The Punjab

The Vedic name of the land of the Punjab, Sapta Sindhu, “the seven rivers,” the region of the Indus and its tributaries in which the hymns of the Rigveda were composed. It was the heartland of the early Indo-Aryans, the world the Vedic poets knew, named for the network of great rivers that watered it; the Avestan Hapta Həndu, which this atlas meets on the page for India, is the exact Iranian cognate, “the seven rivers” in the other branch of the Indo-Iranian family.

Sapta Sindhu is the oldest name of the Punjab and the seed of the wider history of the word sindhu. The same river-name that, generalized, would travel west to become the world’s word for India here names the Vedic homeland by counting its waters. As the focus of Indian geography shifted to the five eastern tributaries, the “seven rivers” of the Veda gave way to the “five rivers” of classical Sanskrit, Pañcanada, and at last to the Persian Panjāb; but the Vedic Sapta Sindhu is where the land of rivers was first named for them.

The Avestan name of the seven-river country, Hapta Həṇdu, the sixteenth and last of the good lands created by Ahura Mazda in the Vendidad’s opening catalogue: the Iranian scripture’s easternmost horizon, the river-plain this page treats under its Vedic name. The phrase is the exact cognate of Sanskrit Sapta Sindhu above it, the same two inherited words for the same country, and the form also stands on the India page, where the Vendidad’s frontier-land answers Old Persian Hinduš as the name of the wider Indus world.

Set beside its Sanskrit twin, the pair displays the oldest sound-law in this atlas twice in two words: inherited s became h in Iranian, so Indian sapta is Iranian hapta and Indian sindhu is Iranian həṇdu, one phrase pronounced from the two sides of the mountains that divided the Aryan world. Every later name for India in Persian, Greek, Arabic, and English descends from the h-side of exactly this equation. The Punjab is where the two traditions stood closest and heard each other best, and its page holds the rare thing itself: the same name, twice, in the two accents of a parted family.

The classical Sanskrit name of the Punjab, Pañcanada, “the five rivers,” for the five eastern tributaries of the Indus, the Jhelum, Chenab, Ravi, Beas, and Sutlej. As Indian geography narrowed its focus from the whole Indus system of the Vedic Sapta Sindhu to these five streams, the land was renamed by their number; the Pañcanada country appears in the epics and the classical literature as the plain of the five waters.

Pañcanada is the direct ancestor of the modern name. When Persian speakers came to rule the region, they calqued the Sanskrit exactly, element for element: pañca, “five,” and nada, “river,” became panj, “five,” and āb, “water,” yielding Panjāb, the Punjab. The name is thus a translation that crossed languages without changing meaning, the “five rivers” of Sanskrit becoming the “five waters” of Persian. The land’s defining feature, the convergence of its five rivers, names it still, in a Persian rendering of a Sanskrit count.

The Persian name that the region bears to this day: Panjāb, panj “five” and āb “water,” a precise calque of the Sanskrit Pañcanada made by the Persian-speaking world that took the region in hand from the Ghaznavids onward. Its earliest standard attestation is in Ibn Baṭṭūṭa, who crossed the region in the 1330s and records the name of the five waters; whether the traveler took it down from local Persian usage or the chancery’s, the compound was in circulation under the Delhi Sultanate, and it settled from the rivers onto the land they define.

The entry closes the arithmetic this page counts through. The Vedic hymns numbered seven rivers, classical Sanskrit five, and Persian translated the five exactly, number and noun, into its own morphemes; like Armenian Miǰagetkʿ for Mesopotamia, it is a name carried across languages as an idea rather than a sound. Every stage of the region’s name is a tally of its rivers taken by whoever governed them, and the Persian count is the one that stuck: the modern states of India and Pakistan both keep a Punjab, still counting five.