River
Fluvius Indus
Indus
Listen to the story
A long river stretched out sideways across the map's India is the Fluvius Indus. Its name goes back to the Old Indian word sindhu, simply 'river', which reached the Greeks through Persian, and the Roman writer Pliny notes that the locals called it Sindus. Alexander's fleet sailed down it to the ocean between 327 and 325 BC, and the geographer Eratosthenes made it India's western border. Here it has gone astray: instead of running north to south it lies almost flat, its source slipped too far south-west into Areia, while the road that should follow it runs nearly upright on its own.