This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
Rivers gathers eleven waterways the atlas treats as having shaped a religious tradition rather than merely running through one, and the group spans the length of the Old World and into East Asia.
The Nile made a religion as well as a country: its annual flood gave Egypt its calendar, its idea of order restored each year and its geography of the dead, the living on the east bank where the sun rises and the tombs on the west where it sets. The Ganges is not only a sacred river in Hinduism but a goddess, Ganga, caught in Shiva's hair so her fall would not break the earth, and dying beside it at Kashi is held to end rebirth. The Jordan is where John baptised and where Jesus was baptised, the model for every Christian font, and for the Mandaeans every flowing water used in ritual is still called a yardna after it. The Euphrates and the Tigris watered the first cities and the religions of Mesopotamia built along them, Eridu, Uruk, Babylon, Nineveh, Ashur and Ctesiphon among them, and both are named in Genesis among the rivers of Eden.
The Indus gives India, Hinduism and the Sindhi people their names, and the Rigveda names it repeatedly a thousand years after the Harappan cities already stood on its plain. The Yellow River and the Yangtze mirror each other, the north giving China its state cult of flood control and dynastic mandate, the south its shamanic poetry and its dragon kings. The Danube carried Roman legions and the Mithraic cult and later marked the frontier between Latin and Orthodox Christendom. The Thames has received votive offerings for three thousand years, and the Min River's Dujiangyan engineer was worshipped as a god beside the works he built.