PIOTR WROTE:
<<You're right about the Greek meanings. And it seems perfectly possible to
translate <sarasvati:> as 'having wide floodplains' or 'forming great pools
of water'.>>
But both of those descriptions seem a little too grand for me, like a
government report. I do not know if there is a term in Vedic or later
Sanskrit for "pools" in the river, but taking <saras> as a practical everyday
word helps reduce the meaning to something that might have been
understandable to an average EBA person.
Here's a simple example. The first resources you might look for in a river
-- before you start looking for river-godesses or the like -- is food. Food
or other things could come by river trade or by husbandry, but they are not
necessarily immediate. What is immediate is food gathering, which in a river
mainly means fish. So maybe the first interest or the best remembered
interest in a river might be where the fish are.
I was thinking about how to illustrate this concept and I came up with this.
Search on the web for river, fish and MANY POOLS. And of course there were
tons of examples. Here are three of them, one from the subcontinent itself:
"FED BY MANY STREAMS and lakes, the beautiful Pinware River rises about 50
miles inland from the south coast of Labrador. Tributaries, snowmelt and
summer rains add to a tremendous volume of water that descends in a rush to
the well-developed valleys along the route... It is here and in _the many
pools_ along this eight-mile stretch that the Atlantic salmon must rest on
their way upstream to the spawning grounds.
http://pinwarelodge.labradorstraits.net/river.html
"The Gold River runs from mid Vancouver Island and empties on the island's
west coast into the pacific ocean. It is a wilderness river famous for a
spectacular run of 20 pound class Steelhead. The river hosts _many pools_
that can be fished from shore as well as driftboat fishing.
http://www.eagle-eye.ca/fishhtml/steelfish.html
"Fish Mahseer : Angling Holidays in India...
As the Cauvery River flows out of the Western Ghats (hills) to the Tamil Nadu
plains, it cuts deep gorges and creates huge rapids. It's the perfect
environment for huge mahseer. Starting at Mekhedaatu - the Goat's Leap - and
down through the Ajibora Rapids are _many pools_ and holding areas [places
were fish hold away from the current.] Although only lightly fished, many
large mahseer have been caught."
www.fishmahseer.com/fishing.cfm
Rather than being an abstraction, this gives a simple name - "many pools" -
some kind of good practical meaning. Perhaps what Sarasvati meant
practically to the early listener was " a lot of good places to fish."
This may not seem grand enough to us, but it might have been just been how
those ordinary folks thought about a river -- before we scribes blew it up to
epic proportions.
As for the "abundance of salt" river, what I'd like to know is whether the
crystalized salt was gathered and exchanged on the river -- with the idea
that the name was not merely descriptive of brackish water, but rather a
practical description of where a lot of salt was available.
Steve