The name ‘Kashmir’
“The use of the word can be traced back to twenty three centuries but the name seems far older.”
According to Auriel Stein, in his translation of Rajtaranghani, name ‘Kashmir’ is ancient and linguistic science can furnish no clue to its origin nor to analyse its formation. The ‘mystical’ legend that has been popular for years is that the region was a mythological lake called ‘Satisar’ which was drained by meditation of a sage called Kashyapa, hence Kashyap-Mar (The abode of Kashyap) evolved over centuries to assume the current form, Kashmir. The story however is only of mythological importance.
Another origin to the name could be from fusion of two words,’ ‘Ka’ meaning water and ‘Samira’ meaning wind, or a lake drained or dried due to wind. There were early geological observations which showed that the basin of Kashmir contained a lake much larger than that of today, The Wular Lake which is now barely a few miles was regarded by Montogmerie as a last relic of the great expanse of water which once covered Kashmir. However, this idea of a prehistoric lake has been abandoned by Mr. R.D. Oldham who studied the Krewas or plateaus and the present lakes in Kashmir in 1903.
According to one more interpretation, Kashmir is a compound world and its components: ‘kas’ means a channel and ‘mir’ a mountain. Kasmir could thus mean a rock trough. Kashmir is actually a deep trough with great mountains as rocky walls.
The emperor Babur in his Memoirs mentions that, “The hill country along the upper course of the Sind or the Indus was formerly inhabited by a race of men called Kas” and he conjectures that the country of Kashmir was so called as being the country of that name.
Wakefield mentions that, “The natives of the Valley itself pronounce its name as Kushmir rather than Kashmir and Vigne, probably led by this peculiarity propounds an ingenious theory which he states not to be an improbable origin of the name. It is as follows, “Cush was the son of Ham, and grandson of Noah-Cush begat Nimrod: he began to be mighty upon the earth” Nimrod is supposed to be identical with Belus, the beginning of whose Kingdom was Babel, i.e Babylon, where his name, power and descendants must have spread over different countries Eastword”
However, natives actually pronounce it as ‘Kasheer’ and not Kushmir.
The other theory points towards the fact that the words Kush and Kash occur frequently in names of places in various countries that form the eastern hemisphere. ‘Kush’ can be found in Arabia and old Mesopotamia; and the Biblical term Kush was applied to the country known to the ancients as Ethiopia.
‘Kash’, occurs as the initial of Kashgar, and Hindu Kush is the name of mountains which are westward continuation of Himalayas and separate Afghanistan from Turkmenistan. The repetition in so many places leads to the inference that these various names have something in common. Ptolemy speaks of Scythia beyond the Imaus, which is in a “Kasia Regio”, probably exhibiting the name from which Kashgar and Kashgaria (often applied to the district) are formed. The country’s people practised Zoroastrianism and Buddhism. Imaus means Himalayas.
Scythia (map below) was a region of Central Eurasia in classical antiquity, occupied by the Eastern Iranian Scythians, encompassing Central Asia and parts of Eastern Europe east of the Vistula River, with the eastern edges of the region vaguely defined by the Greeks. The Scythians – the Greeks’ name for this initially nomadic people – inhabited Scythia from at least the 11th century B.C to the 2nd century C.E In the seventh century BC, the Scythians controlled large swaths of territory throughout Eurasia, from the Black Sea across Siberia to the borders of China. (And maybe some parts of Kashmir)
The earliest Chinese reference to Kashmir is dated to 541 C.E which calls the Valley ‘Ku-shih-mi’.
The use of the word, according to Stein, can be traced back to twenty three centuries but the name seems far older.
Khawar Khan Achakzai