Vedic Index of Names and Subjects v1.c2.20

v1.c2.20

The Map.—In order that the reader may be enabled to visualize in a general way the territory known to and occupied by the Vedic tribes, I have prefixed to the first volume a map of Vedic India. Here the home of the Indo-Aryans of the earliest period—that of the Rigveda—is the territory drained by the Indus river system, lying between the 35th and 28th parallel of northern latitude and between 70° and 78° eastern longitude, and corresponding roughly to the North-West Frontier Province and the Panjab of the present day. The eastern limit was probably the Yamunā, though the Ganges was already known. In the subsequent Vedic period—that of the later Vedas and of the Brāhmaṇas—the Indo-Aryan settlers gradually occupied the whole of the Ganges Valley down to the delta of that river. But the home of the fully developed culture of the Brāhmaṇas lay in the territory extending in a south-easterly direction from longitude 74° to 85°, between the confluence of the Sarasvatī and Dṛṣadvatī in the west and that of the Sadānīrā and Ganges on the east, and embracing roughly the south-eastern portion of the Panjab and the United Provinces of to-day. East of longitude 85° lay, to the north and south of the Ganges, the imperfectly Brahminized country corresponding to the modern Tirhut and Bihār, where Buddhism arose at the end of the Vedic period.