The ‘Prasthas’ of Indian puranas is wrongly defined by academic scholarship scholars as a ‘Tantric division of India’; but this broadly refers to the ‘table land on the top of a mountain’; This also marks places of ‘pilgrimages’. There were five such places in ancient world : Indra-prastha, Yama-prastha, Kurma-prastha, Varuna-prastha, and Deva-prastha.
The war of the epic Mahabharata was fought between the Kauravas and the Pandavas for five pieces of lands: Vyaghra-prastha , Indra- prastha, Yama-prastha prastha, Hastinapura, and Varunabanta.
The difference between the prastha regions of some old texts and the prastha regions of the epic the Mahabharata is that the Kurma-prastha or Qumran was a part of Yama-prastha or Jerusalem itself which identifies the appearance of Kurma-avatara in the Lake Manasarovara in the Negev. Similarly, Deva-prastha identifies the region of Uttara Kuru or the region near Galilee and Bethany extended up o Mt Aruna, or Mt Aoronos, or the Temple of Apollo in the City of Sun..
It seems that the lands the Pandavas demanded from the Kauravas include the three- prastha lands like the Vyaghra- prastha, Indra- prastha, and the Yama- prastha. While Vyaghra- prastha refers to the Plain of the river Tigris and the whole of the Negev region, Indra- prastha is as same as the land of the biblical Canaan or the entire land of the Saka island of Indian puranas. It includes Shechem(‘Sir’ plus -Kantha), Mt Aoronous, Mt Gerizim, and Mt Aalborg and the land of Ur; Yama- prastha pinpoints the entire region of Jerusalem including Cyrus(Kuru), and Cyprus(Kubera). This is the Uttara Kuru region of the Indian puranic tradition. Ptolemy also marks this region in the same name in some of his Maps