Battle of the Ten Kings

The Battle of the Ten Kings is known only from the Rigveda, an ancient collection of Sanskrit hymns, whose poets celebrate how Sudas, king of the Bharata tribe, overcame an alliance of rival tribes beside the river Parushni, today's Ravi in the Punjab. Much of the story comes in poetry rather than history, and its details are uncertain, but many scholars accept that it reflects a real conflict, perhaps of the fourteenth century BCE. Its outcome is linked to the rise of the Bharatas and, later, of the Kuru realm at the heart of early Vedic culture.

The battle is described mainly in hymn 18 of the seventh book of the Rigveda, with further allusions in neighbouring hymns. These are religious poems, not chronicles. The scholar Hanns-Peter Schmidt showed that they are full of sarcasm, puns and mocking comparisons aimed at the defeated alliance, some of which are still not understood. Tribal and personal names are often distorted, and later Vedic texts give different names for the main figures. The scholar Stephanie Jamison warns that the account is "anything but clear" and should not be treated as a straightforward historical record.

According to the third book of the Rigveda, the Bharatas crossed the Beas and Sutlej rivers as they moved east. They met a temporary alliance of tribes, some of them Indo-Aryan speakers like the Bharatas and some apparently not. Why the war began is debated. The scholar Michael Witzel suggests rivalries within the tribes or the intrigues of a dismissed royal priest, while Ranbir Chakravarti thinks control of river water for irrigation was at stake. The hymns also accuse the enemy of trying to steal the Bharatas' cattle.

The Bharata king is named in the Rigveda as Sudas Paijavana, and his priest as Vasishtha. Against them stood a coalition that probably included the Purus, once the Bharatas' overlords, together with the Yadus, Turvasas, Matsyas, Druhyus, Anus and several smaller groups; the exact list is disputed. The hymns stress that the Bharatas were heavily outnumbered. According to the poems, Sudas won by breaching a dyke on the river, drowning many of his enemies. The poets credit the victory to the god Indra, patron of the Bharatas, whose favour Vasishtha's hymns had won.

The fighting appears to have shifted afterwards to the Yamuna river, where the Bharatas defeated a local chief named Bhida and three further tribes.

The victory left the Bharatas in control of former Puru lands in the Punjab and allowed them to complete their eastward migration. Sudas is said to have marked his success with the horse sacrifice, a ritual of royal power. Before long, it seems, the Bharatas and Purus were reconciled, as the core of the Rigveda contains hymns from families on both sides. In the period after the Rigveda this region became the base of the Kuru polity, which many historians see as the first state-like power of the subcontinent and the centre of the Brahminical culture that later fed into Hinduism.

Translators since the nineteenth century have tended to treat the battle as a real event. Witzel dates it to roughly 1450 to 1300 BCE. Some scholars, Witzel among them, see it as a distant model for the great war of the Mahabharata epic, while others, such as Alf Hiltebeitel, reject any such link. The Ravi, the river of the first phase, today flows through north-western India and eastern Pakistan.

Our 1500 BCE map shows north-western South Asia around the period to which the battle is usually dated.