NEW DELHI, INDIA, December 9, 2019 (News 18): With “unequivocal evidence” that the Ghaggar river, where the early Harappans built their settlements, was perennial, a recent study has argued that this is the river known as the Saraswati in the Rig Veda. The hypothesis that modern-day Ghaggar-Hakra river system, which flows intermittently between India and Pakistan, could be the river Saraswati that finds mention in the Rig Veda has been reiterated several times since the 19th century. However, with no proof of the river’s uninterrupted flow during the zenith of the civilization, it has been argued that the Harappans depended on monsoonal rains.
In the study, published in the journal Scientific Reports on November 20, scientists from the Physical Research Laboratory at Ahmedabad and the Department of Earth Sciences, IIT Bombay presented what they called was “unequivocal evidence for the Ghaggar’s perennial past by studying temporal changes of sediment provenance along a 186 mile stretch of the river basin.” They argued that “this revived perennial condition of the Ghaggar, which can be correlated with the Saraswati, likely facilitated development of the early Harappan settlements along its banks.” The study argues that “Harappans built their early settlements along a stronger phase of the river Ghaggar,” during a period 9,000 to 4,500 years ago, “which would later be known as the Saraswati,” but “by the time the civilization matured, the river had already lost its glacial connection.”
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