India

Hapta Həṇdu (𐬵𐬀𐬞𐬙𐬀 𐬵𐬈𐬢𐬛𐬎), “the seven rivers,” is the Avestan name for the land of the Indus, the sixteenth and last of the good lands that Ahura Mazda creates in the opening chapter of the Vendidad. It is the exact Iranian cognate of Sanskrit Sapta Sindhu, “the seven rivers,” the Vedic name for the Punjab and its river-system, with Avestan həṇdu answering Old Persian hindu and Sanskrit sindhu sound for sound. As with the project’s other Avestan forms, the original-script spelling is constructed letter by letter from the standard transliteration, the script being an alphabet whose values are individually secure even where a continuous manuscript string is not to hand.

Where Old Persian Hinduš is the river-land as an imperial tax-district, Hapta Həṇdu is the same frontier seen through the Zoroastrian sacred geography: the eastern edge of the Aryan world, named not for a satrap’s account but for the seven streams themselves. The two forms are siblings, not parent and child, the western and eastern Iranian reflexes of one inherited word. It is a telling pairing that the oldest Iranian witness to the Indus should remember it as a holy landscape of seven rivers while the chancellery beside it remembered it as a line on a tribute list.

Akkadian Indû (In-du-ú, written with the determinative KUR, “land”) is the Babylonian rendering of the Indus province, the third column of the Achaemenid trilingual inscriptions, where the land-lists and the formula ultu KUR Indû, “from India,” answer the Old Persian Hinduš and the Elamite Hinduš. But the Babylonian scribes did something the others did not: they dropped the initial h- of Hinduš and wrote an opening-vowel form, Indû.

That dropped aspirate is the entry’s quiet surprise. The form the modern world thinks of as Greek, Indía without the Persian h, had already been written in Babylonian cuneiform under Darius and Xerxes, a century and more before Herodotus. The same simplification that would later give Europe “India” rather than “Hindia” happened first in the Akkadian column of an Achaemenid inscription. Of the three chancellery languages naming the easternmost satrapy, it is the oldest and most conservative, Babylonian, that accidentally spelled the country the way the West would spell it ever after.

Elamite Hinduš (Hi-in-du-iš) is the Elamite rendering of the Indus province, the second of the three chancellery languages in which the Achaemenid kings published their inscriptions. It stands in the land-lists of Darius at Naqsh-e Rustam and of Xerxes in the Daiva inscription, and the ablative hi-in-du-iš-mar, “from India,” recurs in the same administrative formulae; the Elamite scribes wrote the name close to its Old Persian model, keeping the Hind- with its nasal that the Old Persian cuneiform left unmarked.

Hinduš in Elamite completes the Achaemenid trilingual triplet that this atlas tracks across the empire’s provinces, the same three-column coverage that names Egypt, Greece, and the Persian heartland in Old Persian, Elamite, and Babylonian together. India was the easternmost member of that imperial roll-call, and its appearance in the Elamite column is the administrative proof that the Indus satrapy was a working part of the empire, recorded in the same breath and the same formulae as the lands of the west.

Hinduš is the Old Persian name for the Indus province, the easternmost satrapy of the Achaemenid empire, listed among the lands Darius I claims in the great inscriptions at Behistun and Naqsh-e Rustam. It descends directly from Sanskrit Sindhu, “the river,” by the regular Iranian sound change of initial s to h, and it names not the subcontinent but the lower Indus borderland that the Persians actually administered. The cuneiform spells the skeleton h-i-du-u-š: the nasal before the dental is left unwritten, as Old Persian regularly omits a nasal in that position, so the attested form is read Hi(n)duš.

Hinduš is the headwater from which nearly every foreign name for India flows, and the moment a province’s name began to mean a world. The Persians knew and taxed only the Indus valley, but the Greeks who took the name from them applied it to everything beyond, and so a satrapy on the imperial edge gave its name to the whole of India, exactly as the Anatolian district of Asia came to name a continent. The afterlife runs further still than geography: by the same Iranian s-to-h shift that turned Sindhu into Hinduš, the river’s name became, in the end, the name of a religion.

Greek Indía (Ἰνδία), with the river Indós (Ἰνδός) and the country-name Indikḗ (Ἰνδική), is the Greek form of the Persian Hinduš, taken over from the Achaemenid administration the Greeks knew at first hand. Herodotus, the earliest substantial witness, describes the Indoí as the most numerous and easternmost of all peoples and the Indós as the river that bounds them, and he reckons India the twentieth satrapy of Darius; Megasthenes, Seleucus’s ambassador to the Mauryan court, wrote the Indiká that became the classical world’s standard account. In passing from Persian to Greek the name lost its initial h, written now with the smooth breathing, so that Hinduš became Indía.

That dropped aspirate is why the modern world says “India” and not “Hindia.” The Greek form, inherited by Latin and carried by it into every European language, is the single most consequential descendant of the Persian province-name, and it preserves the Persian generalization wholesale: the Greeks, like their Persian informants, let the name of the Indus stand for the entire land beyond it. The country that called itself Bhārata entered the western imagination, and never left it, under the Greek spelling of a Persian misreading of an Indian river.

Hōddû (הֹדּוּ) is the Hebrew name for India, occurring only in the book of Esther, where it marks the eastern limit of the empire of Ahasuerus, who is said to have ruled “from Hōddû to Kush,” from India to Ethiopia. It is the Old Persian Hinduš taken over through the Achaemenid administration whose world the book depicts, the imperial chancellery’s term for its farthest satrapy; in the passage into Hebrew the nasal assimilated to the following dental, giving the doubled form Hōddû.

The phrase “from India to Kush” is a merism for the whole of the civilized world under one king, and it sets Hōddû at the very edge of the Hebrew Bible’s geography, its easternmost named land. The form is a small monument to the reach of the Persian empire and to the route this name traveled: India entered scripture not by way of trade or conquest but as an administrative boundary marker, the eastern bookend of an empire whose own records the Hebrew writer was echoing. The same Persian word that the Greeks turned into Indía the Hebrews kept, a column over, as the place where the world ran out.

Bhārata (भारत), with the fuller Bhāratavarṣa, “the Bhārata land,” is India’s name for itself, the realm of the descendants of the legendary king Bharata, son of Duṣyanta and Śakuntalā, and beyond him of the Bharata clan already prominent in the Ṛgveda. The Mahābhārata, the epic of the Bharata war, sets out in its Bhīṣmaparvan a formal geography of Bhāratavarṣa as the land bounded by the ocean and the Himalaya, and the Purāṇas repeat and elaborate the scheme. Beside it Sanskrit cosmography sets two further terms named only in passing here: Jambudvīpa, the rose-apple continent of the whole inhabited world, and Āryāvarta, “the abode of the Āryas,” the northern heartland of orthodox culture.

Bhārata is the one name on this page spoken from within, and the only one that is not a river. Where Persian, Greek, Hebrew, Arabic, and Chinese all name the country after the Indus that lay at its edge and on their road to it, India’s self-name reaches instead for a king and a lineage, an account of who the people are rather than where the traveler crossed to find them. The contrast is the whole argument of the page: a civilization remembered abroad by its frontier remembered itself by its founder. The name has outlived every empire that bore it and stands today, beside “India,” in the first article of the Republic’s constitution.

Shēndú (身毒) is the earliest Chinese name for India, recorded in the Shiji from the report of the explorer Zhang Qian. Sent west by Emperor Wu of Han and detained for years among the nomads, Zhang Qian reached Bactria around 128 BCE and was struck to find there cloth and bamboo from Sichuan, which the merchants said had come through a country to the southeast called Shēndú, some thousands of li away. The name is a transcription, its Han-era reading reconstructed as roughly śjen-duwk, of Sanskrit Sindhu, the same Indus-name that the Persians to the west had made into Hinduš.

Shēndú is the first of three Chinese transcriptions of one foreign word, and proof that the river-name reached the Far East as surely as it reached the Mediterranean. China came to India not through Persia but overland across Central Asia and by the southwestern caravan tracks Zhang Qian had stumbled onto, and yet it arrived at the same place: the country named for the Indus. From opposite ends of the continent, the Greek Indía and the Chinese Shēndú are the same river spoken in two directions, and neither end ever knew the country by the name it used for itself.

Latin India is the Greek Indía taken over unchanged, the name under which the Roman world knew the lands at the eastern edge of the earth and the source of the pepper, ivory, gems, and silk that the Red Sea trade carried to Alexandria and Rome. Pliny devotes a long stretch of his sixth book to its rivers, peoples, and prodigies, drawing on Megasthenes and on the merchants of the monsoon route; the geographers Mela and, later, Ptolemy fix it on the map of the oikoumenē.

India is the form that won. From Latin it passed, with little more than local spelling, into the whole of the European vocabulary, so that the country wears in every western language a name three removes from anything Indian: a Latin borrowing of a Greek borrowing of a Persian district named for a Sanskrit river. The chain is the lesson of the page in miniature. A name that began as Sindhu, “the river,” at the subcontinent’s edge ended as the ordinary word for the subcontinent itself, everywhere on earth except in the country’s own oldest name for itself.

Tiānzhú (天竺) is the name for India current in China from the Eastern Han through the period of the great Buddhist translations, given its standard early description in the Hou Hanshu, which reports that Tiānzhú is another name for Shēndú and recounts its climate, its kingdoms, and the arrival of Buddhism. It is a fresh transcription of the same Sindhu-name rather than a development of the older Shēndú, fitted now to characters whose first graph, tiān, means “heaven”; the choice of so auspicious a character belongs to the centuries in which India was becoming, to China, the holy land from which the dharma came.

Tiānzhú is the middle term of the Chinese triplet and the name of India at its most luminous, the country the pilgrims walked toward. It is as Tiānzhú that the monk Faxian crossed the deserts to find the relics and texts of the Buddha at the turn of the fifth century, and the word carried for its users not the flat sense of a far country but the charge of a sacred destination. The same river-name that elsewhere on this page is an imperial border or a trade source is, in Chinese, the road to enlightenment.

Hindū (הינדו), with the gentilic Hindewāʾē, is the India of the Babylonian Talmud, the country at the eastern end of the trade routes that ran through Sasanian Mesopotamia. The Bavli knows it as the source of luxuries and exotica, of Indian iron and spices and dyes, the references gathered in Sokoloff’s dictionary of the dialect. The Jews of Babylonia sat astride the road between the Mediterranean and the East, and Hindū names the far terminus of that road, the same Aramaic Hind-stem their Christian neighbors used.

Hindū is India seen from the marketplaces of Babylonia rather than from an imperial chancellery or a church’s mission. Where the Persian and Greek names are an administrator’s province and the Syriac a diocese, the Talmud’s Hindū is a trading partner, glimpsed through its goods. It belongs to the same Babylonian Jewish world, centered on the academies of Sura and Pumbedita, whose dialect on other pages of this atlas names Athens, Rome, and Babylon itself, the local Aramaic of a community that lived at the crossroads of the late-antique East.

Middle Persian Hind, with the derived Hindūg (“Indian”) and Hindūgān (“the land of the Indians”), is the Sasanian continuation of Old Persian Hinduš, the unbroken Iranian line of the Indus-name across a thousand years. It appears in the Zoroastrian geographical literature, the Bundahišn and the Šahrestānīhā ī Ērānšahr, as the country on the empire’s southeastern flank. It is given here in the Inscriptional Pahlavi script that this atlas uses for Middle Persian, as with Ērān, though its attestations belong to the later Book Pahlavi of the Zoroastrian compendia.

Hind is the pivot on which the river-name turned from antiquity to the medieval world. The Old Persian province-name passed through this Sasanian form into Arabic as al-Hind and into New Persian and Urdu as Hind, so that the Islamic world’s whole vocabulary for India, and ultimately the self-understanding of a Hindu religion defined against Islam, rests on the Middle Persian word. The Achaemenid satrapy had long since vanished, but its name, carried by Persian mouths through the centuries between, outlived the empire that coined it and seeded the one that came after.

Syriac Hendu (ܗܢܕܘ), with the gentilic Hendwāyē, “the Indians,” is India as the East-Syriac church knew it, a real and visited country at the far end of its reach. The Church of the East planted itself on the Malabar coast, the community of “the Christians of Saint Thomas,” and tended it from Mesopotamia; Cosmas Indicopleustes, writing in the sixth century, reports Persian Christians with a bishop in India and on the island of Socotra, and the synodal records of the church list its Indian province. The name continues the Aramaic Hind-stem of the Persian-administered region.

Hendu is the name of a mission-field, and it marks the same astonishing eastward span that put a Syriac inscription in the Tang capital of China. The Church of the East ran the length of Asia, from Antioch and Nisibis to Malabar and Chang’an, and India was one of its farthest dioceses; the Syriac for India and the Syriac for China (Bēth Sīnāyē) are two provinces of a single church’s map. The alphabet of Edessa names the subcontinent not as a geographer’s coordinate or a trader’s source but as a place where its own liturgy was sung.

Geʿez Hendekē (ህንደኬ) is the name of India in the Ethiopic Old Testament, where it renders Esther 1:1, the empire of Ahasuerus reaching “from India to Kush.” Unlike the Persian, Arabic, and Syriac forms, which all continue the Hind-stem of the Iranian East, Hendekē comes through Greek: the Ethiopic scriptures were translated from the Septuagint, and the underlying form is the Greek Indikē, the Christian Bible’s word for India, taken into Geʿez with its ending intact.

The verse carries a particular charge for the church that preserved this form, because its other pole, Kush, is Ethiopia itself. “From India to Kush” set the Ethiopian land at the western edge of the same world-empire whose eastern edge was India, and so an Ethiopian reader met the name of the subcontinent as the far counterpart of home. Hendekē is the one name on this page to reach India by way of the Greek Bible, the Septuagint branch of the family rather than the Persian, landing at last in the highland kingdom that read its own country into the same line of scripture.

al-Hind (الهند) is the Arabic name for India, taken through Persian Hind, and the standard term of the geographers and historians for the lands beyond the Indus. Beside it they set al-Sind (السند), the lower Indus valley itself, so that the Arabic tradition carried the country and its river-province under two names, Hind and Sind, governed and described as distinct regions. The masterwork of the tradition is al-Bīrūnī’s Kitāb al-Hind, a sober and astonishing eleventh-century study of Indian science, religion, and learning written by a scholar who had learned Sanskrit to read his sources.

The Hind-and-Sind pair is the Arabic memory of the very split this page turns on. Sanskrit Sindhu had named both the river and the borderland; the Persians made the borderland into Hinduš and the Greeks stretched it over the whole subcontinent; and now, at the far end of the chain, Arabic holds the two senses apart again, al-Sind for the river-province and al-Hind for the land beyond. The whole and the part, fused into one name at the headwater and pulled back into two at the mouth, with thirteen centuries and half a continent of transmission in between.

Yìndù (印度) is the name the pilgrim-scholar Xuanzang fixed for India, and the one Chinese still uses. Returning in 645 CE from sixteen years of travel and study across the subcontinent, he set down in the Da Tang Xiyu Ji a deliberate correction of the older transcriptions: the country, he writes, had been called Shēndú and Xiándòu and Tiānzhú by turns, all inexact, and the proper form is Yìndù. It is once again a transcription of the same Indus-name, now standardized by a man who had heard it spoken on the ground.

Yìndù is the survivor of the three. Where Shēndú preserved the report of an explorer who never reached India and Tiānzhú the reverence of those who knew it only as the Buddha’s homeland, Yìndù carries the authority of an eyewitness who had crossed the country end to end, and it is his form that outlasted the others into the modern language. Three travelers across seven centuries each tried to write one foreign river-name in Chinese characters; the pilgrim who actually walked to the river won, and India is Yìndù to this day.