The Envisioning of a Nation: A Defence of the Idea of India no exception to this rule. Even where geographical features set seemingly natural limits to a territory, the latter's recognition as a country has not automatically followed. The several indigenous communities inhabiting the Australian continent, did not know, because of lack of sufficient exploration, that they were all on the same island; they were also not aware, since they did not know of any people outside Australia, that they as a group were distinct from inhabitants of other countries in certain important cultural ways. Thus there was no country like Australia before the 19th century. We can see from this example that geographical knowledge was also a pre-requisite before the concept of India as a country could arise. We need not be surprised, then, that such a concept is not present in the Vedas. The first firm evidence of the "idea of India" (courtesy, Sunil Khilnani) is, perhaps, no older than Gautama Buddha's time, some two thousand five hundred years ago (c. 500 B.C.), when we first hear of the "Sixteen Mahajanapadas", which together comprised Northern India and parts of Afghanistan. But it is with the Mauryan emperor Asoka's inscriptions found all over India, datable to around 250 B.C., that we find one of India's early names, "Jambudipa" (the Pali form of "Jambudvipa"), used in his Rock Edict I, for the country as a whole. The cultural affinities of the Indian people, isolated from others by high mountain ranges in the north and by the Indian Ocean in the south, could only be marked more certainly, when there was knowledge of other people outside of these borders—people, that is, who could be seen as culturally different. Asoka says in his Rock Edict XIII that the "Yonas" (Greeks) were different because "they had no Samanas (Buddhist priests) and Brahmanas among them". Thus a cultural distinction could reinforce a territorial one. A similar distinction occurs in the reference made in the Manusmriti (c. 100 B.C.) to foreigners (mlechchhas): theirs are lands where Brahmanas do not perform sacrifices or the "twice-born" dwell (Manu, II, 22-24). The listing of India's regions in the Mahabharata or Samudragupta's Allahabad inscription or Kalidasa's Meghaduta underlined again a fairly distinct concept of India as a geographical and cultural world of its own. The concept could indeed lead to rigid insularity. Alberuni, studying Indian civilization in his Arabic work, the Kitabu-l Hind, written in c. 1035 at Lahore, commented adversely on the Indians' sense of isolation. They believed, he said, that "there was no (other) country like theirs," and had no desire to learn about, or from, other peoples.