Are these earlier references to Ganga the same ones which are considered unreliable since they don't refer to it specifically as a river but, quite possibly, as a woman or deity?
Unrelaible? Most probably inconvenient though to be fair, the great Griffith did translate it like that(
“Jahnu’s children” (I.116.19) and “the house of Jahnu” (III.58.6).) However one of the references (I.116.19) associates
Jahnavi with
Simsumara -
the Gangetic dolphin thus making that particular translation suspect.
I think most people accept that the Vedic peoples were settled in, or at least very familiar with, the Indus-Gangetic plains by the time the later mandala (10) was written. The controversy is about the earlier verses, especially since the Avestas refer to the Helmand river as Sarasvati, implying that the word was sometimes used as an adjective and was, thus, transferable to different rivers over time.
True, where would we all be without the controversies? The Avesta does refer to the
Helmand as the
Haraxvaiti, which is the Avestan form cognate to the Sanskrit
Sarasvati, there is no real way to definitively prove which came first. However the river spoken of in the Rg veda is mentioned as a great river flowing into the sea
(though AIT proponents have made a connection to a lake which can sometimes have the same word) and very few would argue that Helmand is mightier than other rivers including the Indus. Secondly, geographic locations within Afghanistan in the Rg veda are almost non existent with just a reference to
Gandhari(I.126.7 - a later mandala) though there are references to the divine beings, the gandharvas though even all those references are in later mandalas with the one exception of III.38.6 which is actually one of the verses specifically named as an later interpolation by the
Aitareya Brahmana (VI.18). With no references to places in Afghanistan in the early mandalas and with a direct reference of the Ganga in VI.45.31(early if not the earliest) as also mentions of the Yamuna in the oldest mandalas, the idea of the Sarasvati being a river in Afghanistan is difficult to believe especially when even the Indus goes unmentioned in three of the oldest(VI, III and VII) mandalas which incidentally have references to either the Ganga or the Yamuna.
The question is when the Ghaggar stopped being a mighty river. If the drying occurred too early, it becomes problematic for the indigenous theory. The link I posted claims the major rivers have not changed course for 30,000 years, which would be a certain death knell for the indigenous theory. If the drying of the Ghaggar gets pushed back before the Iron Age then, again, we have a problem since the Rig Veda mentions iron implements.
The studies being discussed suggest the river drying up at the earliest by around 3900 BCE and at the latest by 1800 BCE. I'm not concerned specifically about either of the theories, merely pointing out a major discrepancy in the one more widely propounded.
