Indica of Ctesias is a priceless material for research into the perception of distant lands in the Greeks, or the shaping of literary images

Smyk, Anita

English

RepoS

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HISTORIA I ŚWIAT, nr 8 (2019) 
ISSN 2299 - 2464 
 
Anita SMYK

 (Siedlce University, Poland)  
 
Could Ctesias refer to the Kalash tribe?  
Some thoughts on interpretation of Ctesian descriptions 
of India 
 
https://doi.org/10.34739/his.2019.08.14  
 
Abstract: Indica of Ctesias is a priceless material for research into the perception of distant lands 
in the Greeks, or the shaping of literary images. 
 
Key words: Indica, Ctesias, India, literary images 
 
 
Indica is one of the two, next to Persica, works by Ctesias from Knidos which 
describes the Orient. None of the works has survived in full to the present day, they are 
known from copies, abbreviations, notes or comments of other authors. The relative 
popularity of Ctesias’ works allows for a partial reconstruction of both works 
concerning the lands of the East, or at least giving a good image of the content of their 
extensive fragments. India, then understood as the northern part of the currently known 
subcontinent, was the source of stories that amazed with exoticism, basically fabulous. 
The work of Ctesias is no exception here. Therefore, it cannot be treated as a credible, 
direct historical source for research on ancient India. At most, it is a priceless material 
for research into the perception of distant lands in the Greeks, or the shaping of literary 
images. It is clear that Ctesias was not in India and was not the eyewitness 
to the phenomena he reported. He also did not speak any of the languages spoken 
in India. His sources were accounts translated into Persian, which was not his mother 
tongue either. Therefore, the collected stories were translated at least twice (one can 
ask a question about the quality of both processes – from one of the Indian languages 
into Persian (or Aramaic and from it into Persian) and from Persian into Greek.  
The observations were also written down long after Ctesias' return to his homeland, 
and it is difficult to assess the extent to which his books were written in order to satisfy 
the reader's expectations. It seems, however, that when confronting his messages with 
reality, one can suggest a real source of inspiration, whether in the form of references 
                                                          

 ORCID iD 0000-0002-6006-7309. anitasmyk@op.pl; Institute of History 
and International Relations, Faculty of Humanities. 
 
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to material reality or a proper myth. Below we will present a few hypotheses 
concerning the relations of Ctesias. 
Among the fabulous phenomena of India, described by Ctesias, many remarks 
are made on cynocephali or Kynoskephaloi whose tribal name the author describes 
as kalystrioi. The description of Ctesias gained great popularity and was repeatedly 
repeated as reliable, including by Marco Polo. However, can the description of a half-
dog tribe living in the mountains of today’s Pakistan contain elements of truth?  
It seems that a name rather than a sensational description can help to identify 
the people. Kalystrioi seems to be a transformation of the tribal name Kalash,  
the close-to-extinction people of northern Pakistan, known mainly for its eclectic 
polytheism, including Zoroastrian, Hindu and animistic features, and elements 
of shamanism. Kalashas, who were sometimes considered descendants of Greek 
settlers who came after Alexander the Great’s conquests. This rather naïve and archaic 
view has no justification other than polytheism and the European appearance 
of the tribe’s members. The transformation of the name Kalystroi into Kalash seems 
quite probable. However, the forms of shamanism or the use of ecstatic elements 
in rituals, with the use of animal masks, could easily become an inspiration 
for transforming the whole people into cynocephali. It should be added that the cult 
of wolves and the belief in the transformation of warriors, under the influence 
of ecstasy, into wolves, was widespread among numerous Indo-European peoples, 
including the Iranian-speaking nomads of the Great Steppe. The relative universality 
of lycanthropy may explain the popularity of the image of a tribe of half-humans, half-
dogs, inhabiting the periphery of the world. The ritual use of animal masks,  
a characteristic feature of numerous manifestations of shamanism, is attested 
to in Kashmir, but it has become accepted in the circle of Lamaic Buddhism, lasting 
until the present day. At the same time, the emergence of relationships about human 
tribes with dog heads in Africa indicates that the Greek collective imagination has 
adopted this phenomenon as a feature of the ‘edge of the world’ areas, while they may 
have adopted various rationalizations, in the case of African Cynocephali it may have 
been early reports about baboons or remnants of early encounters with Egyptian 
iconography of Anubis, while the dog heads of residents of mountainous regions 
of India may have resulted from the distortion of ethnographic data. 
Pygmies are another feature that is shared between African and Indian 
applications in the Ctesias’ account. While in the case of Africa there may have been 
an adaptation of messages about the low populations of Central Africa’s rainforests,  
in the case of India there may not have been a similar rationalisation. It also seems 
unlikely that Ctesias would introduce the thread on the basis of a simple analogy 
to stories about Africa. Although it was believed that India is linked to Africa, just as 
the Caucasus is linked to the Himalayas, the absence of any other elements of African 
fauna in India, such as hippos, zebras or lions, seems to suggest a different source 
of its origin. It seems that, despite the reference to the well-known motif of Greek 
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folklore, the inclusion of the people of ithyphallic, bearded dwarfs living in distant 
regions of India, again, must have resulted from the distortion of the stories 
of merchants, the tributaries or the envoys. 
As Bivar suggested, in relation to the late antiquity and early medieval period, 
in Iranian imagery, there could have existed the elements deriving from a mix 
of overseas relations as distant as New Zealand and Madagascar. Earlier travels 
over such vast distances might seem unlikely, but a sea voyage around Africa,  
under the auspices of Necho II, makes the relationship with deep-sea expeditions 
in the Achemenid period much more plausible. Considering this, we can see that 
the custom of wearing wooden penis extensions by the warriors from the Papua New 
Guinea tribes (for instance Dani, Huli, Korowei), as well as beards and hair necklaces 
of animal hair that resemble long beards, makes them a perfect candidate 
for inspiration for Ctesias. Papua warriors also often wear beards, but they don’t grow 
very long. Among the characteristics of the Indian Pygmies, they meet 
the requirements of ityphallic, violent and bearded dwarves. Decreasing them 
to the size of dwarfs may have resulted from an exaggerated relationship with 
a relatively low Papua’s height or a Ctesias’ predilection to match the relationship 
to the existing stories of African Pygmies. It is also possible to speculate whether 
the long-beard grey-haired śaivaite ascetics were identified with the phalluses they 
worshipped - lingam. The Siva himself was not presented as an ascetic in ancient times 
in an ithyphallic form. Given the amount of distortion to which the message had to be 
distorted before it was edited by Ctesias, it seems most likely that there are several 
overlapping relationships. 
The mysterious and difficult to explain creature in Indica is, according to 
the text, the Indus’ one-toothed worm, devouring the animals that had the misfortune 
to approach the river bank at night. The inhabitants of India were supposed to fish for 
monsters with iron hooks and obtain from them a flammable substance impossible 
to extinguish, the possession of which was the monopoly held only by the king.  
The monster was explained as a gavial, which however seems very unconvincing 
because of the similarity between gavial and crocodile, known to the Greek reader 
from the descriptions of Egypt. Gavials, as a representative of crocodillia do not differ 
from crocodiles to such an extent as to define him as a worm. At the same time,  
it should be remembered that an important aspect of the description is possession 
of a single tooth, a feature that is difficult to attribute to the gavials, even if their 
narrow mouths differ from those of other crocodilia. It seems that, on the one hand,  
the history of the predatory giant Indus worm may be an aspect of the phenomenon 
of the ancient reception of the prehistoric fossil fossils of fauna, as outlined by Mayor. 
The single tooth of the monster seems to correspond to the construction of the skulls 
of the armored Silurian and Devonian fish (placodermi), which instead of teeth had 
a sharp bone protrusions. It is possible that the fossils of the skull of such a fish could 
have inspired the story of a monster with one tooth. At the same time, the issue 
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of obtaining the ancient ‘napalm’ seems to be connected with the creation 
of petroleum, which, however, comes from the Permian, not the Silurian, but in areas 
of tectonic activity, the layers may have been mixed, hence the discovery of the fossils 
of Silurian fish near oil-bearing springs may have been the inspiration for the story of 
the single-toothed predator. It is also possible that the description of suspending a dead 
monster and dripping the drops of flammable substance from it may refer rather to 
an early method of refining crude oil. It also seems that researchers have so far 
overlooked the important cultural aspect of history associated with the existence of 
the monstrous worm in later Iranian stories describing legendary events related to 
the reign of Ardashir I, who killed a giant worm and overthrew a sect that professed it. 
Importantly, in the current context, Ardashir killed a worm by pouring molten copper 
into it, which corresponds to the fiery nature of the creature in Ctesias’ narrative 
 
 
Bibliography 
 
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in Honour of Nicholas Sims-Williams, eds. W. SUNDERMAN, A. HINZE, F. DE BLOIS , Wiesbaden,  
1-12 
DAVIES G. (2016), ‘Inside the isolated Indonesian Dani tribe where women are expected to ampu-tate a 
finger when relatives die… and the men have some rather eye-catching outfits!’, Daily Mail On-Line, 
PUBLISHED: 11:49 BST, 17 November 2016 | UPDATED: 17:10 BST, 17 November 2016. 
Herodot, Dzieje, tr. S. HAMMER, Warszawa 1954. 
LLEWELLYN-JONES L., ROBSON J. (2013), Ctesias’  History of Persia. Tales of the Orient, London 
and New York. 
Marko Polo, Opisanie Świata, tr. A.L. CZERNY, Warszawa 1975. 
MAYOR A. (2000), The First Fossil Hunters - Dinosaurs, Mammoths, and Myth in Greek and Roman 
Times, Princeton. 
NICHOLS A. (2011), Ctesias: On India. Introduction, translation and commentary, London and New 
York 
STONEMAN R. (2019), The Greek Experience of India. From Alexander to the Indo-Greeks, Princeton 
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WITZEL M. (2004), ‘Kalash Religion, The Ṛgvedic Religious System and its Central Asian and Hin-
dukush Antecedents’, in The Vedas: Texts, Language and Ritual, eds. A. GRIFFITHS, J.E.M. HOUBEN, 
Groningen, 581-636. 
 
 
 
 


Could Ctesias refer to the Kalash tribe? Some thoughts on interpretation of Ctesian descriptions of India

SMYK, Anita

Biblioteka Nauki - repozytorium artykuÅÃ³w

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Could Ctesias refer to the Kalash tribe? Some thoughts on interpretation of Ctesian descriptions of India

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Could Ctesias refer to the Kalash tribe? Some thoughts on interpretation of Ctesian descriptions of India

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