Sindh

The Sanskrit Sindhu, the name of the Indus, applied also to the land along its lower course. It is the same word treated more fully on the page for the Indus, the great river whose name, carried west, became the world’s word for India; here it names the region rather than the river, the country of the lower Indus that would become Sindh. In Sanskrit usage sindhu is both the proper name of the river and a common noun for any great river or the sea.

On this page Sindhu is the headwater of a narrower history. While the generalized form of the name spread west to name the whole subcontinent, as Old Persian Hinduš, Greek Indós, and ultimately India, the bare Sindhu stayed attached to the river’s own valley, the land that the Arabs would later call al-Sind. The single name thus forked: outward into the vast al-Hind, India, and inward into the small al-Sind, the delta, the same Sindhu naming both the largest and the most local of the lands the Indus touched. The name holds: the province is Sindh today, Sindhu worn by centuries but never replaced.

The Old Persian Hinduš, the Achaemenid satrapy of the lower Indus, the easternmost province of Darius’s empire, won around 518 BCE and the richest of all his lands in tribute. It is the same name treated on the pages for the Indus and for India: the Iranian form of Sanskrit Sindhu, with the regular Iranian shift of initial s to h. On this page it names the province specifically, the conquered valley of the lower river rather than the whole subcontinent the name would later cover.

Hinduš is the hinge of the name’s double destiny. Generalized westward, through Greek Indós and India, it became the world’s word for the entire subcontinent; held to the satrapy, it named only the lower Indus, the land the Arabs would inherit as al-Sind. The Achaemenid province is the moment the river-name first became a political territory, and it already contained both futures, the vast India and the narrow Sindh, in the single frontier satrapy at the eastern edge of the Persian world.

The Greek name of the lower Indus country in the Roman period, Indoskythía, “Indian Scythia.” The Periplus of the Erythraean Sea, the merchant’s handbook of the first century, calls the region at the Indus mouths simply Skythía, with its port of Barbarikon serving a royal city upriver; Ptolemy, a century later, fixes the compound Indoskythía on his map for the whole stretch of the river’s lower course. The name records a political fact: the Saka, the Iranian steppe people the Greeks called Scythians, had come down through the passes in the last centuries BCE and made the lower Indus their kingdom, and the geographers renamed the province for its new masters.

The page’s other names all descend from the river, Sindhu and its Persian and Arabic children; this one ignores the river entirely and names the land for a people who had arrived within living memory, the atlas’s steppe pattern breaking through on its southernmost shore. It is also a name with a doubled horizon: Scythia proper lay north of the Black Sea, at the opposite corner of the Greek world, and the compound quietly asserts that the same steppe that touched the Danube had now touched the Indian Ocean. For the sailors of the Periplus, Scythia was no longer the frozen north of Herodotus; it was a monsoon port at the mouth of the Indus, the steppe met by sea.

The Arabic name of the lower Indus, al-Sind, the region conquered for the Caliphate by Muhammad ibn al-Qasim in 711 CE, the easternmost outpost of the early Islamic world. The Arabs took the name from the Iranian Hinduš and the Indian Sindhu, applying it to the province they ruled along the lower river and its delta, distinct from the vast land beyond.

It is in Arabic that the old river-name split cleanly in two. The Arabs called their lower-Indus province al-Sind and reserved al-Hind for India proper, the great subcontinent to the east, dividing by a single consonant, s against h, what had begun as one word, Sindhu. The same name that, generalized, had become the world’s word for all India was thus pulled back, in al-Sind, to the river’s own valley, so that the near province and the far subcontinent stand side by side in Arabic as the two ends of one ancient name, the Indus kept small beside the India it had spawned. Arabic still uses al-Sind, and the province of Sindh carries the name on the map today.