Sarasvati River

The Helmand River, known in ancient Iranian Avestan as Harax^vatī and Harahvaiti, is identified by some as the ancient Sarasvati river.

The Sarasvati River (IAST: sárasvatī nadī́) was one of the Rigvedic rivers mentioned in the Rig Veda and later Vedic and post-Vedic texts. The Sarasvati River played an important role in the Vedic religion, appearing in all but the fourth book of the Rigveda.

Quotes from the Rigveda

• [The composer begs the river Sarasvatī:] "let us not go from thee to distant countries".
  • Rigveda 6.61.14, Quoted in [1]

• THIS stream Sarasvatī with fostering current comes forth, our sure defence, our fort of iron. As on a car, the flood flows on, surpassing in majesty and might all other waters. Pure in her course from mountains to the ocean, alone of streams Sarasvatī hath listened. Thinking of wealth and the great world of creatures, she poured for Nahuṣa her milk and fatness.
  • RV 7:95:1-2
  • Quoted in Frawley, David. The Rig Veda and the History of India. (2001). Quoted from Frawley, D. The Hindu, 25th June 2002. WITZEL’S VANISHING OCEAN – HOW TO READ VEDIC TEXTS ANY WAY YOU LIKE. A Reply to Michael Witzel’s article “A Maritime Rigveda? How not to read the Ancient Texts”.

• Coming together, glorious, loudly roaring - Sarasvatī, Mother of Floods, the seventh- With copious milk, with fair streams, strongly flowing, full swelling with the volume of their water.
  • RV 7:36:6

• Favour ye this my laud, O Gangā, Yamunā, O Sutudri, Paruṣṇī and Sarasvatī: With Asikni, Vitasta, O Marudvrdha, O Ārjīkīya with Susoma hear my call. First with Trstama thou art eager to flow forth, with Rasā, and Susartu, and with Svetya here, With Kubha; and with these, Sindhu and Mehatnu, thou seekest in thy course Krumu and Gomati.
  • Rigveda 10.75.5-6

Quotes

• Scholars such as Romila Thapar, Irfan Habib and the late RS Sharma started questioning this identification in the 1980s. What prompted this rather late reaction? It was a new development: A study of the evolution of the pattern of Harappan settlements in the Saraswati basin now revealed that in its central part — roughly southwest Haryana, southern Punjab and northern Rajasthan — most or all Harappan sites were abandoned sometime around 1900 BCE, a period coinciding with the end of the urban phase of the Indus civilisation. Clearly, the river system collapsed — which archaeologists now saw as a factor contributing to the end of the brilliant Indus civilisation.
  Why was this a problem? We must remember that the Saraswati is lavishly praised both as a river and a Goddess in the Rig Veda, a collection of hymns which mainstream Indology says was composed by Indo-Aryans shortly after their migration to India around 1500 BCE. However, by that time, the Saraswati had been reduced to a minor seasonal stream: How could the said Aryans praise it as a ‘mighty river’, the ‘best of rivers’, ‘mother of waters’, etc? There is a chronological impossibility. Hence, the objectors asserted, the Ghaggar-Hakra was not, after all, the Saraswati extolled in the Rig Veda. While some (Rajesh Kochhar) tried to relocate the river in Afghanistan, others (Irfan Habib) decided that the Saraswati was not a particular river but “the river in the abstract, the River Goddess”; but both theses ran against the Rig Veda’s own testimony that the river flowed between the Yamuna and the Sutlej." (DANINO:2010/2012)].
  • DANINO 2010/2012: The Lost River: On the Trail of the Sarasvati. Danino, Michel. Penguin, 2010.

• As for Burrow‘s thesis that some place names reflect the names of geographical features to the west, and thus preserve an ancestral home, they once again rather rely on an assumption of Arya migrations than prove it. [...] His cited equivalence of Sanskrit Saraswati and Avestan Haraxvaiti is a case in point. Burrow accepts that it is the latter term that is borrowed, undergoing the usual change of s- > h in the process, but suggests that Saraswati was a proto-Indoaryan term, originally applied to the present Haraxvaiti when the proto-Indoaryans still lived in northeastern Iran, then it was brought into India at the time of the migrations, while its original bearer had its name modified by the speakers of Avestan who assumed control of the areas vacated by proto-Indoaryans. It would be just as plausible to assume that Saraswati was a Sanskrit term indigenous to India and was later imported by the speakers of Avestan into Iran. The fact that the Zend Avesta is aware of areas outside the Iranian plateau while the Rigveda is ignorant of anything west of the Indus basin would certainly support such an assertion.
  • ERDOSY 1989: Ethnicity in the Rigveda and its Bearing on the Question of Indo-European Origins. Erdosy, George. pp. 35-47 in ―South Asian Studies‖ vol. 5. London (ERDOSY 1989:41-42). Quoted in Talageri, S. G. (2010). The Rigveda and the Avesta. New Delhi: Aditya Prakashan.

• In contrast, changes taking place in the Saraswati Valley in the early second millennium were probably a major contributor to the Indus decline. In Harappan times, the Saraswati was a major river system flowing from the Siwaliks at least to Bahawalpur, where it probably ended in a substantial inland delta. The ancient Saraswati River was fed by a series of small rivers that rose in the Siwaliks, but it drew the greater part of its waters from two much larger rivers rising high in the Himalayas: the Sutlej and the Yamuna. In its heyday the Saraswati appears to have supported the densest settlement and provided the greatest arable yields of any part of the Indus realms. The Yamuna, which supplied most of the water flowing in the Drishadvati, a major tributary of the Saraswati, changed its course, probably early in the second millennium, to flow into the Ganges drainage. The remaining flow in the Drishadvati became small and seasonal: Late Harappan sites in Bahawalpur are concentrated in the portion of the Sarawati east of Yazman, which was fed by the Sutlej. At a later date the Sutlej also changed its course and was captured by the Indus. These changes brought about massive depopulation of the Saraswati Valley, which by the end of the millennium was described as a place of potsherds and ruin mounds whose inhabitants had gone away. At the same time new settlements appeared in the regions to the south and east, in the upper Ganges-Yamuna doab. Some were located on the palaeochannels that mark the eastward shift of the Yamuna. Presumably many of the Late Harappan settlers had originated in the Saraswati Valley.
  • Jane McIntosh, The Ancient Indus Valley, 2008

• The importance of the Sarasvatī in Indian historical studies has multiplied manifold since archaeological analyses of the Ghaggar-Hakra river bed, combined with detailed satellite imagery of the course of the ancient (now dried up) river, conclusively showed that it had almost dried up by the mid-second millennium BCE itself, and that, long before that, it was a mighty river, mightier than the Indus, and that an overwhelming majority of the archaeological sites of the Harappan cities are located on the banks of the Sarasvatī rather than of the Indus. This has lethal implications for the AIT, which requires an Aryan invasion around 1500 BCE after the decline of the Harappan civilization, since it shows that the Vedic Aryans, who lived ―on both banks (Rigveda VII.96.2) of a mighty Sarasvatī in full powerful flow, must have been inhabitants of the region long before 1500 BCE and in fact may be identical with the indigenous Harappans.
  Therefore, there is now a desperate salvage operation on, in powerful leftist and "secularist" political circles in India, to put a complete full stop to any further official research on the Sarasvatī (including archaeological and geological investigations), and to launch an all-out Goebbelsian campaign through a captive media to deny that there ever was a Vedic Sarasvatī river in existence in India: the river named in the Rigveda was either completely mythical, or it was the river in Afghanistan, but it definitely was not identical with the Ghaggar-Hakra!
  • Talageri, S. G. (2010). The Rigveda and the Avesta. New Delhi: Aditya Prakashan.

• The frequent Rg-Vedic references to the Saraswati river are seen by both sides as a key to the solution of the Aryan question. Non-invasionists have pointed out that the biggest concentration of Harappan cities was along the Saraswati river, and that it nearly dried up synchronously with the decline of Harappan city culture. Therefore, the Rg-Veda cannot be post-Harappan...
  • Elst, Koenraad (2007). Asterisk in bharopiyasthan: Minor writings on the Aryan invasion debate.

• The treatment of the Saraswati evidence forms an interesting case study in the stonewalling of putative pro-OIT evidence by AIT militants, typically outsiders to Indo-European studies such as comparative historian Steve Farmer: they lambast the equating of the Vedic Saraswati with today’s Ghaggar as a paranoid Hindu-nationalist concoction, when actually it was established by a string of Western scholars since the 1850s, in tempore non suspecto. A case study of how this debate has been poisoned by endless political imputations.
  • Elst K. Why Indo-Europeanists Have A Duty To Face The Out-Of-India Theory, 2022

• The first person who attempted to correlate the textual descriptions of Sarasvati with empirical paleogeology was C. F. Oldham, in 1874. He surmised that "the waters of the SarasvatT [are] continuous with the dry bed of a great river [Hakra], which, as local leg- ends assert, once flowed through the desert to the sea" (Oldham 1893, 54).
  • in Bryant, E. F. (2001). The Quest for the Origins of Vedic Culture : the Indo-Aryan migration debate. Oxford University Press. chapter 9

• In addition to locating and mapping a number of Harappan and post-Harappan sites along the banks of the SarasvatI (some of which he excavated with a few exploratory trenches), Stein, like Oldham before him, also concluded that the main reason for the demise of the river was that the waters of its main tributary, the Sutlej, had been de- toured, thus depriving it of the bulk of its water flow. Satellite imagery has confirmed his observation. The present Sutlej River, rising in the Himalayas, heads in a southeast- erly direction directly toward the old bed of the Ghaggar. In the vicinity of modern-day Ropar, about a hundred kilometers from where it would have coincided with the Ghaggar bed had it continued in a straight line, it suddenly takes a sharp right-angle turn to flow away from the Ghaggar in a westerly direction, where, after about 150 kilometers, it is joined by the Beas. These two rivers then merge and proceed in a southwesterly course until they join the Indus and then on to the Rann of Kutch. The satellite imagery revealed the following data: (1) The sudden westward turn of the Sutlej is suggestive of its diversion in the past for which no physical obstruction is evident.14 (2) At the point where the Sutlej would have impacted the Ghaggar riverbed had it not deviated, the latter suddenly widens. Since the bed of the Ghaggar upstream from this point is considerably narrower, this can only be explained if a major tributary was joining the Ghaggar at this place. (3) A major paleochannel can be clearly seen to connect the Sutlej from the point where it takes its sharp westward turn to the point on the Ghaggar where the old bed suddenly broadens. (4) Paleochannels from the Yamuna River show that it also once flowed into the Ghaggar and then subsequently changed its direction three times before assuming its present course. This deviation of the Yamuna also would have deprived the Ghaggar of a substantial supply of water (Pal et al. 1984, 492-497). There is general agreement among scholars that all this demonstrates that "it can be stated with certainty that the present Ghaggar-Hakra is nothing but a remnant of the RgVedic SarasvatT which was the lifeline of the Indus Civilization" (V. N. Misra 1994,511).
  • in Bryant, E. F. (2001). The Quest for the Origins of Vedic Culture : the Indo-Aryan migration debate. Oxford University Press. chapter 9

• In the course of a survey project limited to only a section of the Hakra/Ghaggar in the Cholistan desert in Bahawalpur state (representing three hundred miles of the Pa- kistan side of the Hakra part of the riverbed), Mughal (1993, 85) mapped out a total of 414 archaeological sites on the bed.15 This dwarfs the number of sites so far recorded along the entire stretch of the Indus River which number only about three dozen (Gupta 1993b, 28). The centrality of the river, both archaeologically and culturally, has led a minority of Indian archaeologists to propose, and to begin to adopt, die term Indus- Sarasvan Civilization in lieu of the labels Hamppan or Indus Valley Civilisation.16
  • in Bryant, E. F. (2001). The Quest for the Origins of Vedic Culture : the Indo-Aryan migration debate. Oxford University Press. chapter 9

• Mughal (1993) proposes the following outline: On the Pakistan side, archaeological evidence now overwhelmingly affirms that the Hakra was a perennial river through all its course in Bahawalpur during the fourth millennium . . . and early third millennium B.C. About the middle of the third millennium B.C., the water supply in the Northeastern portion of the Hakra [the Yamuna] was consider- ably diminished or cut off. But, abundant water in the lower (southwestern) part of this stream was still available, apparently through a channel from the Sutlej. . . . About the end of the second, or not later than the beginning of the first millennium B.C., the entire course of the Hakra seems to have dried up. (4)
  • Mughal (1993) in Bryant, E. F. (2001). The Quest for the Origins of Vedic Culture : the Indo-Aryan migration debate. Oxford University Press. chapter 9

• Mughal's broad chronological periods are not specific enough to assist us in definitively situating the Vedic-speaking Aryans as inhabitants of the Indus Valley Civilization. It is significant, however, that about 80 percent of Mughal's 414 archaeological sites along a three-hundred-mile section of the Hakra were datable to the fourth or third millen- nium B.C.E, suggesting that the river was in its prime during this period.17 The dating range proposed by Pal et al. (1984) is no more specific: "The Ghaggar continued to be a living river during the pre-Harappan (c. 2500-2200 B.C.E.) and the Harappan times (c. 2200-1700 B.C.E.)" (496). A third, even wider, dating range (8,000 B.c.E.-l 800 B.C.E.) was proposed for the Sarasvatl's channels through which it discharged into the Rann of Kutch via the Luni River (see Ghose et al., 1979 for additional information on the Sarasvatl's previous drainage system and course shifting). Lai (1997, 9) considers the SarasvatT to have been alive in Kalibangan in the third millennium B.C.E. and dried up at the turn of the millennium: "The SarasvatT dried up around 2000 BC. This clearly establishes that the Rigveda, which speaks of the SarasvatT as a mighty flowing river, has to be assigned to a period prior to 2000 BC. By how many centuries it cannot be said for certain" (Lai, forthcoming). The SarasvatI as known to the Rgveda must have well predated the end of the second millennium B.C.E., when the entire course of the Hakra had already dried up. A further terminus ante quern can be postulated by the fact that Painted Gray Ware (PGW) sites dated to around 1000 B.C.E. were found on the bed of the river, as opposed to on its banks, indicating that the river had already become dry well before this time (Gaur 1983, 133).
  • in Bryant, E. F. (2001). The Quest for the Origins of Vedic Culture : the Indo-Aryan migration debate. Oxford University Press. chapter 9

• However, the Vedic hymns preserve no reference to of the river drying up (although this is explicitly described in the Mahabharata; see 3.130.3; 6.7.47; 6.37.1- 4; 9.34.81; 9.36.1-2).
  • in Bryant, E. F. (2001). The Quest for the Origins of Vedic Culture : the Indo-Aryan migration debate. Oxford University Press. chapter 9

• The quintessential domain of the Rgveda is the land of the Sapta Sindhu, or 'Seven Rivers', a land which, as we have seen, goes by this name even in Avestan sources (Hapta liendu). The heartland of this area more or less corresponds to the present-day Punjab in India and Pakistan and surrounding areas. Among these seven rivers, the Sarasvati is praised as the best6 and as distinct in majesty (R.V. vi.61. 13). Likened to a fortress of metal (R.V. vii. 95. 1), it presses forward like a chariot fighter going from the moun- tains all the way to the river (or ocean).7 Its prestige is such that various rulers (R.V. viii.21.18) situated themselves on its banks, and it causes the five 'peoples' to pros- per.8 Over sixty hymns referring to SarasvatT in the Rgveda, many of which are specifi- cally dedicated to it,9 attest to its importance in the world of the Vedic poets. An invo- cation in R.V. 10.75.5, which lists the rivers in geographically correct order from east to west, situates Sarasvati between the Yamuna and the SutudrT (Sutlej). However, although the other rivers in the list are all still presently extant in the north of the Indian subcontinent, nothing is to be found of the mighty SarasvatT today except for an insignificant stream in the foothills of the Himalayas that preserves its name.... Archaeological researches in the Cholistan desert have uncovered the bed of a once-massive river— up to ten kilometers wide, (Misra 1989, 159)—situated between the Yamuna and the Sutlej, exactly where the Rgveda places the Sarasvati. This river is presently known as the Hakra in Pakistan, and the Ghaggar in India.
  • in Bryant, E. F. (2001). The Quest for the Origins of Vedic Culture : the Indo-Aryan migration debate. Oxford University Press. chapter 9