[25] Ctes. "Ecl." 3; Aelian, 16, 2. [26] Herodotus only makes a passing mention of the elephant in Libya, 4, 191. [27] Ælian 17, 29. Arrian also ("Anab." 4, 14) maintains that the Indus is 100 stades in breadth, and even broader; Megasthenes also relates that the elephants tore down walls, and that the bamboo was a fathom in thickness. Strabo, p. 711. That Ctesias followed Persian-Bactrian accounts is clear from the fact that the scene of all his history is the north-west of India. He knows that India is a civilised land, though he also believes that it obeys only one king; he knows the veneration of the Indians for their kings, their contempt of death, and some products of Indian industry. The fabulous stories of the Pygmæans, Dog-heads, Shovel-eared, Shadow-feet, and Macrobii he did not invent, but copied. Similar marvels of men with dogs' heads, and without a head, and of unicorns, are narrated by Herodotus, only he ascribes these stories to the western Ethiopians, not to the eastern (4, 191). Homer had already sung of the Pygmæans ("Il." 3, 6). Hecatæus had spoken of the Shovel-eared and Shadow-feet (fragm. 265, 266, ed. Klausen), and also Aristophanes ("Aves," 1553). Of the griffins, the one-eyed Arimaspians, the long-lived, happy Hyperboreans, Aristeas of Proconnesus had told and Æschylus had sung long before Ctesias (above, III. 232). Megasthenes repeats the legends of the Pygmæans, Shovel-eared, Shadow-feet, Dog-heads, and adds accounts of men without mouths, and other marvels. Ctesias, therefore, had predecessors as well as followers in these stories. The fantastic world with which the Indians surrounded themselves, the nicknames and strange peculiarities which they ascribed to some of the old population and to distant nations, reached the Persians, and through them the Greeks. "Kirata" of small stature in the Eastern Himalayas, against which Vishnu's bird fights, Çunamukhas (Dog-heads), "brow-eyed" cannibals, "one-footed" men, who bring as tribute very swift horses, occur in the Indian epics, and in other writings. On the divine mountain Meru, according to the Indians, dwell the Uttara Kuru, _i.e._ the northern Kurus, who live for 10,000 years, among whom is no heat, where the streams flow in golden beds, and roll down pearls and precious stones instead of gravel. Lassen, "Ind. Alterth." 1, 511; 2, 653, 693 ff.; Muir, _loc. cit._ 2^2, 324 ff. According to the cosmology of the Buddhists, whose Sutras also knew these Uttara Kuru, Mount Meru is the centre of the world. To the south of Meru is Yambudvipa, to the north the region of the Uttara Kuru, who live for 1000 years, while the inhabitants of Yambudvipa only live for 100 years. Burnouf, "Introduction à l'histoire du Bouddhisme," p. 177; Koppen, "Buddh." p. 233. Ptolemy, obviously following Indian sources, puts the [Greek: Ottora Korra] to the north of the Imaus, beyond the highest range, which with the Indians is a spur of the divine mountain Meru.