66 and
73) yet Nearchus describes the Indian art of making paper from cotton.
He adds that the Indians wrote letters on cotton twisted together
(Strabo, xv. 53 and 67). This would be late in the Sutra period, no
doubt, according to Professor Miller's reasoning. Can the learned
gentleman cite any record within that comparatively recent period
showing the name of the inventor of that cotton-paper, and the date of
his discovery? Surely so important a fact as that, a novelty so
transcendently memorable, would not have passed without remark. One
would seem compelled, in the absence of any such chronicle, to accept
the alternative theory--known to us Aryan students as a fact--that
writing and writing materials were, as above remarked, known to the
Brahmans in an antiquity inconceivably remote--many centuries before the
epoch made illustrious by Panini.
Attention has been asked above to the interesting fact that the god
Orpheus, of "Thracia" (?) is called the "dark-skinned." Has it escaped
notice that he is "supposed to be the Vedic Ribhu or Abrhu, an epithet
both of Indra and the Sun.
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