The Yamuna River

Yamunā (यमुना) is the Sanskrit name of the river and of the goddess who is the river, the twin sister of Yama, the god of death and the first mortal; the name is built on the same root yam- and the dual sense of “twin.” It is named in the Ṛgveda alongside the Gaṅgā in the hymn of the rivers, and it is above all the river of Kṛṣṇa: it was across the Yamunā in flood that the infant was carried to safety at Gokula, and in its pools that the boy danced on the hood of the serpent Kāliya. With the Ganges it forms, at their confluence at Prayāga, one of the holiest sites of the subcontinent.

Yamunā is the headwater of this page and the source of its argument, which is the exact reverse of the Ganges’s. Where Gaṅgā went out into the world as a goddess and kept its name intact in every language, Yamunā, no less divine, fractured the moment it crossed a border. The forms that follow, two rival Greek spellings, a Latin borrowing, and a scatter of Chinese transcriptions, are all reaches at this one Sanskrit word, and none of them agrees with another. The two sister-rivers run together to Prayāga; their names run apart across the earth.

Greek Iōmánēs (Ἰωμάνης) is the Yamuna as Megasthenes reported it, preserved through Arrian: the river of the Sourasenoi, the people of Kṛṣṇa’s Śūrasena, flowing between the towns of Methora, which is Mathurā, and Klisobora. It comes, like the Greek name of the Ganges, by the most direct route any Indian name could travel, from the Seleucid ambassador who lived at the Mauryan court; but where that route delivered Gángēs almost unaltered, here it produced something already reshaped, the Sanskrit Yamunā worked over into a Greek form with its own metathesis and ending.

That is the first half of the Yamuna’s lesson. The same eyewitness channel that fixed the Ganges could not fix the Yamuna: Megasthenes brought home Iōmánēs, and within a few generations Greek geography would write the river another way entirely, as Diámouna. Two Greek names for one river, from one tradition, neither yielding to the other. The river that shared the Ganges’s bank did not share its onomastic luck.

Latin Iomanes (also written Jomanes) is the Greek Iōmánēs taken over by Pliny, who reports that the river flows through the territory of the Palibothri, the people of Pālibothra or Pāṭaliputra, between the towns of Methora and Chrysobora, and so into the Ganges. Of the two Greek forms, Latin took the older, Megasthenes-derived one, not Ptolemy’s Diámouna, and it kept the river firmly in the orbit of the greater stream it fed.

To Rome the Yamuna was a tributary, named by where it joined the Ganges and set among the geography of the Mauryan heartland. The form is faithful to its Greek source and adds nothing new of its own, but its very ordinariness makes the page’s point once more: the Latin Ganges is the unmistakable Ganges, while the Latin Yamuna is Iomanes, a name no one would recognize without being told, the sister-river entering Europe under a spelling three removes from anything an Indian said.

Greek Diámouna (Διάμουνα) is the second Greek name for the Yamuna, recorded by Ptolemy in the second century from the geographical sources he compiled at Alexandria rather than from any traveler on the river. It is the more faithful of the two transcriptions: it keeps the m-n skeleton and the final -a of the Sanskrit Yamunā where the older Iōmánēs had reshaped them, and it sits in Ptolemy’s catalogue of the rivers of India this side of the Ganges.

Diámouna beside Iōmánēs is the heart of this page. Here is a single river carrying two different Greek names, one from the empire of Alexander’s successors and one from the libraries of Roman Egypt, set down by writers who never reconciled them and may not have known they were the same water. It is precisely the fate the Ganges escaped: Gángēs is Gángēs in every Greek author, but the Yamuna is Iōmánēs to one and Diámouna to another, the river that the Greeks, like everyone else who met it, could not name the same way twice.

Yán móu nà (閻牟那) is a Chinese Buddhist phonetic transcription of the Sanskrit Yamunā, the river of the Indian holy land carried into Chinese inside the scriptures and the pilgrims’ records. It is given here as disputed because it is only one of several: the Buddhist lexica record 琰母那, 鹽牟那, and 搖尤那 beside it, competing renderings of the one foreign name, and the form cannot be pinned to a single settled witness the way the Ganges’s Hénghé can. It names the same river the Greeks called Iōmánēs and Diámouna.

The instability is the entry’s whole point, and it completes the page across four languages. The Chinese Buddhist tradition fixed a single stable name for the Ganges, 恒河, and built it into the proverb of the numberless sands; it could not do the same for the Yamuna, which scattered into a handful of transcriptions that never resolved into one. Greek, Latin, and Chinese alike met the two sister-rivers and kept the Ganges whole while letting the Yamuna fragment. In every tongue that received them, the holy Ganges answered to one name and the equally holy Yamuna to many.