oet, say about 1000 B.C. We then hear nothing of
India till we come to the days of Alexander, and when we look at the
names of the Indian rivers, represented as well as they could be by
Alexander's companions, mere strangers in India, and by means of a
strange language and a strange alphabet, we recognize, without much
difficulty, nearly all of the old Vedic names.

In this respect the names of rivers have a great advantage over the
names of towns in India. What we now call _Dilli_ or _Delhi_[211] was
in ancient times called Indraprastha, in later times _Shahjahanabad_.
_Oude_ is Ayodhya, but the old name of Saketa is forgotten. The town
of Pa_t_aliputra, known to the Greeks as _Palimbothra_, is now called
_Patna_.[212]

Now I can assure you this persistency of the Vedic river-names was to
my mind something so startling that I often said to myself, This
cannot be--there must be something wrong here. I do not wonder so much
at the names of the _Indus_ and the _Ganges_ being the same. The Indus
was known to early traders, whether by sea or by land. Skylax sailed
from the country of the Paktys, _i.e._ the Pushtus, as the Afghans
still call themselves, down to the mouth of the Indus. That was under
Darius Hystaspes (521-486). Even before that time India and the
Indians were known by their name, which was derived from _Sindhu_, the
name of their frontier river. The neighboring tribes who spoke Iranic
languages all pronounced, like the Persian, the _s_ as an _h_.[213]
Thus Sindhu became Hindhu (Hidhu), and, as h's were dropped even at
that early time, Hindhu became Indu. Thus the river was called
_Indos_, the people _Indoi_ by the Greeks, who first heard of India
from the Persians.

_Sindhu_ probably meant originally the divider, keeper, and defender,
from sidh, to keep off. It was a masculine, before it became a
feminine. No more telling name could have been given to a broad river,
which guarded peaceful settlers both against the inroads of hostile
tribes and the attacks of wild animals. A common name for the ancient
settlements of the Aryans in India was "the Seven Rivers," "Sapta
Sindhava_h_." But though sindhu was used as an appellative noun for
river in general (cf. Rig-Veda VI. 19, 5, samudre na sindhava_h_
yadamana_h_, "like rivers longing for the sea"), it remained
throughout the whole history of India the name of its powerful
guardian river, the Indus.

In some passages of the Rig-Veda it has been pointed out th