In this respect the names of rivers have a great advantage over the names of towns in India. What we now call Dilli or Delhi[211] was in ancient times called Indraprastha, in later times Shahjahânabâd. Oude is Ayodhyâ, but the old name of Saketa is forgotten. The town of Pataliputra, known to the Greeks as Palimbothra, is now called Patna.[212]
Now I can assure you this persistency of the Vedic river-names was to my mind something so startling that I often said to myself, This cannot be—there must be something wrong here. I do not wonder so much at the names of the Indus and the Ganges being the same. The Indus was known to early traders, whether by sea or by land. Skylax sailed from the country of the Paktys, i.e. the Pushtus, as the Afghans still call themselves, down to the mouth of the Indus. That was under Darius Hystaspes (521-486). Even before that time India and the Indians were known by their name, which was derived from Sindhu, the name of their frontier river. The neighboring tribes who spoke Iranic languages all pronounced, like the Persian, the s as an h.[213] Thus Sindhu became Hindhu (Hidhu), and, as h's were dropped even at that early time, Hindhu became Indu. Thus the river was called Indos, the people Indoi by the Greeks, who first heard of India from the Persians.
Sindhu probably meant originally the divider, keeper, and defender, from sidh, to keep off. It was a masculine, before it became a feminine. No more telling name could have been given to a broad river, which guarded peaceful settlers both against the inroads of hostile tribes and the attacks of wild animals. A common name for the ancient settlements of the Aryans in India was "the Seven Rivers," "Sapta Sindhavah." But though sindhu was used as an appellative noun for river in general (cf. Rig-Veda VI. 19, 5, samudré ná síndhavah yâdamânâh, "like rivers longing for the sea"), it remained throughout the whole history of India the name of its powerful guardian river, the Indus.
In some passages of the Rig-Veda it has been pointed out that sindhu might better be translated by "sea," a change of meaning, if so it can be called, fully explained by the geographical conditions of the country. There are places where people could swim across the Indus, there are others where no eye could tell whether the boundless expanse of water should be called river or sea. The two run into each other, as every sailor knows, and naturally the meaning of sindhu, river, runs into the meaning of sindhu, sea.
But besides the two great rivers, the Indus and the Ganges—in Sanskrit the Gangâ, literally the Go-go—we have the smaller rivers, and many of their names also agree with the names preserved to us by the companions of Alexander.[214]
The Yamunâ, the Jumna, was known to Ptolemy as Διἁμουνα,[215] to Pliny as Jomanes, to Arrian, somewhat corrupted, as Jôbares.[216]
The Sutudrî, or, as it was afterward called, Satadru, meaning "running in a hundred streams," was known to Ptolemy as Ζαδἁρδης or Ζἁραδος ; Pliny called it Sydrus; and Megasthenes, too, was probably acquainted with it as Ζαδἁρδης. In the Veda[217] it formed with the Vipas the frontier of the Punjâb, and we hear of fierce battles fought at that time, it may be on the same spot where in 1846 the battle of the Sutledge was fought by Sir Hugh Gough and Sir Henry Hardinge. It was probably on the Vipâs (later Vipâsâ), a north-western tributary of the Sutledge, that Alexander's army turned back. The river was then called Hyphasis; Pliny calls it Hypasis,[218] a very fair approximation to the Vedic Vipâs, which means "unfettered." Its modern name is Bias or Bejah.
The next river on the west is the Vedic Parushnî, better known as Irâvatî,[219] which Strabo calls Hyarotis, while Arrian gives it a more Greek appearance by calling it Hydraotes. It is the modern Rawi. It was this river which the Ten Kings when attacking the Tritsus under Sudâs tried to cross from the west by cutting off its water. But their stratagem failed, and they perished in the river (Rig-Veda VII. 18, 8-9).
We then come to the Asiknî, which means "black." That river had another name also, Kandrabhâga, which means "streak of the moon." The Greeks, however, pronounced that Σανδαροφἁγος, and this had the unlucky meaning of "the devourer of Alexander." Hesychius tells us that in order to avert the bad omen Alexander changed the name of that river into Ακεσἱνης, which would mean "the Healer;" but he does not tell, what the Veda tells us, that this name Ακεσἱνης was a Greek adaptation of another name of the same river, namely Asiknî, which had evidently supplied to Alexander the idea of calling the Asiknî Ακεσἱνης. It is the modern Chinâb.
Next to the Akesines we have the Vedic Vitastâ, the last of the rivers of the Punjâb, changed in Greek into Hydaspes. It was to this river that Alexander retired, before sending his fleet down the Indus and leading his army back to Babylon. It is the modern Behat or Jilam.