SINDHU. India was first known to the Chinese in the time of the emperor Wu-ti of the Ilan dynasty, in the 2d century before Christ. It was then called Yuan-tu or Yin-tu, that is Hindu and Shintu or Sindlin. At a later date it was named Thian-tu, and this is the form which the historian Mat-wan - lin has adopted. The name Sindliu was taken from the Romans, the Romans from the Greeks, the Greeks from the Persians. In Persian the initial s is changed into h, which initial h was as usual dropped in Greek. It is only in Persian that the country of the Sindhu (Sindhu is the Sanskrit name for river), or of the seven Sindlin, could have been called Ilindia or India instead of Sindia. ' Unless the followers of Zoroaster had pronounced every s like h, we should never have heard of the West Indies. The name of India, i.e. Hoddit, does not occur in the Bible before the book of Esther, where it is noticed as the limit of the territories of Ahasuerus in the east, as Ethiopia was in the west (i. 1, viii. 9). The names are shnilarly connected by Herodotus (vii. p. 9). The Hebrew form Hoddu is an
abbreviation of Honadu, which is identical with the indigenous names of the river India, Hindu or Sindhu, and again with the ancient name of the country as it appears in the Vendidad, Hapta Hendu. The native form Sinclus is noticed by Pliny (vi. p. 23). But though the name of India occurs so seldom in the Old Testament, an active trade was carried on between India and Western Asia. The Tyrians established their depots on the shores of the Persian Gulf, and procured 'horns of ivory," broidered work and rich apparel ' (Ezekiel xxvii. 15, 24), by a route which crossed the Arabian desert by land, and then followed the coasts of the Indian Ocean by sea. The trade opened by Solo mon with Ophir through the Red Sea chiefly consisted of Indian articles. Algummim (sandal wood), kophim (apes), thuccum (peacocks), are words of Indian origin (Humboldt, Kosmos, p. 133), to which we may add the Hebrew names of the topaz, pitdah, derived from the Sanskrit pita.—Maller's Lectures, p. 215.