mean "the Healer;" but he does not
tell, what the Veda tells us, that this name [Greek: Akesines] was a
Greek adaptation of another name of the same river, namely Asikni, which
had evidently supplied to Alexander the idea of calling the Asikni
[Greek: Akesines]. It is the modern Chinab.

Next to the Akesines we have the Vedic Vitasta, the last of the rivers
of the Punjab, changed in Greek into Hydaspes. It was to this river
that Alexander retired, before sending his fleet down the Indus and
leading his army back to Babylon. It is the modern Behat or Jilam.

I could identify still more of these Vedic rivers, such as, for
instance, the Kubha, the Greek Cophen, the modern Kabul river;[220]
but the names which I have traced from the Veda to Alexander, and in
many cases from Alexander again to our own time, seem to me sufficient
to impress upon us the real and historical character of the Veda.
Suppose the Veda were a forgery--suppose at least that it had been put
together after the time of Alexander--how could we explain these
names? They are names that have mostly a meaning in Sanskrit, they are
names corresponding very closely to their Greek corruptions, as
pronounced and written down by people who did not know Sanskrit. How
is a forgery possible here?

I selected this hymn for two reasons. First, because it shows us the
widest geographical horizon of the Vedic poets, confined by the snowy
mountains in the north, the Indus and the range of the Suleiman
mountains in the west, the Indus or the seas in the south, and the
valley of the Jumna and Ganges in the east. Beyond that, the world,
though open, was unknown to the Vedic poets. Secondly, because the
same hymn gives us also a kind of historical background to the Vedic
age. These rivers, as we may see them to-day, as they were seen by
Alexander and his Macedonians, were seen also by the Vedic poets. Here
we have an historical continuity--almost living witnesses, to tell us
that the people whose songs have been so strangely, ay, you may almost
say, so miraculously preserved to us, were real people, lairds with
their clans, priests, or rather, servants of their gods, shepherds
with their flocks, dotted about on the hills and valleys, with
inclosures or palisades here and there, with a few strongholds, too,
in case of need--living their short life on earth, as at that time
life might be lived by men, without much pushing and crowding and
trampling on each other--spring, sum