5. In 1884 Colonel H. G. McGregor gives two names with their explanation, “Ningrahar and Nungnihar; the former is a corruption of the latter word[2777] which in the Afghān language signifies nine rivers or rivulets.” He names nine, but of them six only issue from Safed-koh.
6. I have come across the following instances in which the number nine is represented by other words than na (ni or nu); viz. the nenhan of the Chitrālī Kāfir and the noun of the Panjābi, recorded by Leech,—the nyon of the Khowārī and the huncha of the Boorishki, recorded by Colonel Biddulph.
The above instances allow opinion that in the region concerned and through a long period of time, nine has been expressed by nang (ning or nung) and other nasal or high palatal sounds, side by side with na (ni or nu). The whole matter may be one of nasal utterance,[2778] but since a large number of tribesmen express nine by a word containing a nasal sound, should that word not find place in lists of recognized symbols of sounds?
c. Are there two names of distinct origin?
1. Certainly it makes a well-connected story of decay in the Sanscrit word Nagarahāra to suppose that tribesmen, prone by their organism to nasal utterance, pronounced that word Nangrahār, and by force of their numbers made this corruption current,—that this was recognized as the name of the town while the Town-of-towns was great or in men’s memory, and that when through the decay of the town its name became a meaningless husk, the wrong meaning of the Nine-streams should enter into possession.
But as another and better one can be put together, this fair-seeming story may be baseless. Its substitute has the advantage of explaining the double sequence of names shown in Section b.
The second story makes all the variant names represent one or other of two distinct originals. It leaves Nagrahār to represent Nagarahāra, the dead town; it makes the nine torrents of Safed-koh the primeval sponsors of Nīng-nahār, the name of the riverain tract. Both names, it makes contemporary in the relatively brief interlude of the life of the town. For the fertilizing streams will have been the dominant factors of settlement and of revenue from the earliest times of population and government. They arrest the eye where they and their ribbons of cultivation space the riverain waste; they are obvious units for grouping into a sub-government. Their name has a counterpart in adjacent Panj-āb; the two may have been given by one dominant power, how long ago, in what tongue matters not. The riverain tract, by virtue of its place on a highway of transit, must have been inhabited long before the town Nagarahāra was built, and must have been known by a name. What better one than Nine-streams can be thought of?
2. Bellew is quoted by the Gazetteer of India (ed. 1907) as saying, in his argument in favour of nawā vihāra, that no nine streams are found to stand sponsor, but modern maps shew nine outflows from Safed-koh to the Kābul-river between the Sūrkh-rūd and Daka, while if affluents to the former stream be reckoned, more than nine issue from the range.[2779]
Against Bellew’s view that there are not nine streams, is the long persistence of the number nine in the popular name (Sect. b).