"This list... in my opinion, has the same meaning as the lists of the sixteen Great Territories, sodasa mahājanapada, subjected to the Aryan element according to Buddhist, Jain, and epic sources of 6th-century BCE India. The first fargard of the Vendidad – I do not know if this parallelism has ever been observed – is a Zoroastrian list of the sixteen Great Territories in which the Aryan element spread, albeit unevenly."
January 1, 1970
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Gherardo_Gnoli