The Himalayas

Himavat (हिमवत्), “the snowy one,” is the older Sanskrit name of the range and its personification as a god, formed from himá, “snow,” with the possessive suffix -vat. The Ṛgveda already speaks of the himavantaḥ, the snow-clad peaks; the epics and Purāṇas make Himavat a king of mountains and a father, whose daughters are the river-goddess Gaṅgā, who descends from his snows, and Pārvatī, “the daughter of the mountain,” who becomes the consort of Śiva. The Himalaya is in this form not a place but a person, and a progenitor.

Himavat matters to the page for two reasons. It is the mountain as the Indian tradition most deeply imagined it, a living parent rather than a wall of rock, the source from which the sacred rivers and a great goddess are born. And it shares with Himālaya the snow-syllable himá that became the Greek Imaus and Emodos; indeed the second Greek name, Emodos, most likely renders the adjective haimavata, “belonging to Himavat, of the snowy mountain.” The father of the Ganges gave the Himalaya, by way of the Greeks, one of the two names under which the West would know it.

Himālaya (हिमालय) is the Sanskrit name of the great northern range, a transparent compound of himá, “snow,” and ālaya, “abode,” the abode of snow. Kālidāsa opens the Kumārasambhava with it in a famous verse, “In the northern quarter is the divine-souled Himālaya, the king of mountains, spanning the earth from eastern to western sea”; the epics and Purāṇas make it the dwelling of ascetics and gods and the northern boundary of the known land. It is the headword of the range and the source of its modern English name.

The whole of this page hangs on the first element of the compound, himá, “snow.” That single word, shared with the personified Himavat beside it, is what the Greek and Latin geographers caught and carried west as Imaus and Emodos, and it is what Pliny, uniquely, translated back. The Indian name says plainly what the mountains are, the place where the snow lives; the foreign names are that same snow-word worn down past recognition, so that the Himalaya travels into Europe as a sound whose meaning only one ancient writer still heard.

Himavā (stem Himavant) is the Pali name of the Himalayas, the Middle Indo-Aryan continuation of Sanskrit Himavat, “the one possessing snow.” In the canon the Himavā is less a mountain range than a mythic north: the abode of ascetics and strange peoples, the source of the great rivers, the standard of immensity. The Dhammapada makes it a simile for the good, who “shine from afar like the snowy mountain,” and the Jātakas people its slopes with hermits, elephants, and golden geese; cosmological texts count it among the great features of Jambudīpa, the southern continent.

The entry’s interest is in register. The Sanskrit tradition on this page names the range in two ways, the possessive Himavat and the compound Himālaya, “abode of snow”; Pali inherited the first and made it the ordinary word, and it is the possessive form, not the compound that eventually conquered the world’s atlases, that the Buddhist canon carried across Asia. A reader of the Jātakas in Burma or Ceylon knew the mountains as the Himavā centuries before any European knew them at all.

Latin Emodus, usually in the plural Emodi montes, is the Greek Ēmōdós taken into Pliny’s geography, where the Emodi mountains are the first stretch of the great Indian range, beyond which he sets Imaus, the Paropanisus, and the rest. It is the Latin half of the doublet, the form descended from the haimavata road into the snow-word, and it stands in Pliny’s text a few lines from its own twin.

Emodus completes the page’s quiet irony. Pliny knew that Imaus meant “snowy”; he had the translation in hand. Yet he set the Emodi montes beside Imaus as a separate range and never saw that they too were the same snow, that Emodus and Imaus were one Sanskrit word, himá, refracted twice through Greek and landing in his own list as two mountains. The man who alone among the ancients understood what the Himalaya’s name meant still could not tell that he had written it down twice.

Latin Imaus is the Greek Ímaos taken into Roman geography by Pliny, who places it among the great ranges of inner Asia and India. But Pliny does something no other ancient source does: he tells his reader what the name means. Imaus, he writes, signifies “snowy” in the language of the people who live beneath it, incolarum lingua nivosum significante. He had no Sanskrit and no notion of the word himá, but he had the gloss, presumably from the Greek geographers’ Indian sources, and he set it down correctly.

That single clause is the philological heart of this page. Across the whole width of the ancient world, an encyclopedist who would never see the Himalaya recorded that its name meant snow, and he was right: Imaus is himá, the Sanskrit word the mountains are named for, surfacing in a Latin natural history with its meaning intact. Of all the forms on this page, this is the one that closes the circuit, the West not merely borrowing the Indian snow-word but, for one sentence, understanding it.

Greek Ēmōdós (Ἠμωδός), also tò Ḗmōdon óros, is the second Greek name for the Himalaya, which Ptolemy enters as a range distinct from and lying beside the Imaus. It most likely renders the Sanskrit adjective haimavata, “belonging to Himavat, of the snowy mountain,” and so reaches the same himá, “snow,” by a slightly different road than Imaos, through the personified mountain rather than the bare snow-word.

Ēmōdós and Ímaos are the page’s central fact: two Greek names for one range, set side by side as if they were two mountains. Ptolemy mapped them as separate ranges, and Pliny would list the Emodi montes beside Imaus in Latin, and neither saw that the two names were the one Sanskrit snow-word twice over. It is a rare thing to watch a single foreign name split in transmission into a pair that its receivers then mistake for two different places; the Himalaya, too vast and too distant to be seen whole, became in Greek geography two mountains that were always one.

Greek Ímaos (Ἴμαος), also tò Ímaon óros, “the Imaon mountain,” is the more famous of the two Greek names for the Himalaya, and a fixed landmark of ancient geography: Ptolemy uses it to divide the world of the nomads into “Scythia within the Imaus” and “Scythia beyond the Imaus,” making the range the great meridian wall of inner Asia. It descends from the Sanskrit himá, “snow,” the same element that stands at the head of Himālaya and Himavat.

Ímaos is the name that carried the Sanskrit snow-word furthest into the Western imagination, and the one whose meaning the ancients actually recovered. When Pliny took it into Latin as Imaus, he added the note that makes this page possible, that the word means “snowy” in the local tongue. The Greek geographers had turned himá into a coordinate on the map of Asia without knowing what it meant; it took a Roman compiler to translate it back. The Himalaya stands in Ptolemy’s world as Imaos, a mountain-name that is, unrecognized, simply the Indian word for snow.

The Tamil name of the Himalaya, Imayam, the Sanskrit snow-mountain name with its initial h- dropped at the door, as Tamil regularly drops it, and the ending reshaped to the Tamil noun class in -am; whether the immediate model was Himavat or a form of Himālaya the Tamil shape does not say, and the atlas leaves the vector open. In the Sangam panegyrics the mountain is the fixed northern limit of the world: a king’s fame runs “from Kumari to the Imayam,” from the cape at Tamil country’s southern tip to the snows, and the Chera kings claimed the mountain in their very titles as Imayavarampaṉ, “he whose boundary is the Himalaya.” The Cilappatikāram makes the claim literal, quarrying the heroine’s image-stone there.

The page’s other names look up at the range from many directions, but the Tamil one is measured from the greatest distance: a people of the tropical far south, most of whom would never see snow at all, kept the snow mountain as one pole of a formula whose other pole was their own southern cape. The mountain and the cape between them defined the world an ambitious Tamil king was supposed to fill. Greek and Latin set the range at the edge of their maps; the Tamil poets set it at the edge of ambition, and a Chera dynasty wore the boundary as a personal name.