a centre of trade, and a great mixture of races — also an asylum for refugees, political and religious.
41. NambanilS. — The text is Mambarus. This is probably the same as the Saka ruler Nahapana. See under § 52.
41. Abiria. Phis is the native Abhira, which Lassen (I, 538-9), argues must have been the Biblical Ophir. In the account of the Ophir trade given in I Kings, IX, 26-28; I Kings, X, 11; II Chronicles VIII, 17, and IX, 10, the products mentioned are gold, sandalwood ( ?), precious stones, ivory, silver, apes and pea- cocks. The word translated ape, Lassen remarks, is kophi, not a Hebrew word, but derived from the Sanscrit word kapi. The word for ivory is noted under § 49. The word for peacock, tukhi-im, is the Sanscrit sikhi, called in Malabar, togei.
Sandalwood, Lassen thinks, was the almug or algum , which he derives from the Sanscrit valgu, Malabar valgum. Lassen also refers to the Indian city Sophir (the Suppara of § 52).
But the location of Ophir in India is impossible. The land of Abhira, the modern Gujarat, is and was purely an agricultural country, dealing in none of the products mentioned, and is at the northern end of India’s west coast, not the southern, from which these products came. Later scholarship is sufficiently sure in locating Ophir on the Arabian coast of the Persian Gulf, but the Indian names for the prod- ucts mentioned proved clearly enough that it was a trading center dealing with India, even if the land itself was not Indian.
The name, too, has a suggestive similarity. Just as we have Cutch, Kachh, Khuzistan=Kassites, and “wretched Cush,” so Ab- hira, Apir, Ophir suggest the same Dravidian-Accadian activity be tween India, the Persian Gulf, and Africa, which later gave way
