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 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.