58

VII.

ATTICA.

pare ducere muros,

Molirique arcem, et manibus subvolvere saxa;

Pare optare locum tecto, et concludere sulco.

Jura, magistratusque legunt, sanctumque senatum.

Hic portus alii effodiunt: hic alta theatris

Fundamenta locant alii, immanesque columnas

Rupibus excidunt, scenis decora alta futuris."—Æn. i. 427—433.

6

WHO could have imagined that from the present barbarous land of Afghanistan, the elegant, the refined, and the witty Athenian should have set out!—yet so it was. The northern course of the Indus was his first home. The Attac indeed, gave a name to the far-famed province of Attica! The Attac is at present a fort and small town on the east bank of the Indus, 942 miles from the sea, and close below the place where it receives the waters of the Cabul river, and first becomes navigable. "The name," writes Thornton, "signifying obstacle,' is supposed to have been given to it under the presumption that no scrupulous Hindoo would proceed westward of it. But this strict principle, like many others of similar nature, is little acted on. The banks of the river are very high, so that the enormous accession which the volume of water receives during inundation, scarcely affects the breadth, but merely increases the depth. The rock forming the banks is of dark coloured slate, polished by the force of the stream, so as to shine like black marble. Between

these one clear blue

stream shot past.' The depth of the Indus here is thirty feet in the lowest state, and between sixty and seventy in the highest, running at the rate of six miles an hour. There is a ford at some distance above the confluence of the river of Cabool, but the extreme coldness and rapidity of the water render it at all times very dangerous, and on the slightest inundation, quite impracticable. On the right bank, opposite Attac, is Khyrabad, a fort, built according to some by Nadir Shah. The locality is important in a military and commercial point of view, as the Indus is here crossed by the great route which, proceeding from Cabool eastward, through the Khyber Pass into the Punjab, forms the main line of communication between Afghanistan and Northern India. The river was here repeatedly crossed by the British armies, during the military operations in Afghanistan ; and here, according to the general opinion, Alexander, subsequently Timour the Jagatayan conqueror, and, still later Nadir Shah, crossed."

1

If the energetic people of the Attac had their "barrier " at this point of the far-famed river of the Sindh, the triangular peninsula, which they afterwards inhabited in the land of Hellas, bounded on the north by Boeotia and the Euripus, and on its southern and eastern shores by the waters of the Saronic gulf and the Ægæan, proved a more effectual "Attac," or barrier, than they had ever before possessed; and while the barrenness of her soil protected the classic land of Attica from an overwhelming population, it taught her to turn her attention to the development of the arts of industry, in which she so much excelled, and the completion of a marine that enhanced the glory of her more peaceful activity. "The sterility of Attica," says an eloquent author, "drove its inhabitants from their own country.

1 Thornt., Punj. vol. i., p. 61.

2 Wordsworth's Pictorial Greece.

It carried them abroad. It filled them with a spirit of activity, which loved to grapple with difficulty and to face danger; it did for them what the wise poet says was done for the early inhabitants of the world by its Supreme Ruler, who, in his figurative language, first agitated the sea with storms, and hid fire, and checked the streams of wine which first flowed abroad in the golden age, and shook the honey from the bough, in order that men might learn the arts in the stern school of necessity. It arose from the barrenness of her soil, as her greatest historian observes, that Attica had always been exempt from the revolutions which in early times agitated the other countries of Greece, which poured over their frontiers the changeful floods of migratory populations, which disturbed the foundations of their national history, and confounded the civil institutions of the former occupants of the soil. Attica, secure in her sterility, boasted that her land had never been inundated by these tides of immigration. She had enjoyed a perpetual calm, she had experienced no such change; the race of her inhabitants had been ever the same; nor could she tell whence they had sprung; no foreign land had sent them; they had not forced their way within her confines by violent irruption. She traced the stream of her population in a backward course, through many generations, till at last it hid itself, like one of her own brooks, in the temporary recesses of her own soil."

As a practical comment upon this graceful summary of national belief, I would observe that the geographical evidences I have brought forward of the ancient birthplace of the splendid race of Attica, will now be amply confirmed by the same course of demonstration, a demonstration that will prove harmonious and complete in all its proportions; for it is based upon truth. One simple but ingenious Attic boast gives at once the key to the Autochthonous origin of the Athenians. They were, then,

not AUTO-CHTHŌNS, "sprung from the same earth," but Attac-thans, i. e. the people of "the Attac-land."1 Thus fades mythology, and the doctrine of mythopoeic propensities, and the negation of an historical basis for fable, before the light of a positive geographical and historical fact! Again,—"The belief that her people was indigenous, she expressed in different ways. She intimated it in the figure which she assigned to Cecrops, the heroic prince and progenitor of her primæval inhabitants. She represented him as combining in his person a double character; while the higher parts of his body were those of a man and king, the serpentine folds in which it was terminated, declared his extraction from the earth. The cicada of gold which she braided in her hair, were intended to denote the same thing; they signified that the natives of Attica sprang from the soil upon which they sang, and which was believed to feed them with its deer. The attachment of the inhabitants of this country to their own land was cherished and strengthened by this creed; they gloried in being natives of the hills and plains which no one had ever occupied but themselves, and in which they had dwelt from a period of the remotest antiquity. Such, then, were some of the circumstances which gave to this small province the dignity and importance which it enjoyed amongst the nations of the world." "

The source of the grasshopper symbol of the children of Attica, is by the plain and very unpoetical aid of geography, as clearly developed, as that of their autochthonous origin. This ingenious people who compared themselves to Tettiges, or Grasshoppers, could they have referred to the original cradle of their race, would have discovered that while the

northern section of their tribe dwelt on the Attac, adjoining the magnificent valley of Cashmir, with whose princes their tribe was connected by policy and domestic alliances, and whose lineage long ruled over the brilliant Athenians,1 by far the greater part of that primitive community whose descendants raised the glory of the Attic flag above all the maritime powers of Hellas, dwelt in a position eminently befitting their subsequent naval renown. They were the "People Of Tatta," or

"Tettaikes." "

Now, hold we the clue to the happy choice of their new settlements made by these sons of "Hela-des," or the Land Of Hela."

Practised mariners, expert traders, with the mercantile resources of the sea-board line of Sinde, and Mekran on the west, the magnificent Indus by which they could ascend to the northern Attica, a position which would serve as a noble depot for overland traders, whose merchandise was again easily conveyed down the Indus to the seafaring Tettaikes, or people of Tatta—these energetic sons of commerce enjoyed all the advantages of the vast traffic resulting from the coasting voyages, towards the Persian gulf. To the east, the brilliant commercial establishments on the gulfs of Cutch and Cambay; to the south, an almost interminable line of coast, dotted with the lucrative settlements of a thriving trade.

It is easy to perceive, that a voyage down this immense extent of coast was merely a subject of time—that Ceylon

1 This I shall distinctly demonstrate in the sequel.

2 TETTIYES, "Tattaikes," derivative form from "Tatta," signifying "The people of Tatta." In the sequel, I shall demonstrate the true origin of the term "Tatta," which ranges far beyond the foundation of this city, though it was of an antiquity so truly venerable.

3 The Institutes of Menu, the Ramayuna, and the Mosaic accounts of the early magnificence of Egypt, all demonstrate the early splendour of this commercial people; for Egypt and India were of one race.