Free Land of seven rivers: History of India's Geography by Sanjeev Sanyal Page B

us that the Druhyus would
     later migrate farther north to Central Asia and turn into Mlechhas (or foreign
     barbarians). 28 After that we hear nothing more of them. Another tribe called the Purus
     survived into the Mahabharata epic and probably accounts for King Porus who fought
     against the invading army of Alexander the Great in the fourth century BC .
    Some of the tribes, however, appear to
     have fled further afield after the great battle. Two of them have names that suggest
     interesting possibilities: the Pakhta and the Parsu. The former are also mentioned
     by later Greek sources as Pactyians and one wonders if they are the ancestors of
     Pakhtun (or Pashtun) tribes that still live in Afghanistan and north-western Pakistan. This fits with the finding that, genetically
     speaking, the Pashtuns are related to Indians and not to Central Asians or Arabs as
     was previously thought.
    Similarly, the Parsu are possibly
     related to the Persians because this is the name by which the Assyrians refer to the
     Persians in their inscriptions. This is not as fanciful a recreation of events as
     may appear at first glance. There is a great deal of evidence that links the Rig
     Vedic Indians to the ancient Persians. The Avesta, the oldest and most sacred text
     of the Zoroastrian religion, is written in a language that is almost identical to
     that of the Rig Veda. The older sections of the Avesta—called the
     Gathas—are said to have been composed by the prophet Zarathustra himself.
     They can be read as Rig Vedic Sanskrit by making a minor phonetic change. The
     Avestan ‘h’ is the same as the Sanskrit ‘s’.
     Thus, the word Sapta-Sindhu becomes Hapta-Hindu. 29 A similar phonetic shift survives in the modern Indian language of Assamese and
     is easy to master.
    The texts are clear that the Avestan
     people came to Iran from outside. Unlike the Rig Vedic Indians, they are much more
     self-consciously an ethnic group and call themselves the Aryan people. This makes
     sense because they were the outsiders in a foreign land and would have wanted to
     differentiate themselves. Moreover, they are aware of Sapta-Sindhu but not of
     western Iran, suggesting that they entered the country from the east. Unlike the
     Vedas, the ancient Persians also talk of an original ‘Aryan’
     homeland and even name the river Helmand in Afghanistan after the Saraswati (i.e.
     Harahvaiti). Indeed, the Persian identity as ‘Aryans’ was so
     strong that their country would come to be known as theLand of
     the Aryans or Iran. As recently as the late twentieth century, the Shah of Iran used
     the title ‘Arya-mehr’ or Jewel of the Aryans. Contrast this with
     the Indian identification with the Bharatas.
    Another interesting indicator of the
     sequence of events is the use of the terms ‘deva’ and
     ‘asura’. In the Rig Veda, the terms apply to different sets of
     deities and do not have
clear connotations
of good and bad. The god Varun,
     for instance, is described as an asura. However, in later Hinduism, the asuras would
     be identified as demons and the devas as the gods. In contrast, devas refers to
     demons in the Zoroastrian tradition of Persia while the word asura is transformed
     into Ahura Mazda—the Great Lord. 30 Since the deva–asura dichotomy is not clear cut in the Rig Veda but
     becomes very distinct in later texts, it is reasonable to argue that these opposing
     sets of meaning came to be attached at a later date. What caused this separation?
     Did the Parsu have a religious dispute with the Bharatas? As they moved into the
     Middle East, was the Persian nomenclature influenced by the Assyrian god called
     Assur? One may never know for sure but these are some more intriguing
     possibilities.
    There is a lot more evidence of
     Vedic-related tribes in the Middle-East in the second millennium BC . In 1380 BC , the Hitties signed a treaty
     with a people called the Mittani. This treaty is solemnized in the name of Vedic