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CAimON ACA1NST THE USE OF UTERARY SOURCES . 1S1

“Ye wrought thal hero exploit in the ocean which giveth no support, or hołd, or station,/

What time ye carried Bhujyu to his dwelling, borne in a ship with hundred oars, O A$vins,//5”¹⁷

Refcrring to the same episode Rgyeda I, 182, 5 States:

“Ye madę for Tugra’s son amid the water-floods thal animated ship with wings to fly withal.

and furlher, Rgveda I, 158,3 States:

“As erst for Tugra's son your car, sea-crossing, strong, was equipped and set amid the waters...”¹⁹,

and lastly as mentioned in Rgvcda 1,117, 14-15:

“With horses brown of hue that llew with swift wings ye brought back Bhujyu from the sea of billows//14.

“The son of Tugra had invoked you, Aśvins; borne on he went uninjured through the ocean./

“Ye with your chariot swift as thought, well-harnessed, carried him off, O Mighly ones, to safcty//15.”²⁰

Could the Rgveda, with such mythological accounts given by the composers of the hymns, be ever rcspecled as an aulhentic historical source of marinę archaeology ?

The reliability of the Rgveda as a historical source of marinę archaeology has bcen rightly rejecled by schoiars due to dilTerent meanings associated with ‘Sindhu ’ and ‘Samudra. ’ The word ‘Sindhu ’ is often explained as ‘sea’ and not *river’, and the word ‘Samudra' as ‘sky* and not ‘sea’. The Rgvedic passage where the divine A£vins are requested to escorl King Bhujyu and his lollowers, to the othcr side of the ‘sea’ ‘Sindhu, ’ seems to be mercly a poctic imagination, as no one, in reality, could ever see the other side or shore of the sea. The word ‘sindhu ’ has to mean a ‘river’, a term pre-cmincntly applicd to the Indus river....²¹.

Relercnce to four seas in Rgveda IX, 33.6 seems to be morę imaginary than real, as, unlikc the rivers and the mountains, the seas have no names in the Rgveda. The word Samudra (sea), seems to have been figuratively uscd to mean the vast, limilless expanse of the sky, and the reference to easlcm and western seas in association with the rising and setting of the sun, as in Rgveda X, 136.5, has been “used to mean nothing but eastcrn and western sky.”²² The abscnce of a common word for * sea' in the Indo-European languages, is also one morę cvidcnce to suggcsl that the