Tribes in Ancient India c8.2

c8.2

The Pañcālas, like the Kurus, are most intimately connected with the Vedic civilization of the Brāhmaṇa period. The *Śatapatha Brāhmaṇa*¹ tells us that they were called Krivis in ancient times. In an enumeration of the ancient monarchs who had performed the Aśvamedha sacrifice, a king Kraivya Pañcāla is mentioned, and it is definitely stated that Krivi was the ancient name of the Pañcāla tribe. Krivi appears as a tribal name in the *Ṛgveda*.² Zimmer is of the opinion that the Krivis resided in the region near the Sindhu and the Asiknī in the Punjab, and the authors of the *Vedic Index* express the same view.³ But the only piece of evidence in favour of this hypothesis is that Krivi is mentioned in a verse of a Ṛgvedic hymn, in which the names of those rivers occur in a subsequent verse (VIII, 20, 25). The *Ṛgveda* does not clearly testify to any connection between the rivers and the people.