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The upheaval is too regular to have occurred by ordinary causes. At the time of the Periplus it seems to have been open water, although shoal, with a clear opening into the ocean below the Indus delta, and with a branch of the Indus running into it. Now the Indus delta is pushed very much farther south, and the scour of the tides has carried its alluvium along the coast, almost blocking up the Rann; while the branch that watered it no longer flows in that direction.
One is led to surmise that the great migration from Cutch and Gujarat to Java, which occurred in the 6th and 7th centuries, and which led to the establishment of Buddhist kingdoms there (surviving in the tremendous temples of Boroboedor and Brambanan) may have been due even more to this cause than to the invasion of hostile Aryan tribes from the upper Indus. The conversion of a navigable bay into a salt desert, and the diversion of the rivers that watered it, must have spelled ruin and starvation to multitudes of its agricultural and seafar- ing inhabitants, who would have been forced to migrate on a scale unusual in history.
Geological considerations tend to confirm the tradition, other- wise unsupported by historic evidence, that the Indus was formerly deflected by the Rohri Hills directly into the Rann of Cutch, where it was joined by the river which was supposed to have formed a con- tinuation of the Sutlej and Sarasvati through the now dried-up Hakra (Wahind) canal. During exceptional floods the waters of the Indus still overflow into the eastern desert and even into the Rann. Other channels traversing the desert farther south still attest the incessant shift- ing of the main stream in its search for the most favorable seaward out- let. According to Burns, a branch of the Indus known as the Purana, or “Ancient,” still flowed in 1672 about 120 miles east of the present mouth.
The constant shiftings of the river-bed toward the west have rendered the eastern regions continually more arid, and have changed many river-channels into salt-pits. In the year 1909 a city of 25,000 inhabitants, Dera Ghazi Khan, was almost annihilated by the Indus.
The name Eirinon, Rinn or Rann is from the Sanscrit aranya or irina, a waste or swamp.
40. The Gulf of Baraca is the modern Gulf of Cutch. Whether the name survives in the modern Dwarka (22° 22' N., 69° 5' E. ), is uncertain. It seems to be the same as Bahlika, which is associated with Surashtra in the Mahabharata , the Ramayana and the Vishnu Purana.
41. Ariaca. — This word in the text is very uncertain. Lassen thinks that the name is properly the Sanscrit Latica (pronounced Larica )
