Early India and Pakistan to Ashoka c8.2

c8.2

FROM THE INDUS BASIN with its spreading coastline we turn eastwards to the doāb or two-river country of the holy waters of Hindustan, the Yamunā or Jumna and the Gaṅgā or Ganges. The actual distance from the Sutlej, of the Indus system, to the Jumna at the foot of the Simla hills is less than eighty miles, but anciently the two valleys were a world apart. Here was a true partition between the submontane Punjab and the Great Plains of northern India. Hereabouts only a little more than 100 miles intervenes between the vast Thar or Indian Desert, which stretches towards the Arabian Sea, and those same Himālayan hills; and it was through this jungle-filled corridor that the invader from the mountains of the north-west had to force his way. The corridor was further narrowed, indeed almost closed, fifty-five miles north of Delhi, where the upper waters of the (former) river Ghaggar approached to within a narrow margin of the Jumna. Squarely in the midst of this shallow divide stands the town of Pānīpat which has on at least three occasions been the scene of a decisive battle.¹ Today the mound which rises in the midst of the little town is sixty feet high, and its crumbling sides exude the débris of close upon 3000 years.²