ACCIDENTS OF HISTORY

Environment and Geology: Concept of the Ancient Floods with special referen...

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Environment and Geology: Concept of the Ancient Floods with special referen...: Floods played an important role in the decline of Harappan civilization. b y Dr. Nitish Priyadarshi “And God said unto Noah, The end ...

THERE HAS TO BE A BEGINNING…

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GETTING INTO THE ROOTS OF THE INDIAN CULTURE AND HERITAGE THROUGH THE INDUS VALLEY CIVILIZATION

A well-planned city
Two storied houses
With private baths and drinking wells
State-of-the-art sewage systems
Kids playing with toys
Women beautifying themselves with jewellery and lipsticks
Dances, swimming pools and creative crafts
And all this existed 5000 years ago!

It is not just another story to lure your kid to sleep. These real facts and situations existed during the Indus Valley Civilization which flourished from about 3000-2,500 BCE to about 1500-1900 BCE. This means that it existed at about the same time as the Egyptian and Sumerian civilizations. The civilization was spread over an area of some 1,260,000 km, making it the largest ancient civilization in the world. Also, it is one of the earliest urban civilizations of the world.

However, much is not know about the marvelous Indus Valley Civilization, as we have not been able to decipher their scripts until today.

DUG OUT

The ruins of Harappa were first described in 1842 by Charles Masson in his 'Narrative of Various Journeys in Baluchistan, Afghanistan and the Punjab'. In 1856, the British engineers accidentally used bricks from the Harappa ruins for building the East Indian Railway line between Karachi and Lahore. In the year 1912, J Fleet discovered Harappan seals. This incident led to an excavation campaign under Sir John Hubert Marshall in 1921-1922. The result of the excavation was discovery of Harappa by Sir John Marshall, Rai Bahadur Daya Ram Sahni and Madho Sarup Vats and Mohenjo-Daro by Rakhal Das Banerjee, EJH MacKay and Sir John Marshall.

The excavations continued. After the partition of India in 1947, the area of the Indus Valley Civilization was divided between India and Pakistan.

TOPOGRAPHY

The Indus Valley Civilization extended from Baluchistan to Gujarat and from the east of the river Jhelum to Rupar. It covered almost entire Pakistan along with the western states of India. Even though most of the sites have been found on the river embankments, some have been excavated from the ancient seacoast and islands as well. About a 500 sites have been unearthed along the dried up riverbeds of the Ghaggar-Hakra River and its tributaries according to the archeologists. There are approximately a 100 along the Indus and its tributaries.
Among the settlements were the major urban centers of Harappa and Mohenjo-Daro, as well as Dholavira, Ganweriwala, Lothal, Kalibanga and Rakhigarhi.

A DEEP INSIGHT
Houses and Infrastructure:

It is believed that the Indus Valley was a very advanced civilization. The houses were made of baked brick, with flat roofs and were just about identical. Each home had its own drinking well and private bathroom. They were proud owners of the best sewage system. Clay pipes led from the bathrooms to sewers located under the streets. These sewers drained into nearly rivers and streams. The advanced architecture is shown by their impressive dockyards, granaries, warehouses, brick platforms and protective walls.

Lifestyle:

Excavations show that women possessed jewellery of gold and precious stones. They even wore lipsticks. Among the treasures found, was a statue of a woman wearing a bracelet. Also, a statue of a dancer was found.

Scientists have found the remains of a large central pool in Mohenjo-Daro, with steps leading down at both ends and smaller pools that could have been private baths. This central pool could have been a public swimming pool or perhaps been used for religious ceremonies.

Not much information is available on their agriculture and food habits. But majorly, the cultivated cereal crop was naked six-row barley, a crop derived from two-row barley. It is believed that they worshipped a Mother Goddess, who symbolized fertility.

Arts and crafts:

Toy making, pottery, weaving and metalworking must have been the skills of the then people. Arts and crafts that have been unearthed include sculptures, shell works, ceramics, agate, glazed steatite bead making, special kind of combs, toys, seals, figurines in terracotta, bronze and steatite, etc.

Science:

The people of Indus Valley are believed to be amongst the first to develop a system of uniform weights and measures. Their smallest division was approximately 1.704 mm. The brick weights were in a perfect ratio of 4:2:1. The numerous inventions of the Indus River Valley Civilization include an instrument used for measuring whole sections of the horizon and the tidal dock. The people of Harappa evolved new techniques in metallurgy and produced copper, bronze, lead and tin. They also had the knowledge of proto-dentistry and the touchstone technique of gold testing.

A FASCINATING RIDDLE

It's a mystery as to where such a flourishing civilization vanished. The major reasons of the decline are believed to be connected with climate change. Not only did the climate become much cooler and drier than before, but substantial portions of the Ghaggar-Hakra river system also disappeared.

A definite reason is still elusive. It has also been suggested that the Aryans who were the next settlers, may have attacked and destroyed the Indus Valley Civilization, since their epics talk about their conquest of great cities. Such theories of a violent end have been partly proved by the discovery in Mohenjo-Daro of human remains that indicated a violent cause of death.
However, the Indus Valley Civilization did not disappear suddenly. Its many elements can be found in later cultures. There is no exact evidence of where this civilization came from or where it went. Let us study and dig out more about the history to design a better future.

Written by: Aditi Rindani

The Cradle of Civilization

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he area of land around the Middle East and the Levant – also known as the Fertile Crescent - lays a precarious claim to be the 'cradle of civilization'. But is it really the birthplace of the world’s most ancient civilized societies? And what do we even mean by civilization, anyway?

What’s in a Word?

Attempting to pin down a definition of the world 'civilization' is no easy task. As it turns out, annoyingly, there are quite a few opinions on the issue. Some even argue the very definition of the word has to be intrinsically shifted as ‘civilization’ moves along, for example from writing to government (though surely those words in themselves suffice?). Still, there seem to be some running themes throughout this infinite mish-mash of musings, whereby a civilization comprises:

1. The gathering of people in populated areas, as opposed to sporadically-placed in wilderness regions.
2. The advancement of societies through record-keeping, like writing.
3. The development of social and political institutions.

In this sense, there’s more to ‘civilization’ than a few hairy men lighting fires around a cave. Indeed, civilization under these terms hadn’t even emerged by the time small bands of humans downed their spears and knives, and began cultivating permanent spots of land for agriculture during the Neolithic Revolution. Animals were also kept for domestic purposes (although there's no mention of stupid Labradoodles with tartan jackets). This monumental paradigm came around 10,000 BC. But it would not be until around 5,000 years later that the Middle East would see the first city-states emerging, with significant populations.

An Early Sumer

A rough guide to the Fertile Crescent, the disputed Cradle of Civilization
Let’s get things straight – settlements had already existed before those in what is now known as Sumer, the area of fertile land between and beside the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, above where they open their mouths into the Persian Gulf. Humans had already made small living quarters and agricultural settlements all over the world, from the Mediterranean to Melanesia (the specific area of Polynesia stemming from Papua) – sites such as Serbia’s Lepenski Vir and China’s Banpo testify to this.

Yet it was Mesopotamia where these settlements began to show signs of development from egalitarian farming centres to socially-structured states with some sort of hierarchical power. In short, there began to exist the first official divide between ‘haves’ and ‘have-nots’ (socialists feel free to challenge the idea of civilization here). This may have taken the form of a lead chieftain or religious figure, which then developed into some sort of tent-based pre-dynastic nepotism.

The earliest such ‘cities’ in Sumerian history sprung up around 5,500 – 5,000 BC, and comprised longstanding states such as Eridu, Larsa and Sippar. Just a few hundred miles north, the Samarran culture of the same time was beginning to show signs of advancement like social structure and stylised art.

Experts believe the area became so structured due to the tempestuousness of their two mother rivers. Both the Tigris and the Euphrates, while gifting the Sumerians with water, irrigation and arable land, were able to unleash devastating floods which could wipe out entire settlements at a canter. Thus, while food and animals were plentiful, the danger of the region meant people needed rigid leadership and planning in order to survive.

The next two thousand years would see an astonishing increase in the development of Mesopotamia’s city states, twinned with surges in the Levant and Lower Egypt. The chain reaction was no accident – each prominent city evolved along an area known as the ‘Fertile Crescent’, an arc swinging round from the Nile Delta, along the elbow of modern Israel and Syria down the route of the Tigris and Euphrates to the Persian Gulf. It wasn’t even as if Sumer had a monopoly on the biggest urban areas of the Crescent, either – the Egyptian capital Memphis took that accolade around 3,100 BC with an estimated population of 30,000. Still, it would be in the southern states of Sumer that humanity would make one of its biggest moves, singling the region out as the Cradle of Civilization.

Cuneiform and its Consequences

The first writing?
As Sumer expanded and its people started to manipulate their environment through irrigation techniques, they began to pass on advice to their descendents in the form of pictures. These pictures became notes, idiosyncratically sealed and stylised with various symbols. By the turn of the 4th millennium BC, this series of symbols had evolved into a fully-blown alphabet, which was scribed upon triangular tablets to preserve commercial and social activity, recipes (think ‘Naked Chef’, but with loin cloths) and astronomical observations. Writing had begun, and it allowed its Mesopotamian creators the ability to record events, discoveries, social changes and inventions. It was made an easier evolution in Sumer than Egypt, for example, as their kings were much more community-based; accountable to the people rather than the self-styled god-king pharaohs of Egypt.

As Sumer spread its wings and turned into the empires you may more readily recognise today – Babylon, Assyria, Media etc – Mesopotamia became the hub of human innovation, the melting pot from which many of humanity’s earliest inspirations crept forth. In various sources, Mesopotamia is credited with discovering modern astronomy, irrigation, the wheel, law codes and mathematics. Not an inconsiderable portfolio, then.

Other Claimants

Many people might tout Mesopotamia as the Cradle of Civilization, but there are understandably some who think the assumption is a little hasty. The Chinese dynasties of the fourth and third millennia BC may not have acquired writing skills – that came around 1,500 BC with the famous ‘oracle bones’ of the Shang Dynasty – but village settlers in central China did show many of the advances in art and agriculture which marked out the Middle East at its inception. The Longshan Culture of 3,000 – 2,000 BC gave rise to the first Chinese ‘cities’, with advanced levels of pottery-making, silk production and rice harvesting.

Was Mohenjo-daro actually the Cradle?
Recent evidence has also suggested the area of the Fertile Crescent be expanded thousands of miles east, to the fertile lands of the Indus Valley, and the Balochistan region between India and Pakistan. The area is mainly separated into two separate stages – pre and post-Harappan. Around 4,000 BC a pre-Harappan society emerged which developed highly specialised farming techniques, as well as being credited with the first consistent use of the decimal point, and uniform measuring systems. Its twin cities – Harappa and Mohenjo-daro – were huge metropolises holding over 30,000 people each. A series of symbols dating to around 2,500 BC has also been found in the area, yet historians are still unable to draw any meaning from them which could be construed as symbolic of an alphabet in the area.

However recent events have seen places in Iran and between Mesopotamia and the Indus Valley brought to light as potential evidence for simultaneous interaction between the two areas. A site near Jiroft, Iran, threw up evidence for writing which throws doubt on the area, previously thought of as a cultural backwater.

Indeed, many may even argue the definition of ‘civilization’ at its foundation. If civilization is thought of as the gathering of people in any form, then any number of cultures, from Africa to China, could claim to be the Cradle of Civilization. However it was Mesopotamia which made the discoveries so integral to our modern lives, and it was the fertile land of Sumer which brought forward the complex systems of government we largely adopt today. There may have been more populous and artful nations during the time of society’s conception, but it was ancient Mesopotamia which brought it kicking and screaming into a truly modern era.

Sarasvati-Sindhu Civilization (c. 3000 B.C.)

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Introduction

The National Atlas of India (Hindi), Calcutta, 1957, Govt. of India publication; Bharat-BhUracanA map depicts a short trace of Sarasvati-Ghaggar in Haryana, in dotted lines apparently to denote dried-up river beds.

Harappa was a `city' site; but the Sarasvati and Sindhu rivers had nurtured a large number of `village' sites. The state of archaeological knowledge has grown enormously since the Harappan site discovery in the 1920's. The cumulative achievement of archaeological work allows us to redefine the Harappan civilization as Sarasvati-Sindhu Civilization.

"Evidence from many sources, including that of archaeological remains associated with old river courses, indicates that a major river, stemming mainly from the same sources as the present Sutlej, flowed through Northern Rajasthan, Bahawalpur and Sind-- to the southeast of the present course of the Sutlej and the Indus -- in the third to second millennium BC. This river, known as the Sarasvati in its upper course, at different times either joined the lower course of the Indus in Sind, or found its way independently into the Arabian Sea via Rann of Kutch.'' (Allchin, B., Goudie, A., and Hegde, K., 1978, The prehistory and palaeogeography of the Great Indian Desert, London, Academic Press, p. 198).

Prof. Ahmad Hasan Dani writes (Ed. Indus Civilization -- New Perspectives, Quaid-i-Azam University, Islamabad, 1981, pp.3- 12): `To him (John Marshall) goes the credit of coining the term The Indus Civilization. But his geographic horizon no longer holds good and the term deriving therefrom is open to question ... . The wide-spread nature of the Indus Civilization throughout Panjab and Sind had already expanded the meaning of the original term. Still later in the post-1947 period the Indus Civilization sites have been discovered in large number outside the present Indus region right up to the very borders of Yamuna in the north-east (Alamgirpur on the Hindon, a tributary of the Yamuna about 30 miles north of Delhi), along the dried-up bed of the river Ghaggar in northern part of Rajasthan, and in Gujrat right upto the mouths of Narbada and Tapti rivers'.

Ghaggar which reached the Hakra branch in Bahawalpur, is traditionally identified with the Sarasvati river. [cf. Sir Aurel Stein's explorations in the valley: Ancient India, no.5, 1949, pp. 12-30; A. Ghosh discovered 25 Harappan sites (Indian Archaeology--a Review, 1962-63) in the ``region beginning right from the Pakistan border (eastwards) up to midway between Hanumangarh (bhaTner or bhattinagara) and Suratgarh in the Sarasvati valley and about 25 kms. east of Bhadra in the Drishadvati valley''; Dr. Mughal discovered more than 300 sites in the Bahawalpur area)]. Banawali excavated by Bisht is 15 km. northwest of Fatehabad, near the Sarasvati river and about 120 km. east of Kalibangan. Bhagwanpura, Dist. Kurukshetra, is located on the right bank of the Sarasvati river south of Rupar and is a site excavated by Joshi.

Etymologically, sarasvati means `abundance of lakes (saras)'. The synonym of sarasvatI (goddess of vAk = speech or language) is brAhmI which is the name given to the early scripts used in aSOka's epigraphs of circa 300 B.C. The sUkta 6.61 of the Rigveda is a dedication to sarasvatI river; sUkta 75 is the nadi sUkta dedicated to sindhu river. The trio: drshadvatI, Apaya and sarasvatI are extolled in Rk 3.23.4. Other Rks dedicated to the river are: 1.3.10, 1.3.11, 1.3.12, 2.30.8, 7.95.1, 8.21.17 and 18. References are made to yajnas performed by king citra on the banks of the river.[Apaya may be a branch of the Chitang river; this may also have yielded the sememe: ab, Ap = waters].

Glimpses of life in the vedic period (Sarasvati-Sindhu civilization)

The best source for the description of life in the vedic period is the veda itself, Rgveda, in particular. It was a cooperating society among the yajnikas and others, both endeavouring to generate wealth: samAne Urve adhi sangatAsah sam jAnate na yatante mitha-s-te te devAnAm na minanti vratAnyamardhanto vasubhir-yAdamAnAh (RV. vii.76.5) being united with common people they become of one mind; they strive together as it were, nor do they injure the rituals of the gods, non-injuring each other they move with wealth. (SAyaNa explains samAne Urve as cattle -- common property of all: sarveSAm sAdhAraNe go-samUhe).

The vedic period was a nascent material culture: the period had weavers; the words sirI and vayitrI denote a female weaver. (RV. x.71.9; PB, I.8.9); tasara is reffered to which is a shuttle (RV. xiv.2.51). Reference to women weaving is provided: tantum tatam samvayanti (RV. ii.3.6). Gold (hiraNyapiNDAn, hiraNyayuh) was highly valued (cf. RV. vi.47.23, vii.78.9). DivodAsa gave golden treasures to the Rsi Garga. Rigveda refers to niSkagrIva (RV. v.19.3) which is a golden ornament on the neck and necklaces of gold reaching down to the chest. HiraNya (pl.) means gold ornaments (RV. 1.122.2). Gold was smelted from the ores (PB, xviii.6.4, JB I,10) which evoke the Indian alchemical tradition enshrined in the soma rasa, later elaborated as the science of alchemy: rasa-vAda. In Tamil soma-maNal means, sand containing silver ore. In Egyptian, assem means electrum; in Gypsy, somnakay means gold. Gold was won from the river-beds: Sindhu is called the hiraNmayI (RV. x.75.8); SarasvatI is called hiraNyavartanI (AV. vi.61.7). [cf. the reference to vasatIvari waters in vedic hymns related to soma, an apparent reference to panned-gold from the SarasvatI river-bed.] It is notable that in 1992, Rafiq Mughal (Pakistan archaeological department) has discovered a site, Guneriwala, an industrial site on the dried-up river bed of the Sarasvati across the Rajasthan border). This site is reportedly as large as Mohenjo-daro. The vedic people had used ships to cross oceans: anarambhaNe... agrabhaNe samudre... SatAritram nAvam... (RV. I.116.5; cf. VS. 21.7) referring to aSvins who rescued bhujyu, sinking in mid-ocean using a ship with a hundred oars (nAvam-aritraparaNIm). There is overwhelming evidence of maritime trade by the archaeological discoveries of the so-called Harappan civilization, which can now be re-christened: Sarasvati-Sindhu civilization. Some beads were reported to have been exported to Egypt from this valley (Early Indus Civilization, p. 149); Sumerians had acted as intermediaries for this trade (L. Wooley, The Sumerians, pp. 46-47; cf. Ur Excavations, vol. II, pp. 390-396).which extended to Anatolia and the Mediterranean. The Sarasvati-Sindhu rivers supported the cultivation of wheat and barley, as evidenced by the archaeological finds. ( John Marshall, Mohenjo-daro and the Indus Civilization, vol. 1, p.27) Sunam nah phAla vi kRsantu bhUmim... SunASIrA Sunam-asmAsu dhattam: the ploughshare ploughing makes the food that feeds us and with the feet cuts through the path it follows (RV. iv.57.5-7).

Many vedic people were herdsmen, pastoralists: jAto-yad-agne bhuvanA vyakhyah paSun na gopA: agni looks upon the people of the world as a herdsman watches his cattle. (RV. x.19.3-5). Rigvedic(Rk,Rca,or rk) hymns on Sarasvati. The Rigvedic(rk) sources which refer to Sarasvati river are as follows:

yastE stanah SaSayo yo mayobhUyemna viSvA pushyasi vAryANi
yo ratnadhA vasuvidyah sudatrah sarasvati tamiha dhAtave kah (RV 1.164.49)

Oh Sarasvati offer that breast of yours for our nourishment here which is on your body, which spreads happiness by which you nourish (those who praise you) with all the choicest things, the one which holds all the beautiful things, which knows the enemies' wealth and which offers good gifts.

pAvakA nah sarasvatI vAjebhirvAjinIvatI
yajnam vashTu dhiyAvasuh (RV 1.3.10)

May Sarasvati be our purifier may she who holds food offer us food, the holder of wealth may desire yajna.

cOdayitrI sUnrtAnAm cetantI sumatInAm
yajnam dadhe sarasvatI (RV 1.3.13)

The Sarasvati inspirer of good acts and good thoughts holds yajna.

maho arNah sarasvatI pra cetayati ketunA
dhiyO viSvA vi rAjati (RV 1.3.12)

Sarasvati is known, by the flag (course) of great water. All prayers shine very much.

sarasvatI tvamasmAm aviDDhi marutvatI jeshi SatrUn
tyam cicchardhantam tavishIyamANamindro hanti vrshabham SaNDikAnAm (RV 2.30.8)

Oh Sarasvati you protect us. You who are joined with Maruts, who are a great fighter conquer our enemies. Indra kills that famous and powerful of Shandikas who despised us.

iyam SushmebhirvisaravAyi rujatsAnu giriNAm tavishebhirurnibhih
pArAvatahnImavase suvrktibhih sarasvatImAr vivAsemadhItibhih (RV 6.61.2)

We serve the Sarasvati who with flames and tides destroyed the peaks of mountains (the fortified towns) like one who plucks lotuses, with good prayers and with good nets for food. [ ... by her force and her impetuous waves, has broken down the sides of the mountains like a digger of lotus fibres.]

ni tvA dadhe vara A prthivyA iLAyAspade sudinatve ahmAm

drshadvatyAm mAnusha ApayAyAm sarasvatyAm revadagne didIhi (RV 3.23.4)

Oh Agni, you were placed on the earth on an auspicious day on the best of the places on the earth. Blaze with wealth among the men (on the banks of) Drshadvati, Apaya and Sarasvati.

imam me gange yamune sarasvatI Satudri stomam sacatA parushNyA
asikanyA marudvrdhe citastayArjIkIye SrNutdyA sushomayA (RV 10.75.5)

Oh Ganga, Yamuna, Sarasvati, Sutudri with Parshi, Marudvridha with Asikni; Arjikiya with Vitasta and Sushnoma hear this praise.

ambitamA ... naditamA (RV. 2.41.16)

best of mothers ... best of rivers ... Ascertaining the wishes of the great sages the best of rivers (the Sarasvati) incorporated AruNA with her own body; formerly the flow (of the AruNA) was hidden. Afterwards (the Sarasvati) inundated the divine AruNA wih its own waters.

A yat sAkam yaSay vAvaSnAh sarasvati saptathI sindhumAtA
yAh sushvayanta sudughah sudhArA abhi svena payasA pIpyanah (RV 7.36.6)

May the seventh (stream), Sarasvati, the mother of the Sindhu and those rivers that flow copious and fertilizing, bestowing abundance of food, and nourishing (the people) by their waters, come at once together.

prakshodasA dhAyasA sasr eshA sarasvatI dharUNamAyasI pUh
prabAbadhana ratthyeva yAti vishvA apo mahina sindhuranyA (RV 7.95.1)

This Sarasvati, firm as a city made of Ayas (copper) flows rapidly with all sustaining water, sweeping away in its might all other waters, as a charioteer (clears the road). Alternative: AyasIh pUh : (Sarasvati is) like a great fortified town. [With her fertilizing stream the Sarasvati comes forth. (She is to us) a stronghold, an iron gate. Moving along, as on a chariot, this river surpasses in greatness all other waters.]

ekAchetat sarasvatI nadInAm SuchIryati giribhya A samudrAt
rAyaSchetantI bhuanasya bhurer ghrtam payo dudue nAhushAya (RV 7.95.2)

Sarasvati, chief and purest of rivers, flowing from the mountains to the ocean, understood the request of Nahusha and distributing riches among the many existing things, milked for him butter and water. [Alone among all rivers Sarasvati listened, she who goes pure from the mountains as far as the sea. She who knows of the manifold wealth of the world has poured out to man her fat milk.]

[cf. Max Mueller, Sacred Books of the East, xxxii.60: ``Here we see Samudra used clearly in the sense of sea, the Indian sea, and we have at the same time a new indication of the distance which separates the Vedic age from the late Sanskrit literature. Though it may not be possible to determine, by geological evidence, the time of the changes which modified the southern areas of the Punjab and caused the Saraswati to disappear in the desert, still the fact remains that the loss of the Saraswati is later than the Vedic age, and that, at that time, the waters of the Saraswati reached the sea.''] cf. RV 10.64.9 BaudhAyana's DharmasUtra (I,1,2,9) describes MadhyadEsa as lying to the east of the region where sarasvatI river disappears, to the west of the black forest: kAlakavan, to the north of the pAripAtra mountain and to the south of the Himalayas.

MahAbhArata (BhIshmaparva, 6.49,50) refers to seven divyagangas: nalinI, pAvanI, sarasvatI, jambu, sItA, gangA and sindhu. The epic locates kurukshetra to the south of sarasvatI and to the north of DrshadvatI (iii,83.204). [This area is defined as Brahmavarta in Manu Smriti 2.17]. The doab formed by these two rivers thus becomes the locus of the Bharata war of kurukshetra (fought on five lakes: samanta-pancaka; said to be the northern sacrificial altar of brahmA: MB, Vana, lxxxiii). [Alberuni found, in 1000 A.D., a holy lake in Kurukshetra]. The epic provides an account of Balarama's sojourn along this river dotted with centers of learning and austerities. [The dividing line of Drshadvati is at Chunar near Varanasi; the modern name is Rakshi].

The dried-up bed -- wadi -- of sarasvatI might have constituted the great road between hastinApur and dvArAvatI (dwAraka). Part of this road would have constituted the road from Sind to Delhi via Bahawalpur, MaroT, Anupgarh, Suratgarh, Dabli, KAlibaggAN, BhaTner (Hanumgarh), Tibi and SIrsa suggested by Major F. Mackeson in 1844 to the British government (Report on the Route from Seersa to Bahawulpore, JAS, Beng., XLII, Pt.I, 1844, No. 145 to 153)]. A synonym of sIrsa is sarsuti < sarasvatI; at this place, about 100 miles below Rassauli, a fortress was built. Hieun Tsang's reference to `five indies' is amplified by Cunningham to define northern India to comprise the Punjab proper including Kashmir and the adjoining hill states, eastern Afghanistan beyond Indus and the Sutlej states to the west of the sarasvatI river.

Geographically, the sarasvatI basin can be traced to the currently known:
ghaggar-nALI-hakDA-rainI-nArA-wAhindA-mihrAn-purAN channels. Ghaggar might have been a stream that rose in the Siwaliks and that joined the sarasvatI. This network runs parallel to the Indus across Sind. The river flowed from the Himalayas to the Rann of Kutch. [cf. Oldham, C.F., JRAS, 1893, p.49 on the Lost river of the Indian desert; Sir A. Burnes, Memoir n the Eastern Branch of the River Indus, given an Account of the alterations produced on it by an earthquake, also a Theory of the formation of the Runn, Trans. RAS, III,1834, pp. 550-88].

Geologically, the entire sarasvatI river bed, and the arm of the Arabian sea (formerly spanning into saline Ranns of kutch) into which the river fell are on an earth-quake belt; an earthquake could have upraised this entire river-sea-bed profile, drying up the river. [This may explain the formation of the Thar desert on the left banks of the river in earlier earthquakes; also, perhaps of the Thal desert in Pakistan. Did some tracts of the thar desert support cultivation in ancient times? Geological surveys do indicate subsoil water in some tracts. Even today, over 2 million people in Rajasthan live in these tracts! The Sanskrit name is maru-sthalI. cf. Tamil maruta-nilam??].

Was this event of the dried-up sarasvatI linkable to the 12 years of drought in the Santanu reign -- an anecdote in the Mahabharata? Could this explain the migrations of the Indus-Sarasvati people to other parts of the sub-continent? Another possibility is that the head-waters of sarasvatI were captured by sutlej (sutudrI) shrinking the water-volume carried by sarasvatI. [cf. H.Raychaudhari, The Sarasvati, in Science and Culture, VIII, 12, June 1943; Studies in Indian Antiquities, Calcutta University, 1958, pp. 121-41]. Yamuna is also considered a tributary of the sarasvatI (Wadia, D.N., Geology of India, London, 1949, p.41).

Could the Indo-Aryan migrations, attested in a number of scholarly studies, have been caused by the (gradual?) drying-up of the river?

Linguistically, was this Indus\-Sarasvati a region which had synthesized the Indo-Aryan (Gypsy, Dardic, Panjabi, Gujarati), Dravidian (Brahui, Tamil) and Munda language streams, before internal migrations began circa 1700 B.C.? Was this a south asian linguistic area, circa 2500 B.C.? In the lingua franca, was the river called khal = stream (Tamil)? [khAyal (Malayalam); khADI (Gujarati); khAl (Hindi)]? Was drshadvatI like gangA, a term absorbed from Munda? [The absorption of the Dravidian retroflex sounds render the Indo-Aryan tongues to be distinct from the IE; also, cf. references to Indian sememes in Turner's comparative indo-aryan dictionary and the author's work: Comparative Etymological Dictionary of South Asian Languages (in press)].

What are the dates of the formation of the Rann of Kutch? What are the dates of the drying-up of the Sarasvati river? Do the vivid landsat pictures of the lost river skirting the Indian desert convey enough information to unravel the geological causes of the drying-up?

Maybe, further researches to firm up these dates will hold a clue to unravel the apparent discontinuity between Indus-Sarasvati proto-historic culture (circa 3000-1700 B.C.) and the linguistic evidence of the historical periods (circa 300 B.C.) of the region. [Recent excavations in Banawali and Dholavira seem to establish the continuity of settlements bridging this apparent gap between circa 1700 and 300 B.C. belying some theories about the abrupt disappearance of the Harappan tradition, say, caused by floods on the Indus?]

Defining the course of the ancient, `lost' Sarasvati river

The following extracts, principally from earth sciences' and LANDSAT literature establish the existence of Sarasvati river contiguous to the Indus river valley and the area of Rann of Kutch and the Gulf of Cambay in Gujarat. This region is studded with many Harappan culture sites.

Background

Harappa is a site on the west bank of Ravi; Kalibangan is a site on the right bank of Sutlej; Amri is a site on the west bank of Indus (close to the Arabian sea); Banawali is located 15 km northwest of Fatehbad, near the Sarasvati river and about 120 km east of Kalibangan; Lothal and Rangpur are sites below the Rann of Kutch.

Landsat photographs analyzed

Bimal Ghose et al (1979) use images taken in 1972. Plate V traces the wide valley of the Sarasvati running from Suratgarh through Anupgarh to Fort Abbas and Ahmadpur East. From Anupgarh another wide belt of discontinuous patches of dark grey tone runs southwestward upto Sakhi. From Sakhi, the remnant of a former valley can be traced towards the west ... the imagery reveals the presence of a narrow zone of saline/alkaline fields, partly obliterated by the overlying sand dunes, extending upto Khangarh. To the south of Khangarh, a narrow strip of green vegetation, producing a slightly darker tone than the surroundings, can be identified. It runs from Islamgarh, through Dharmi Khu, Ghantial, Shahgarh, Babuwali and Rajar to Mihal Mungra. This was the course of the Sarasvati from the Himalaya to the Rann of Kutch after the river severed relations with Luni. South of Mihal Mungra, the course could be traced up to the present Hakra channel and there are indications of its having even crossed the Hakra channel (Plate VI). This signifies that the course of the old Saraswati might have been somewhere to the west of the present Hakra ... The other major courses of the Saraswati could be identified further to the west, through Mithra and Sandh, the remnants of which are now known as the Raini and the Wahinda rivers. Here also the river shifted its course several times, and, at one time, flowed to the east of the Wahinda river, through Mundo. Finally, the river ceased to flow southward and met the Sutlej to the west of Ahmadpur East.

Ramasamy, Bakliwal and Verma (1991) show satellite photographs mosaiced, planimetrically controlled ... Figure 1 shows the last tongue of the Saraswati river ... The study of remotely-sensed data in the desert tract of Rajasthan shows that there are plenty of paleochannels with well sprung-up tentacles throughout the desert (figure 3). On the northern edge of the Thar-Great Indian desert at the Ganganagar-Anupgarh plains a well-developed set of paleochannels are clearly discernible in satellite photographs (figures 1 and 4). Bakliwal et al (1988) have explained that these well sprung-up paleochannels are traces of the mighty Saraswati river which once ruled the desert. Yashpal et al (1980) have argued that the paleochannels observed in the Anupgarh plains are the arm of the Saraswati river, which has been displaced by the present day Gaggar river ... that the Saraswati river once flowed close to the Aravalli hill ranges and met the Arabian Sea in the Rann of Kutch, that it has migrated towards the west, the north-west and the north and has ultimately got lost in the Anupgarh plains ... Yash Pal et al (1980) present in Figure 3 a synoptic view provided by the Landsat of the northwestern Indian subcontinent showing 6-8 km wide paleochannel of the Saraswati ... ; Figure 4 shows the old bed of the Sarasvati river ... Figure 7 shows a synoptic view of the Indus valley showing possible course of the Sarasvati beyond Marot through the Nara into the Rann of Kutch ...

Ring stones in ancient time in Gulf of Cam bay

Alex Rogers, 1870. A few remarks on the Geology of the country surrounding the Gulf of Cambay in Western India, Quarterly Journal of Geological Society of London, 26: 118-124 who was perhaps among the earliest observers of the geology of the Gulf of Cambay (close to Lothal), points out that from the geological formation of the country bordering on the Rann, it appeared that the drainage of the Punjab once flowed into it: `` ... The rapid silting up of the Gulf of Cambay gives particular interest to an inquiry into the geological conditions which probably shaped it in remote ages ... (The head of the Gulf) comprises within itself the Great Runn of Cutch ... primary or metamorphic rocks are traceable in its immediate vicinity only in a small tract on its west coast ... even the highest points of the granite peaks show signs of weathering, and probably also of the erosive action of waves ... Many considerations point to the existence in former ages of some large river flowing down from the north, and falling into the Indian Ocean somewhere in the position of the present Gulf of Cambay: and it is not improbable that that river may have been the Indus. It may have been that the original course of the Indus from the Punjab was in a more south-easterly direction than that of the present day ... (In this Gulf), coinciding to a large extent with the black-soil belt, there can be clearly traced a natural depression in the surface of the country for some twenty miles from the head of the Gulf, terminating in a shallow lake of brackish water called the Null ... Shells of the genus CERITHIUM, an estuarine form, are found lying loose in the black soil many miles from this point (Bhogava); and the records of the old Revenue Survey of Gujarat state that there were formerly found in the Null large stones with holes through them, which had evidently served as anchors for boats of some size ... [cf. the ring stones found in Mohenjodaro] ... there is historical and well-known proof of the alteration of the level of the larger of these salt flats as the consequence of an earthquake in AD 1819 ... only a much more violent action would have separated the laterites of the high and low levels ... this rock, again, appears at precisely the same level on the opposite sides of valleys in the Concan and Deccan, giving ample proof of denudation ... at the time (some of the Vedas) were composed, the Suruswuttee, the most easterly of the Punjab rivers, which now loses itsels in the desert of Rajputana, flowed into the Indian Ocean. This confirms to come extent the theory of the case of the alluvial deposit at the head of the Gulf of Cambay."

Raverty, H.G.Major, Bombay Army, 1893, The Mihran of Sind and its tributaries: a geographical and historical study, Journal of Asiatic Society of Bengal, Vol. lxi, Pt. 2, pp. 155-297: `` ... to notice some of the numerous fluctuations in the courses of the Sindhu, Ab-i-Sind, or Indus, and of the rivers of the Panj-ab. The changes in the courses of two of these rivers, together with the drying up of the Hakra, Wahindah, or Bahindah were so considerable that they reduced a vast extent of once fruitful country to a howling wilderness, and thus several flourishing cities and towns became ruined or deserted by their inhabitants ... the old course of the Biah, or `Bias' previous to its junction with the Sutlaj, when both rivers lost their names and became Hariari , Nili or Gharah ... why the army of Islam marched along the bases of the mountains, for the route was long, and the way by Sasruti and Marut was nearer? He (Mangu Khan) was answered that the numerous fissures on the banks of the river rendered the way impossible for the army ... Sarasti is the ancient name of Sirsa: Sursuti is the name of a river, the ancient Saraswati ... Sutlaj was a tributary of the Hakra or Wahindah ... Hakra ... appears to be the modified form of Sagara, the letter S being pronounced H in Rajputana and Sindh ... Sagar is the Sanskrit for `ocean', `sea' etc., and it is still known as the Sind-Sagar near the sea coast. Tod calls it the `Sankra', which is another form of the name; and it is called Sankrah in the treaty entered into by Nadir Shah, and Muhammad Shah, Badshah of Dihli, when ceding all the territory west of it to the Persians ... Hakra did once run through the so-called `Indian Desert' ... Ghag-gar, the Sursuti and the Chitang were also the tributaries of Sind-Sagar or Wahindah or Hakra ... Mansuriyat ... this city is situated among the branches of the Mihran river, and from that place the river unites with the ocean by two channels. One is near the town of Loharanj, and the other bends round towards the east in the confines of Kaj (Kachch) and is called the Sind Shakar (Sind-Sagarah) which means the The Sea of Sind. The river Sarasat unites with the ocean to the east of Suminath. This last named river is, of course, the Saraswati, which falls into he sea near Pattan Som-nath, not the classical river, the tributary of the Ghag-ghar, described farther on, the sacred river of the Brahmans ... At Thatha the Sind is called Mihran ..."

Leshnik, Lawrence S., 1968, The Harappan Port of Lothal: Another View, American Anthropologist, 70, 1968, pp. 911-921: `` ... The Volkerwanderung that brought the Harappans to Lothal (2450 BC) is conceived of as a sea passage from the Indus ... This dating is, however, questionable and exploration of the Kutch area has brought to light a number of Harappan sites there (Joshi, J.P. 1966, Exploration in Northern Kutch, Journal of the Oriental Institute, Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda, 16: 62-67), so the arrival- by-sea theory will have to be reconsidered ... In Mohenjo-daro there is a linear representation of a man using the shaduf, so that its presence is documented for the Harappan civilization as well ... Marshall describes the Mohenjo-daro ringstones as having slots that were used to fasten stones to something that passed through the central aperture. This could have been the arm of a shaduf, to which the stone weights were lashed by rope or leather thongs. The shaduf is still employed near Lothal, although the stones are no longer pierced, but simply secured with rope. Pierced stones continue however to be used in this way in Eastern India ... A note on the Lothal tank as an irrigation reservoir ... "

R.D. Oldham, 1886, On probable changes in the geography of the Punjab and its rivers - a historico-geographical study, J. Asiatic Soc. Bengal, 55: 322-343: " ... we have now seen that a dry river bed can be traced, practically continuously, from Tohana in Hissar district to the Eastern Narra in Sind ... " C.F. Oldham, 1893, The Saraswati and the lost river of the Indian Desert, Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, pp. 48-76: " ... local legends assert (that Sarasvati) once flowed through the desert to the sea. In confirmation of these traditions, the channel referred to, which is called Hakra or Sotra, can be traced through the Bikanir and Bhawulpur states into Sind, and thence onwards to the Rann of Kach ... attested by the ruins everywhere overspread what is now an arid sandy waste. Throughout this tract are scattered mounds, marking the sites of cities and towns. And there are strongholds still remaining ... Amongst these ruins are found, not only the huge bricks used by the Hindus in the remote past, but others of a much later make ... Freshwater shells, exactly similar to those now seen in the PanjAb rivers, are to be found in this old river-bed and upon its banks ... After entering Sind the Hakra turns southward, and becomes continuous with the old river-bed generally known as Narra. This channel, which bears also the names of Hakra or Sagara, Wahind and Dahan, is to be traced onward to the Rann of Kach ... Tha Hakra varies in different parts of its course from about two to six miles in width, which is sufficient for a very large river ... The only river near Marot was the Hakra ...

Lost courses of the Sarasvati

Bimal Ghose, Amal Kar and Zahid Husain, 1979, The lost courses of the Sarasvati river in the Great Indian Desert: New evidence from Landsat Imagery, Geographical Journal, 145: 446-451: ``Interpretation of LANDSAT imagery and field investigation in the western part of Jaisalmer district in India have revealed some hitherto unknown abandoned courses of the former Saraswati river. It has been suggested that these courses were alive before the Saraswati occupied the Raini or the Wahinda courses, and contributed to the alluviation of the region. The subsurface water in the region is contributed mainly by the Himalayan precipitation flowing subterraneously through the former courses of the Saraswati ... ."

River migrations in Western India

Ramasamy, SM, PC Bakliwal and RP Verma, 1991, Remote Sensing and River migrations in Western India, Int. J. Remote Sensing, Vol. 12, No. 12, 2597-2609: ``The art of remote sensing has opened up many vistas in the study of river migration as satellite photographs, both in their normal and digitally enhanced modes, vividly show the rivers and their migratory signatures. The rivers migrate for various reasons amongst which tectonic movement is one of the main causes ... The study has shown that Western India sow considerable signs of Quaternary tectonics ... `` ... (Landsat photographs, on a 1:1 000 000 scale) ... the palaeochannels were interpreted, as exhibiting linear, curvilinear and loop-like features with typical black ribbon-like stripes ... The Landsat imagery studies show that the Indus river has a very wide flood plain on either side of its course up to a maximum width of 100-120 km in the east and south-east. To have such a wide flood plain on only one side shows that the Indus river has preferentially migrated towards the north-west in the northern parts and towards the west in the central and southern parts. The study of remotely sensed data in the desert tract of Rajastan shows that there are plenty of paleochannels with well sprung-up tentacles throughout the desert. On the northern edge of the Thar-Great Indian desert at the Ganganagar-Anupgarh plains a well-developed set of palaeochannels are clearly discernible in satellite photographs. (Bakliwal PC , Ramasamy, SM, and Grover, AK, 1983, Use of remote sensing in identification of possible areas for groundwater, hydrocarbons and minerals in the Thar desert, Western India, Proceeding volume of the International conference on prospecting in areas of desert terrain, The Institute of Mining and Metallurgy Publications, 14-17 April, Rabat, Morocco, 121-129) have explained that these well sprung-up palaeochannels are traces of the mighty Saraswati river which once ruled the desert ... . (these and) the present study show clearly that the Saraswati river once flowed close to the Aravalli hill ranges and met the Arabian sea in the Rann of Kutch, that it has migrated towards the west, the north-west and the north and has ultimately got lost in the Anupgarh plains ...

"... When the Aravalli hills are traced back to the foothills of the Himalayas the water divide of the Yamuna and Saraswati rivers becomes apparent. Hence, it follows that the drifting of the Saraswati river from its easterly flow towards the Great Indian Desert would have been initiated by such a rise in the Aravalli mountains and that due to the subsequent Luni-Sukri cymatogenic arching, the Saraswati migration towards the north-west would have been accelerated ...

"... it seems that climatic changes have also played a subordinate role in shifting the (Sarasvati) river towards the north. When the Saraswati flowed in a southwesterly direction it was flowing against the northeasterly moving sand advance in the Thar desert. It can be concluded, therefore, that the Saraswati river could not overcome such a sand advance and hence that it started drifting towards the north with a rotational migration in a clockwise direction until ultimately it was buried in the Anupgarh plains ..."

P.C. Bakliwal and A.K. Grover, 1988, Signatures and migration of Saraswati river in Thar desert, Western India, Rec. Geol. Surv. Ind., 116: Pts. 3-8, pp. 77-86:

" ... Remote sensing study of the Great Indian Desert reveals numerous signatures of palaeochannels in the form of curvilinear and meandering courses with feeble to contrasting tonal variations. The Saraswati river, which is believed to be lost in the desert, could be traced through these palaeochannels as a migratory river. Its initial course flowed close to the Aravalli ranges and successive six stages took west and northwesterly shifts till it coincides with the dry bed of Ghaggar river. The groundwater, archaeological and pedological data with selected ground truths also corroborates these findings. The migration of river Saraswati seems to be caused by tectonic disturbances in Hardwar-Delhi ridge zone, Luni-Surki lineament and Cambay Graben and Kutch fault facilitated by contrasting climatic variations. The stream piracy by Yamuna river at later stage is responsible for the ultimate loss of water and drying up of the Saraswati river ..."

Secrets of the Thar desert

Singhvi AK and Kar, Amal eds., 1992, Thar Desert in Rajasthan: Land, Man and Environment, Bangalore, Geological Society of India, Bangalore: " ... In the south it (Thar desert) has a sharp natural boundary with the world's largest saline waste - the Great Rann of Kahchh, while in the north the riparian sub-Himalayan plains define its boundary ... Quaternary continental sediments in the Thar desert of Rajasthan comprise a succession of fluvial, fluvio-lacusrine and aeolian deposits ... The neogene tectonic movements ... are considered as responsible for controlling the origin, configuration and development of basins of deposition ... Occurrence of aligned earthquake epicentres of different dates from 1879 to 1976 AD along it (Luni-Sukri lineament from the Rann to the Sambhar lake) in the Kachchh area suggests its neotectonic potentiality ...`` ... The dry bed of the Ghaggar is conspicuous on the satellite imagery of north Rajasthan and adjoining parts of Pakistan as a continuous wide belt running through Suratgarh and Anupgarh in India to Fort Abbas and Ahmadpur East (in Pakistan) [(Ghose et al., 1979, The lost courses of the Sarasvati river in the Great Indian Desert - new evidence from Landsat imageries, Geographical Journal, 145 (3): 446-451); Balkiwal, PC and Grover, AK, 1988, Signatures and migration of Sarasvati river in Thar desert, western India, Rec. Geol. Surv. India, 116 (3-8)]. Some south-flowing earlier courses of this stream were detected through the western part of Jaisalmer district and in the Bikaner-Sardarshahr tract further east. Buried courses of another Himalayan stream, R. Drishadvati (which was also a tributary to the Saraswati) were found in the Churu-Nagaur tract. The rivers had several tributaries joining them from the Aravallis and other rocky areas within the desert. Recent SEM analysis of the Quaternary sediments of the northeastern part of the desert indicate considerable glacial, as well as fluvial, transport of some of the sediments [Raghav, KS, 1991, Quaternary history of a part of the northeast fringe of the Thar desert of India, Ann. Arid Zone, 30(4)]. The survival of the Saraswati-Drishadvati courses depended to a large extent on the perennial supply of water from the mightier Sutlej (the Satadru of Vedic literature) which shifted its course several times in the sub-Himalayan plains due to neotectonism, change of grade etc. (Valdiya, KS, 1989, Neotectonic implication of collision of Indian and Asian plates, Ind. J. Geology, 61: 1-13). A detailed account of former streams in the region is provided by Kar (Kar, A., 1992, Drainage desiccation, water erosion and desertification in northwest India, in: Desertification in the Thar, Sahara and Sahel Regions, AK Sen ed., Scientific Publishers, Jodhpur). Some of the buried stream segments are potential ground water aquifers.. The course of the Saraswati to the west of Jaisalmer has an estimated reserve of about 3000 mcm water awaiting a judicious exploitation ...

"... Mughal M.R. (1982, Recent archaeological research in the Cholistan desert, in: Harappan Civilization, GL Possehl, ed., Oxford, pp. 85-95) has located a large number of settlements of the Hakra Ware culture, dating to the fourth millennium BC., and of the Harappan culture, dated to the third millennium BC, on this (Ghaggar-Hakra) river in Pakistan. Nearly two hundred settlements of the Harappan culture have been located by Indian archaeologists on the Ghaggar river and is tributaries in Punjab, Haryana and northern Rajasthan [Ghosh, A., 1952, The Rajasthan Desert - its archaeological aspect, Bulletin of the National Inst. Sci., I : 37-42; Bhan, S., 1973, The sequence and spread of prehistoric cultures in the upper Saraswati basin in: Radiocarbon and Indian Archaeology, DP Agrawal and A. Ghosh eds., TIFR, Bombay, pp. 252-263] ... Kalibangan was abandoned at the beginning of the second millennium BC., probably due to the drying up of the river and shifting of the Sutlaj away from it (Lal. B.B., 1979, Kalibangan and Indus civilization, in: Essays in Indian Protohistory, DP Agrawal and DK Chakrabarti eds., BR Publ., Delhi, pp. 65-97).

Bhan, Suraj., 1973, The sequence and spread of prehistoric cultures in the upper Saraswati basin in: Radiocarbon and Indian Archaeology, DP Agrawal and A.Ghosh eds., TIFR, Bombay, pp. 252-263: `` ... The Kalibangan I culture (c. 2300 - 2100 BC) ... The Siswal A ware was recovered from 16 sites in the south-western part of Haryana adjoining northern Rajasthan. It extended to Jind and Paoli in the north-eat. The comparative preponderance of the ware in the Drsadvati valley suggests the preference of the pre-Harappan folk for smaller river valleys as in north Rajasthan ... But the absence of the Late Harappan ware from north Rajasthan and the adjoining regions of Haryana (south of Vanawali near Fatehabad in the Sarasvati valley and Alipur Kharar near Hansi in the Drsadvati valley) suggests the survival of the Harappa culture in our region (as also in the north-eastern Panjab and western UP), after the lower and mid zones of the Sarasvati basin had been deserted. The desertion of the semi-arid zone of north Rajasthan and Bahawalpur by the Harappans or the Harappa-influenced kindred folks, and their subsequent expansion further north-east seems to have been forced by the growing desiccation of the Sarasvati basin consequent upon the changes in the courses of the Sarasvati, Drshadvati and the Yamuna rivers. It was this second phase of the Harappan expansion which was largely responsible for the colonization of the ancient Madhya Desa which ensued with the settlements of Daulatpur I, Alamgirpur I etc ... With more than 90 OCP or Late (degenerate) Harappan sites reported from the doab it would be difficult to agree with Agrawal (1967-68) that the doab was first colonized by the iron-using PGW people."

Yash Pal, Baldev Sahai, R.K.Sood and D.P. Agrawal, Space Applications Centre, and PRL, Ahmedabad, 1980, Remote sensing of the `lost' Sarasvati river: Proc. Indan Acad. Sci. (Earth and Planetary Sci.), Vol. 89, No. 3, Nov. 1980, pp. 317-331: `` ... delineation of the palaeochannels of the Satluj, the Yamuna and the Ghaggar to trace the `lost' Sarasvati. Study of Landsat imagery shows that the Satluj once flowed into the Ghaggar; it is also probable the Yamuna too was flowing into the Ghaggar river at the same time. The bed of this river is traceable upto Marot, from where it is likely to have extended through Hakra/Nara bed to the Rann of Kutch. The present dried bed of the Ghaggar was thus part of a major river, anciently known as Sarasvati. Analysis of satellite imagery supports the above hypothesis regarding the course of the 'lost' Sarasvati ...

Secrets of the Thar desert

" Satluj and Yamuna are perennial rivers ... the rivers Ghaggar, Sarasvati, Markanda and Chautang all rise from the Siwalik Hills and are non-perennial. They flow mainly during the monsoon. At present none of them reaches the sea or joins any major river as a tributary ... "... The sharp westward right-angled bend in the course of Satluj is suggestive of its diversion in the past, as at the point of river capture or stream diversion similar elbows develop ... There is a sudden widening of the Ghaggar Valley about 25 km. south of Patiala ... can be explained only if a major tributary was joining Ghaggar at this place. The satellite imagery does show a major palaeochannel joining the Ghaggar here ... Our observations are supported by the field data of Singh (Gurdev Singh, 1952, The Geographer, 5,27) who mentions a channel starting near Ropar and leading towards Tohana (29.35N, 75.55E). The area along this old course of the Satluj is called `dhaia' meaning an upland or high bank ... It might have required only a little tectonic movement to disturb its previous course and force it into its present channel ... Our studies show that the Satluj was the main tributary of the Ghaggar and that subsequently the tectonic movements may have forced the Satluj westward and the Ghaggar dried. Wilhelmy (H., 1969, Z. Geomorphol. Suppl., 8, 76) considered ... the second alternative, i.e., river capture. The Satudri (Satluj) might have been a tributary of the Vipasa (Beas) and through headward erosion captured the waters of the river coming down the Himalayas near Ropar. Tectonic movements may have aided the river capture ...

"... the Landsat imagery of the Indus system and it appears that the confluence of the Satluj with the Indus may not be an ancient feature. The palaeochannel of the river Beas, which is quite conspicuous in Landsat imagery, joined the Indus independent of the Satluj. There is a distinct palaeochannel which seems to suggest that the Satluj flowed through the Nara directly into the Rann of Kutch ...

" ... The ancient bed of the Ghaggar has a constant width of about 6 to 8 km. from Shatrana in Punjab to Marot in Pakistan. The bed stands out very clearly having a dark tone in the black-and-white imagery and reddish one in false colour composites. There is a clear palaeochannel southeast of the river Markanda which joins the ancient bed of the Ghaggar near Shatrana ... Another channel which corresponds to the present Chautang (Drishadvati) seems to join the Ghaggar near Suratgarh. Near Anupgarh the ancient Ghaggar bed bifurcates and both the plaeochannels come to an abrupt end; the upper one terminates near Marot and the lower one near Beriwala. These two terminal channels of the Ghaggar seem to disappear in a depression which is suggested by salt encrustation and the physiography of the area ...

" ... Palaeo-Yamuna was alive during the Painted Grey Ware (PGW) period (c. 800-400 BC) as indicated by the distribution of the PGW sites on its banks (Gupta SP etal., 1977, Ecology and archaeology of Western India eds. DP Agrawal and BM Pande, New Delhi, Concept Pub., p. 79). Both the Chautang and the Ghaggar beds have archaeological mounds on their banks (Pande BM, ibid, p.55). The Ghaggar continued to be a live river during the pre-Harappan (c. 2500-2200 BC) and the Harappan times (c. 2200-1700 BC). Even during the PGW times, there is some indication of habitation along the palaeochannel, though the PGW mounds follow a very narrow river bed, perhaps indicating a dwindling water supply. The archaeological evidence for dating the Chautang is not very definite yet, though the late Harappan mounds along it appear to be a clear indication that it was a living river during at least the late Harappan time (c. 1700-1000 BC) ...

" ... For miles and miles around Marot one finds numerous place names with a suffix toba, which in the local language means a playa (or rann) ... It is obviously improbable for such a mighty river to vanish into a shallow depression (or khadins in the local languages) in its heyday. There is, therefore, a good possibility that the Ghaggar flowed into the Nara and further into the Rann of Kutch without joining the Indus ... " ... If the bore-hole samples from these areas are analysed, one is sure to come across mineralogical compositions reflecting the signatures of the ancient Satluj and the Palaeo-Yamuna when they flowed through the Sarasvati bed ... A multidisciplinary approach employing archaeological, mineralogical, chemical and thermoluminescence, combined with remote sensing techniques can provide a clear and consistent history of these changes in the palaeochannels of northwestern sub-continent in an absolute time-frame."

R.L. Raikes (a hydrologist) and R.K. Karanth (a geologist) found at Kalibangan (in 1967) through a drilling program, that at a depth of 11 m. below the present flood-plain level, a coarse, greyish sand very similar in mineral content to that found in the bed of the present-day Yamuna. It extended over a width at least four times that of the bed of the present-day Yamuna and down to a depth, at one point at least, of 30 m. ..the material in short is typical flood-plain deposit of the kind being laid down today at a rate of about 2 m. per thousand years. (R.L. Raikes, 1968, Kalibangan: Death from Natural causes, Antiquity, 42, pp. 286-291).

Climate change

Gurdip Singh, 1971, Archaeology and Physical Anthropology in Oceania, 6, 177-189: The Indus Valley Culture seen in the context of post-glacial climatic and ecological studies in North-West India: suggests that `` ... the significant increase in rainfall at the beginning of the third millennium BC, attested by palaeoecological evidence, played an important part in the sudden expansion of the Neolithic-Chalcolithic cultures in north-west India, ultimately leading to the prosperity of the Indus culture ... The present evidence would suggest that the onset of aridity in the region around 1800 BC probably resulted in the weakening of the Harappan culture in the arid and semi-arid parts of north-west India ... "

Amal Kar and Bimal Ghose, 1984, Geographical Journal, The Drishadvati river system of India: an assessment and new findings, 150: 221-229: `` ... there are indications that the riveer formerly flowed southwards, through the desert, and was supplied from streams originating in the Aravallis, thus explaining the distribution of alluvium in the region ... Drishadvati ... means a stream with a pebbly bed ... The interfluve between the Saraswati and the Drishadvati used to be known as Brahmavarta and was sacred ... Sir Alexander Cunningham (1871, The ancient geography of India, repr. 1979, Indological Book House, Varanasi) first identified the Drishadvati with the modern Rakshi ... "

Aurel Stein, 1942, A survey of ancient sites along the `lost' Sarasvati River, Geographical Journal, 99: 173-182: `` ... the sketch-map based on the latest survey shows how great is the contrast between the very scanty volume of water brought down by the Ghaggar and the width of its dry bed within Bikaner territory; over more than 100 miles it is nowhere less than 2 miles and in places 4 miles or more. This bed is lined on both sides by dunes varying in height ... the Ghaggar bed above Hanumagarh, one notes that the number of mounds marking ancient sites long abandoned is here distinctly smaller than farther down the old river bed ... (mounds) known as ther or theri ... Archaeological facts prove cultivation, and with it settled occupation, to have been abandoned much earlier on the Hakra than on the Ghaggar ... trial excavation at Sandhanawala Ther, 3 miles to the north-west of Fort Abbas ... some sherds with incised characters which appear on many inscribed seals from Mohenjodaro and Harappa, chief sites of the Indus Valley cultre ... The great height and size of several others indicate prolonged settlement ... the evidence shows that down to historical times the Ghaggar carried water for irrigation under existing climatic conditions much farther than it does now. This makes it intelligible how the Sarasvati has come in hymns of the Rigveda to be praised as a great river ... upper portion of the ancient bed ... drying up during historical times ... hastened by diversion of flood water for irrigation brought about by more settled conditions and the resulting pressure of population. Lower down on the Hakra the main change was due to the Sutlej having in late prehistoric times abandoned the bed which before had joined the Ghaggar: the result of a law affecting all rivers whose course lies over alluvial plains ...

D. A. Holmes, 1968, The recent history of the Indus, Geographical Journal, 134: 367-382: ``.. Lambrick (H.T., 1967, The Indus Flood-plain and the `Indus' civilization, Geographical Journal, 133,4: 483-95) believes that the union of the Sutlej with the Beas (and thence with the Indus) in the West Punjab had already occurred prior to the time of Alexander. It must be assumed that the Nara was continuing to flow as a result of seasonal overspill from both the Indus and the Sutlej, the latter floods using the now dry Ghaggar channel (which is a remnant of the Sutlej-Nara system) ... ''

THE ARCTIC HOME IN THE VEDAS

2011-07-15T14:25:00.000+05:30

Being Also a New Key to the Interpretation of
Many Vedic Texts and Legends

By
Lokamanya Bâl Gangâdhar Tilak

Poona City, India, 1903

CONTENTS

. Preface p. i – ix
Chapter I Prehistoric Times p. 1
Chapter II The Glacial Period p. 19
Chapter III The Arctic Regions p. 37
Chapter IV The Night of the Gods p. 57
Chapter V The Vedic Dawns p. 74
Chapter VI Long Day and Long Night p. 113
Chapter VII Months and Seasons p. 136
Chapter VIII The Cows’ Walk p. 173
Chapter IX Vedic Myths — The Captive Waters p. 216
Chapter X Vedic Myths — The Matutinal Deities p. 276
Chapter XI The Avestic Evidence p. 328
Chapter XII Comparative Mythology p. 364
Chapter XIII The Bearing of Our Results on the History of Primitive Aryan Culture and Religion p. 385
. Index p. 433

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What and where was the mythical kumari kandam

2011-07-15T14:16:00.000+05:30

What and where was the mythical kumari kandam

WHAT AND WHERE WAS THE MYTHICAL KUMARI KANDAM

In my effort to impress upon my readers about the antiquity of the Vedas and the Vedic civilization I have been reading and researching about the same for quite sometimes. Reading an interesting book titled UNDERWORLD by Graham Hancock I came across the mythical land called Kumari Kandam . I will discuss about Graham Hancock’s findings later but it will be a jump start to this article when one would relate Graham’s Hancock’s finding with that of Bal Gangadhar Tilak’s book The ORION where he has postulated with enough evidences that there was an intelligent civilization in the post glacial period some 13000 years ago. We call such civilization, “antediluvian civilization”.

This report was published in TIMES OF INDIA on 25 September 2009.

“ The study of prehistory of SUNDA LAND/LEMURIA/KUMARI KANDAMN is very important. I insist that there was nothing known as ARYAN and DRAVIDIANS in the ancient India. They were just symbols of address for various type of people. ARYANS were NOT a race but a lingual fraternity who owed their ancestry to NAGAS of SUNDA LAND/ KUMARI KANDAM/ LEMURIA. To be very frank, if I can use the term ’Anglicised-’NRI’ to describe the ARYANS of ancient India, as in the modern context , I won’t be drastically wrong. They were ’SANSKRITISED NAGAS’ who returned home after a long sojourn outside Indian sub-continent. Same is true of Dravidians—-they were ‘Non -Sanskritised’ people—–who did not speak Sanskrit.

As time passes many established logics get blown away—particularly about cosmic arena, sociology, geology and astronomy. More recently, it has come to notice that Homo sapiens—–ancestors of present day man first appeared in the Middle East on the banks of River Jordon and NOT the Rift valley of Africa. It is from here the man went to SUNDA LAND or LIMURIA Islands or KANDAM. This land is the SUBMERGED PORTION of ocean between Peninsular coastline of India and modern Indonesia. It is here man first tasted his social growth as a ‘civilized man’ when he established the AGRICULTURAL CIVILISATION which later spread to rest of the world.

This development further debunks ARYAN MIGRATION or ARYAN INVASION THEORY. The agricultural civilization in the coastal region of India or what some call SUNDA LAND/LIMURIA or KANDAM existed in the pre-ice age. This was a KNOWLEDGE RICH society of NAGAS—-followers of Lord Shiva whose temples dot the Subcontinent from Afghanistan-Pakistan in the west and North to North east India in the East and Kerala-Karnataka in the South.

Around the end of last ice age, say some 11000- 8000 BC, the sea level began to rise with the melting of glaciers. By 8000 BC it had risen by 400 feet thus submerging bulk of SUNDA LAND. This forced the people from the region to move up north and west—-along with their VEDIC KNOWLEDGE, which they had generated . When glaciers melted they also formed rivers—–There sprang up rivers like SARASWATI and SINDHU——The migrants from the SUNDALAND settled along the banks of River SARASWATI— for, the need of the water for their agricultural economies was essential——It led to setting up of RIVER CIVILISATIONS. It was the SARASWATI River along which major settlements were established as evidenced by 75% of the settlements being unearthed along its recreated channel, today. It is called INDUS valley Civilization because two early excavations of MOHANJODARO and HARAPPA were found along River Indus and its tributary, River Sutlej. Incidentally, Sutlej and Yamuna were tributaries of River saraswati. This river is worshipped as GODDESS of KNOWLEDGE in Hindu mythology. This is the reason because most of the ancient Indian Civilization—-the resource of Knowledge—was spread along this river. The migrations of Naga people continued towards North and West—-as far as Syria-Iraq—Turkey—Germany—-Hungry—Uzbekistan–Kazakhstan—and many other countries in the Balkans.”

The question that came into my mind is the word LEMURIA. Why is Lemuria so important when dealing with Kumari kandam? Wikipedia gives the definition or some idea about Lemuria. “Lemuria is the name of a hypothetical “lost land” variously located in the Indian and Pacific Oceans. The concept’s 19th century origins lie in attempts to account for discontinuities in biogeography however, the concept of Lemuria has been rendered obsolete by modern theories of plate tectonics. Although sunken continents do exist — like Zealandia in the Pacific and the Kerguelen Plateau in the Indian Ocean Though Lemuria is no longer considered a valid scientific hypothesis, it has been adopted by writers involved in the occult as well as some Tamil writers of India. Accounts of Lemuria differ, but all share a common belief that a continent existed in ancient times and sank beneath the ocean as a result of a geological, often cataclysmic change.” So what is the relationship of Lemuria with that of Kumari kandam? The continent of Lemuria is referred as “Kumari Kandam” in ancient Tamil literature. Tamil is one of the world’s classical languages. Tamil has continuous historical records for more than 2000 years and Tamil language was recognized as a classical language in India (beside the other being Sanscrit). Tamil does not belong to the Indo-European language family.

In our India, we have a good bit of literature in the ancient Tamil texts of our lost continent by the name of “Kumari Kandam”. It is not only mentioned as a first hand eyewitness support in the popular Tamil treatises, Silapathikaram and Manimegalai but it is also mentioned in good graphic detail in the other ancient Tamil texts namely : Tholkappiyam, Purananuru, Kalithokai, Kurunthokai, Kamba Ramayana, Iraiyanar Akapporul, and Thiruvachagam

These texts speak of a Pandya King Nilan Tharu Thiruvil Pandyan 2 who led his people north when the Kumari Kandam continent was submersed by the sea. These Tamil literatures speaks of three noble flourishing periods of Tamil culture. Each of these three phases of high Tamil culture is called Sangam age. The first Sangam age was entered around Then Madurai and the second Sangam age was in the capital city of Kapadapuram. It is only the third and final Sangam age was compiled at Madurai, the present day city in South Tamilnadu. The first two cities namely Then Madurai and Kapadapuram are described to have been in the land of Kumari Kandam south of the present land mass of South India. This information is well collaborated in the other literary references of the land like the Sinhala text – Mahavamsa, Ramayana, Mahabharatha Roman and Greek maps of – Ptolemy Pliny Periplus, and other geological proofs of Al-Biruni observations.
The nature of these extensive literatures, both ancient and medieval, speaking of the lost continents of Kumari Kandam substantiated by geographical, geological, and oceanography proofs ,which strongly suggest that the south Indian Tamil legend of Kumari Kandam may be the real lost continent that the world has been talking about and looking for the past 1000′s of years. “Even though modern scholars date this commentary to the eighth century CE, the tale refers to three Tamil academies which existed for almost ten thousand years,” Veluppillai adds.
It is believed by some Tamil scholars that the first academy existed at southern Maturai and was terminated by sea devouring the city. The Pandya king established a second academy at Kapadapuram. Again, the sea devoured the city. The Pandya king established the third academy in present Maturai (far away from sea coast).
“What is available now as Cankam literature is mentioned as productions of the third academy,” says Velupillai.
“The sea devouring entire sea coast cities in the Indian Ocean area was something that many modern scholars dismissed as unrealistic. It now appears very probable that this tale about devouring of land by the sea, is not just a legend, as some modern scholars surmised,” he says.
“Tamils have by long historical tradition associated themselves with the sea. ‘Cross the seas and make the fortunes’ (Thirai Kadal Odiyum Thiraviam Thedu) is a motto of the ancient Tamils who were driven to make wealth through sea trade,” says professor Sittampalam, Dean of the faculty of advanced studies, University of Jaffna.
“International trade ports are mentioned in the Sangam Literature in Tamil, as well as in Greek and Roman literatures. The Chola Empire had the most powerful Navy during its time. Even as late as in the period of 10th – 15th Century Tamil language was the language of sea trade in the Indian Ocean,” says professor Sittampalam. “Tamils engaged in sea trade spread to other countries, especially in Asia and took along their culture and language. For example, there was found a 2000-years-old pot in Egypt that has Tamil letters on it. The 14th Century inscription was found in Galle, Sri Lanka, has inscriptions is in three languages: Tamil, Chinese and Persian”.
The Cilappatikaram and the Manimekalai, the two earliest epics/narrative poems in Tamil, both refer to a vast landmass that was swallowed by a “cataclysmic landslip” or “on-rush of the sea.” These landslips have submerged vast territory that was called Kumai Nadu or Kumari Kandam, known also as Lemuria to western scholars.
“Even though there is some controversy on the exact date of these works, certain inferences can be made. Large scale destruction by kadatkol seems to have made deep impressions to the Tamil psyche,” says to Dr. Velupillai. The Manimekalai refers in graphic terms to the sea devouring Poompukar or Kavirippoompaddinam, the Chola capital, port and emporium of foreign trade. The New Indian Express of December 2002 published an article that Poompukar site could be the cradle of world civilization, mentioning discovery of archaeological remains of a port city under the sea and hypotheses of well-known scholars. “Reading this with the background of the magnificent description of the prosperity of this cosmopolitan port-city, it is possible now to visualize that a huge tragedy of that magnitude could have taken place,” says Dr. Velupillai.
Tamil scholars note that there have been at least three major floods according to the references they find in Tamil literature and vast part of ancient literature was lost as a result of such events.
“Adiyarkkunallar, the medieval commentator to the Cilappatikaram, gives intriguing details about lands devoured by the sea. He mentions about Ezh Tenku nadu, Ezh Panai nadu, Ezh Kunakarai nadu, etc., listing seven such regions. As Ezh can mean ‘seven’, some later interpreters say that 49 regions (7 by 7) were devoured by the sea,” says Veluppillai. Some Tamil historians argue that the political power of the Tamils diminished due to repeated re-locations and vast damage that was caused to the ancient Tamil homeland by the deluges.

“One can imagine the strength and magnitude of the Tidal wave required to devour a mountainous area that had existed in the ancient coastal belt of the Tamil world,” says professor Shanmugathas.
He also refers to records in Mahavansa, the Buddhist chronicle of Sri Lanka. References in Tamil records speak about devouring of landmass by the sea (kadatkol). “The earliest connected account about kadatkol occurs in the commentary on Iraiyanar akapporul,” says Dr. A. Velupillai, department of religious studies, Arizona State University.
Tamil poets were lamenting about “kadatkol” (devouring of the land by the sea) so often that scholars found it difficult to explain these references of devouring the land mass with towns and villages by the sea. According to the Kumari Kandam tradition, over a period of about just 11,000 years, the Pandyas, a historical dynasty of Tamil kings, formed three Tamil Sangams, in order to foster among their subjects the love of knowledge, literature and poetry. These Sangams were the fountain head of Tamil culture and their principal concern was the perfection of the Tamil language and literature. The first two Sangams were not located in what is now South India but in antediluvian Tamil land to the south which in ancient times bore the name of Kumari Kandam, literally the Land of the Virgin or Virgin Continent.

The first Sangam was head-quartered in a city named Then-madurai (Southern Madurai). It was patronised by a succession of eighty-nine kings and survived for an unbroken period of 4,400 years during which time it approved an immense collection of poems and literature. At the end of that golden age, the First Sangam was destroyed when a deluge arose and Then-madurai itself was swallowed by the sea along with large parts of the land area of Kumari Kandam.

However, the survivors, saving some of the books, were able to relocate further north. They established a Second Sangam in a city called Kavatapuram which lasted 3,700 years. The same fate befell this city as well, when it too was swallowed by the sea and lost forever all its works with the sole exception of the Tolkappiyam, a work on Tamil grammar. Following the inundation of Kavatapuram, the survivors once again relocated northward in a city identified with modern Madurai in Tamilnadu, then known as Vada-madurai (Northern Madurai). The Third Sangam lasted for a period of 1850 years and most scholars agree that that Sangam terminated around 350 AD.

Literary evidence of the lost continent of Kumari Kandam comes principally from the literature of the Third Tamil Sangam and the historical writings based on them. Many of them refer to the lost Tamil lands and to the deluges which ancient peoples believed had swallowed those lands. The Silappathikaram, a well known Tamil literary work, for instance mentions, ” the river Prahuli and the mountain Kumari surroundered by many hills being submerged by the raging sea”.

The following is based on an article on Sage Agathiyar –SAGE AGASTHYA – FOREMOST OF THE SIDDHAS by Dr. Mandayam Kumar of the Siddha Medical Research Institute, Bangalore:

“‘Agathiyar Muni is considered to be the embodiment of one of the nine celestial intellectuals who came to this earth for enlightening human beings.’ Siddhars are those who have attained perfection in yogic practices to ultimately reach the stage of immortality. Through higher-level yogic practices they attain a state of ultra luminosity that results in invisibility; thus they remain impervious to ordinary vision.’ Such siddhars work incessantly for the propagation of knowledge and the evolution of souls.’

Dr Mandayam Kumar says, it was possible to find out details about sage Agathiyar during the course of literary research on the Siddha medical sciences in a Tamil manuscript written on palm leaves about 3,000 years ago. The text is titled ‘Prapancha Kaandam’ and runs into several volumes mentions the Dr.

It is attributed to Lord Muruga. It was narrated by sage Agathiyar while recorded by sage Pulasthiya. The original Tamil manuscript is in the care of Pandit S. Jayanari of Vellore says the Dr. The Dr provides information extracted from this work. The Prapancha Kaandam commences with explanations about the origin of the earth and the entire solar system. The earth is believed to be a fragment of the sun blown into space as a big ball of fire billions of years ago. This big fire globe, after spinning round and round at a very high speed for innumerable length of time, began to cool on its surface.

During the course of its voyage from the sun through different gaseous spheres of highly energetic particles the earth being attracted and repelled by different planets of the solar system, acquired the energetic potencies of all the planets.

Later it gained a constant movement rotating on its own axis having its path around the sun. It is stated that the earth took its origin 200 billion years ago.’

The Dr states that the world was not habitable having only land and water for half this period of time.

‘Gradually vegetation began to appear as the earliest form of life on earth. Subsequently aquatic living creatures followed by insects, reptiles, birds and animals came upon; with the last being humans. Each species had its own genetic origin and human beings are considered the sixth in the order of original creation. It is stated that planet earth is the only place for the survival and existence of life in the entire solar system. As life began to exist time began to be counted.

The entire period was divided into yugas. The present Kali Yuga is stated to have started from 3100 BC and may correspond to 14th March 3100 BC.’

ON THE BIRTH OF AGATHIYAR

The Dr. reveals for the first time the parental heritage of the sage.

Sage Agathiyar was said to have been born about 4573 years prior to the commencement of Kali Yuga at a place in Gujarat, in the early hours of Tuesday, 14th of February 7673 BC. Belonging to the early Aryan race, his father Bhargava was well learned while his mother Indumathi was from Punjab. They were both devotees of the Pasupatha order of the sage Rishabha Muni. Agathiyar then had his early education in Gujarat. As his thirst for knowledge in particular on philosophy, yoga, medicine, and astronomy was immense he traveled all over Kashmir, Tibet, China, Nepal and Kailas in Manchuria. Mount Kailas was deemed to be in Manchuria those days.

He became a disciple of sage Nandi and Dhanvantri. He then traveled towards the south to Cambodia and Malaya. In Cambodia he established the very first of his many educational institutions for the propagation of philosophy and science.

After establishing a similar institution and hospital in Malaya he crossed the sea to the continent of Kumari Kandam. During Agathiyar’s time Kumari Kandam occupied a vast area extending from the present day Sri Lanka to the Antarctic. This continent was ruled by Ravana, a great devotee of Lord Siva. King Ravana gave away a portion of his kingdom to Agathiyar to establish more institutions. The foremost of these institutions in this region was known as Arunodaya Giri or Meozone. Here Agathiyar practiced yoga and taught it to his large following of disciples. He then went back north to Malayawhere he was betrothed to the king’s daughter. He then ruled the kingdom of Vijayapuri.

He returned to Kumari Kandam where he met Lord Murugan in the form of sage Kandan or Supramaniar at Trikona Malai, present day Trincomali. At the hill station called Kadari Kama or Kadhirgama, Lord Murugan imparted spiritual knowledge to Agathiyar. In his meditation he could see into the future; see impending calamities. As a result he moved to the North Pole considering it to be a save place. This period of his move to the Arctic was said to coincide with the end of the Dwapara Yuga placed at about 6580 BC. Just as he had seen of an impending calamity and had decided to move north, a tremendous explosion in the planet Mars sents a piece of debris towards earth. This impact caused a great deluge on the earth. Significant portions of Kumari Kandam submerged into the Indian Ocean. Continental drift resulted in the present day arrangement of this region.

On returning to Mancuria after the great flood Kailas was no more but instead the Himalayan mountain range had emerged in North India. Amidst all this geographical changes says the Dr, sage Agathiyar went seeking for a place that would not be affected by future calamities. He located a mountain range in South India. This is the present day Courtalam. This spot is said to be the safest place and free from any future catastrophes. Here Agathiyar met Lord Siva and Uma in the form of Dhashina Murthi and Shenbaga Devi. This spot where the meeting took place between Dhashina Murthi, Shenbaga Devi, Lord Murugan and Agathiyar was Mahadeva Giri. This meeting also signified the commencement of Kali Yuga.

Other sages then stated coming to Mahadeva Giri. Lord Dhashina Murthi revived the knowledge of the Vedas and instructed these sages to propagate this knowledge at the appropriate manner and time for the benefit of humanity. This imparting of this knowledge was said to have taken place on the 21st day of the Tamil month of Kartigai, during the eleventh year, Eswara Samvatsara, of Kali Yuga. Agathiyar gave much importance to this day. All his dating was reckoned from this day. The sages recorded their knowledge on palm leaves after extensive discussions held in Alagan Kulam and presented them to Dhashina Murthi for his perusal. This included the 64 kinds of learning, 18 Puranas, 96 Tatvas, and 48 branches of scientific knowledge. The entire literature in Tamil came to be called Sidha Veda. It was then translated into the four existing languages of that period vis Sanskrit, Greek, Hebrew and Chinese. Sage Agathiyar on the instruction of Lord Murugan originated the Tamil language. Sage Bhogar from China, Thaeraiyar from Malaya, Yugimuni from Kerala, Pulipani from Kantha Malai, Pulathiyan and Kapiyan too served Agathiyar. A conference of sidhas called Sidhar Sabai was held during the 53rd year, Sidharti Samvatsara, of Kali Yuga at Courtalam.

An institution known as Sidhar Gnana Koodam was inaugurated by Lord Murugan and was headed by Agathiyar. Pulathiyan and Kapiyan headed the literary section while Pulipani in research. Thaeraiyar who was into surgery headed a medical research centre established at Thorana Malai. Yugimuni who was into herbal medicines headed an Ayurvedic hospital at Paradesi Kundai. Sage Bhogar who was in charge of all scientific researches established an alchemy research centre at Thiruparankundram. Pambatti Sidhar was heading a team researching venom at Marudamalai.

After having established these institutions Agathiyar again started on an extensive mission of propagating the wealth of knowledge gained by these sidhars in Tibet, Manchuria, Egypt, Palestine, Rome, America, Africa, Malaya and Arab world. After satisfactorily completing their mission of propagating the said teachings the sages went into ‘Samadhi’ merging themselves into the cosmos. Kandan went into Samadhi in Thorana Malai, Bhogar in Palani, Thaeraiyar, Pulipanai and Yugimuni in Kantha Malai, and Agathiyar himself choosed to come back to Courtalam. He chosed a spot called Dhashina Meru in the Pothigai Hills. This spot is also the abode of Lord Siva as Dhashina Murthi.”

The reason for this article to be mentioned here is very simple. Here is a Siddha Purush ( An enlightened soul),who has brought about a pertinent reason for kumari kandam to vanish under the sea and gave a reason for such a calamity, for a landmass as huge as kumari kandam to be devoured by the sea. This would need a tremendous unnatural force and a massive rise in the sea level. The type and intensity of such a devastating force would be unfathomable to us today for we have not seen anything like this earlier and hopefully would not see in the future. Thinking about such a force, the television visuals of the tsunami that hit Japan on 31st march 2011 came flooding. Youtube.com has visuals of this tsunami and each one of them is nastier than the earlier. This force of nature was severe and it has brought about human suffering which is unimaginable. There were immeasurable Loss of lives and property and the economy of the nation took a severe beating. So imagine what would have been the force of the destruction that obliterated Kumari kandam from the face of the earth? If that be the case and there was a civilization living, when the great forces of nature culminated into an unprecedented devastation and the entire land, a big land something like a continent, went underwater, then we could expect to find some evidences of human settlement in the adjoining sea. National Institute of oceanography of India did research in this very direction and did find many evidences about the topography, as described in the Tamil sangams, and human settlements. I will come to the evidences and the nature of the research later in this article but now I must let my readers understand as to why and how Lemuria got into the Tamil literature.

The narratives about Lemuria found their way into colonial India about the time when folklore began to permeate historic knowledge as though they were fact. The writings of Wishar Cerve and the maps of Scott Elliot were brought into Tamil writings by K. Appadurai, in his book Kumari Kandam Allathu Kadal Konda Thennadu (Kumari Continent or the Submerged Southern Land, 1941). The term Lemuria found its way into certain Tamil textbooks and was given the Tamil name Kumari kandam, or continent of Kumari. Names from Tamil classics were given to the mountain ranges, rivers, places and areas. For example, the puranic geography of an axial mountain called Meru as the centre of Jambudvipa (Sanskrit) or Navalan Theevu (Tamil) was accepted, and, later on, these names were attributed to certain parts of Lemuria, giving it acceptability among Tamil readers. In the 1920s, with Tamil revivalism and the efforts to counter the “Aryan” and associated Sanskrit dominance, the concept of Lemuria was wedded to the notion of the lost land referred to in Tamil literature.

There are a few references in Tamil Sangam classics to a landmass that was swallowed up by the sea. Historians consider the first three centuries A.D. as the Sangam period. The reference to the tradition about three Tamil Sangams (assemblies or academies) is noted in Iraiyanar Kalviyalurai, attributed to Nakeerar. According to this commentary, the Pandya kings patronised Tamil poets in their capital, where the Sangam was located. According to tradition, the Mudal Sangam (first assembly), was located in Thenmadurai. When the sea swallowed Thenmadurai, the capital was shifted to Kapatapuram and the second or Idai Sangam was established. The Idai Sangam functioned until a deluge destroyed Kapatapuram. After the deluge, the Pandyas shifted their capital to the present-day Madurai where the last or Kadai Sangam was established.

Some of the important references from Tamil Sangam classics are as follows: 1) in Purananuru 9, verses 10-11 are interpreted as a reference to a Pandya king who ruled a part of the lost land where the river Pahruli flowed. 2) in Silapathigaram (Kadu Kaan Kaathai) (11:17-22) is a reference to a Pandya king who won over kingdoms in Imayam (the Himalayas) and Gangai (the Ganga) to compensate for his land lost to the deluge. Tamil scholars such as Devaneya Paavaanar consider the deluge under reference to be the one that destroyed Thenmadurai. 3) According to Adiyarku Nallar, poem 104:1-4 from Mullai Kalithogai indicates that the Pandya king resettled the survivors of the deluge in certain Chera and Chola territories. It is portrayed by certain Tamil writers that the series of deluges destroyed the Tamil civilisation and the survivors spread out and civilised other parts of the world.

The Tamil tradition about a lost land was committed to writing after the 10th century by commentators like Nakeerar in his commentary on Iraiyanar Akapporulurai. Nachinarkiniyar and Adiyarku Nallar followed him. Those who wrote the commentaries exaggerated the extent of land that was submerged by the deluges referred to in Silapathigaram and Kalithogai. According to the commentators, there were 49 countries ( nadu) in the lost land of Kumari and the distance between the river Kumari and the river Pahruli that flowed in the lost land was 700 katham, which according to one calculation is about 770 km.

The crucial question is whether the land referred to as Kumari was as large as a continent? The advocates of Kumari kandam interpreted the term nadu to mean country. In Tamil Nadu and Kerala many small towns and villages have in their names the term nadu, which basically referred to a settlement, as opposed to kadu, or forest. In the above Tamil references there is no mention of the term kandam, referring to land the size of a continent.

According to Pingala Nikandu, a lexicon of ancient words, k andam means country. In the words of the historian N. Subrahmanian (1996), “It is possible that a small area of land (to the extent of a present-day district) was lost by sea erosion and Pahruli and Kumari were parts of that territory and that the king shifted this capital to some other place. But in all probability that event occurred only in the 5th or 4th century B.C. Such erosions on a limited scale were not unknown to the southern and eastern seaboards of Tamil Nadu. If the fiction is removed from the fact, the entire romantic superstructure called the theory of the Kumari kandam will stand exposed, as non-history” ( The Tamils – Their History, Culture and Civilisation; pages 26, 27). If the oral traditions and the subsequent writings exaggerated the size of the submerged land called Kumari, what was the background to the lost land referred to in Sangam literature?

Geology emerged as a scientific discipline in the late 19th century when both scientific and popular imagination was dominated by Biblical accounts of creation and deluges. Dramatic geological events were attributed to catastrophes like earthquakes and volcanic eruptions. Eventually, the understanding of phenomena such as plate tectonics, continental drift and sea floor spreading dismissed the catastrophe theories. The speculation about land bridges and lost continents faded into obscurity elsewhere in the world but not quite so in Tamil Nadu.

Since the early part of the last century major strides have been made in the geological and geophysical understanding of the earth. For instance, in 1912 Alfred Wegener, a German meteorologist, explained the concept of continental drift; in 1924, the British geologist Arthur Holmes explained that the convection current in the mantle could cause continents to drift; in 1962, the American Geologist Harry Hess pointed out that continental drift could be explained by sea-floor spreading; in 1966, the concept of sea-floor spreading was established by independent oceanographic data involving microfossils, sediments of the sea floor, measure of heat flow from the earth’s interior and palaeo-magnetic and seismic studies. Since the first oceanic sounding in 1840, the study of oceans, including their chemistry, biology, geology and physics, has advanced in the last century. Improved coring devices have enlarged our knowledge of the oceans, and deep ocean floors have been mapped by echo-soundings and ultra-sonic signals. In the 1940s, seismic methods were also used to study the ocean floor.

Evidence of former glaciations on a wide scale became overwhelmingly conclusive in the last century. During the past two million years, there have been five major glacial advances and five glacial retreats as the globe began to warm. The last of such periods is the present period known as Holocene. The last Ice Age caused the fragmented distribution of Homo sapiens, and the enormous environmental changes that took place with global warming had a profound influence on the prehistory of humankind.

Extensive studies were done to understand global warming during the interglacial periods; sediments were subjected to meticulous analyses to establish the age and palaeo-geographical conditions in many parts of the world. For instance, about 18,000 years ago, during the time of the last Ice Age, ice sheets in the poles spread much wider and the sea level was more than 100 meters lower than it is today, exposing a large area of land along the continental shelf. Then Siberia was connected to Alaska and along this land bridge, the peopling of the Americas and migration of animals happened over a long period. At this time, the landmass of present-day Papua New Guinea, Australia and Tasmania were joined together as were the British Isles with Europe. After the last Ice Age the level of the Indian Ocean, like the rest of the oceans, fell. Sri Lanka was connected to the Indian peninsula by a landmass, which now lies under the Gulf of Mannar. In the following 8,000 years, global warming continued and large masses of ice and glaciers melted, raising sea levels in stages and inundating low-lying lands. The portion of the continental shelf of the south Indian peninsula and the land that connected it to Sri Lanka also went under water as the sea level rose.

Records of sea-level fluctuations and related climatic changes are preserved in the layered sediments of the seabed. These can be studied through data such as faunal contents and nature of sediments. Rajiv Nigam and N.H. Hashimi of the National Institute of Oceanography (NIO), Goa, have done extensive work on sea-level rise by analysing sediments for microfossils such as pollen and foraminifera to determine palaeo-climate and by dating corals from the continental shelf in the west coast of peninsular India. The team studied marine sediments to generate proxy climate records through which changes in palaeo sea levels could be deciphered.

Nigam and P.J. Henriques, also of the NIO, have developed a regional model for palaeo depth determination on the basis of percentage of foraminifera in surface sediments of the Arabian Sea. The significant results of the study on palaeo sea levels are that the sea level was lower by 100 m about 14,500 years ago and by 60 m about 10,000 years ago and that during the last 10,000 years there had been three major episodes of sea-level fluctuation. These sea-level changes had affected human settlements and peopling of the coastal areas and had left their signatures on archaeological events.

Once the status of the periodic sea-level rise was established, it was easy to decipher the configuration of the coastline, giving allowance wherever applicable to tectonic activities and deposition of silt at the confluence of rivers. The Naval Hydrographic Office, Dehra Dun, has produced hydrographic charts (INT 717071-1986 to the scale 1:10,000,000 and INT 7007706-1973 of scale 1:3,500,000) pertaining to Cape Comorin-Gulf of Mannar, where it surveyed the depth of the sea floor with echo-sounders, which measure the sea floor contours with great accuracy.

It is possible to demarcate the land lost to the sea in the south of India from postglacial inundation maps that indicate the significant changes in the coastline. Inundation maps on the basis of bathymetric contours and the sea-level curve for the central west coast to work out the configuration of the coastline south of India since the last Ice Age. This study shows that about 14,500 years ago the sea level was lower by approximately 100 m than the present sea level. The land between the present coast and the bathymetric contour of 100 m roughly was the land that was exposed during that time.

In other words, hypothetically, if a 100 m column of sea water were to be removed, the land that went under water would be exposed. At that time the present Gulf of Mannar was a landmass of 36,000 sq. km connecting Sri Lanka with peninsular India and the coast was wider by about 80 km to the east, south and west of present-day Cape Comorin exposing a triangular mass of 6,500 sq. km adjoining the Cape. The coastline was 25-35 km wider than the present near Cuddalore and about 25 km wider near Colombo.

The increased rate of global warming between 12,000 and 10,000 years ago saw the sea level rise almost 50 m, inundating low-lying lands and covering a major part of the exposed continental shelf. About 10,000 years ago, the sea level was about 50 m lower than the present sea level. At that time, the land extended about 25 km south of the Cape and the coast was about 40 km broader than the present coastline along the east and the west, which exposed about 1,000 sq km of land near Cape Comorin. Rameswaram and Mannar were joined by land and the land that extended in the present-day Gulf of Mannar was a 2,500-sq km stretch marked by sedimentary formations and coral reefs.

planet rotation and especially the difference in rotation speed between poles and equator force earth mantel to strain and to break more easily where the strain is strongest, that is at the equator regions. These tectonic processes played important role in the disappearance of the ancient continent known as Lemuria to western scholars. Sri Lanka together with India, Indonesia and Malaysia were a part of this continent. Many islands in the Pacific and Indian oceans are remnants of this continent that in ancient time covered the whole area of today’s ocean. Storetvedt, who seems to reject the theory of continental drift and plate tectonics, says that descriptions of cataclysms in early literature when land suddenly went underwater are logical. But they should be proven to be scientific facts. This can be done with the help of sea-floor analysis that is possible to carry out. Modern theories find supportive evidences both in ancient literature and language history.

What we know of the antiquity of Tamil civilization seems to be top of an iceberg. More exciting and interesting prehistory of Tamils may emerge from the jolt applied by the tsunami. Scientific details relating to these catastrophic events, particularly the correlation of the available socio-anthropological knowledge from the Tamil literature with geological research is yet to be found or ascertained. There is ample scope for Tamil scholars, socio-anthropologists and geologists to do further research on these topics.

History of kumari kandam (Lemuria) theory.
1860 Philip Lutley Sclater Puzzled by the presence of fossil lemurs in both Madagascar and India, but not in Africa nor the Middle East, Sclater proposed that Madagascar and India had once been part of a larger continent, which he named “Lemuria” for its lemurs.The acceptance of Darwinism led scientists to seek to trace the diffusion of species from their points of evolutionary origin
Melchior Neumayr in his book Erdgeschichte in 1887. Many hypothetical submerged land bridges and continents were proposed during the 19th century, in order to account for the present distribution of species.
Ernst Haeckel, a German Darwinian taxonomist, proposed Lemuria as an explanation for the absence of “missing link” fossil records. According to another source, Haeckel put forward this thesis prior to Sclater (but without using the name ‘Lemuria’). Locating the origins of the human species on this lost continent, he claimed the fossil record could not be found because it had sunk beneath the sea.
In 1999, drilling by the JOIDES Resolution research vessel in the Indian Ocean discovered evidence that a continent about a third of the size of Australia sank about 20 million years ago. Samples showed pollen and fragments of wood in a 90 million-year-old sediment. This might lead one to expect similarity of dinosaur fossil evidence and will help to understand the breakup of the Indian and Australian land masses.It does not support the concept of Lemuria as a land bridge for mammals.
Madame Blavatsky’s Lemuria,Lemuria entered the lexicon of the Occult through the works of Madame Blavatsky, who claimed in the 1880s to have been shown an ancient, pre-Atlantean Book of Dzyan by the Mahatmas. Within Blavatsky’s complex cosmology, which includes seven “Root Races”, Lemuria was occupied by the “Third Root Race”, which was about seven foot tall, sexually hermaphroditic, egg-laying, mentally undeveloped and spiritually more pure than the following “Root Races”. Before the coming of the Lemurians, the second “Root Race” is said to have dwelled in Hyperborea.After the subsequent creation of mammals, Mme. Blavatsky revealed to her readers, some Lemurians turned to bestiality. The gods, aghast at the behavior of these “mindless” men, sank Lemuria into the ocean and created a “Fourth Root Race”—endowed with intellect—on Atlantis.Lemuria and Mount Shasta
In 1894, Frederick Spencer Oliver published A Dweller on Two Planets, which claimed that survivors from a sunken continent called Lemuria were living in or on Mount Shasta in northern California. The Lemurians lived in a complex of tunnels beneath the mountain and occasionally were seen walking the surface dressed in white robes.This belief has been repeated by such individuals as the cultist Guy Warren Ballard in the 1930s who formed the I AM Foundation. It is also repeated by followers of the Ascended Masters and the Great White Brotherhood. This list includes such organizations as Bridge to Freedom, The Summit Lighthouse, Church Universal and Triumphant, The Temple of The Presence, and The Hearts Center. According to L. Sprague de Camp, Mme. Blavatsky was influenced by other writers on the theme of Lost Continents, notably Ignatius L. Donnelly, a cult leader named Thomas Lake Harris and the French writer Louis Jacolliot.
Dravidologist Devaneya Pavanar, who held that all languages on earth were merely corrupted Tamil dialects proposed Kumari Kandam is a sunken kingdom also known as Lemuria . According to these modernist interpretations of motifs in classical Tamil literature — the epics Cilappatikaram and Manimekalai that describe the submerged city of Puhar — the Dravidians originally came from land south of the present day coast of South India that became submerged by successive floods. There are various claims from Tamil authors that there was a large land mass connecting Australia and the present day Tamil Nadu coast.Adiyarkkunelar, described the distance between the Prahuli and Kumari rivers as 700 kavathams. This distance has been interpreted as about 7,000 modern miles (11,000 km).

Having said about the scope of the research based on the ancient scripts and literature the question automatically comes as to what precisely the Tamil literature says about kumari kandam.

Three literary sources are said to say something about the kumari kandam ,

Silapathikaram says,
kumarikOdum kodunkadal koLLa…” The mighty sea at the end of kumari(kanyakumari) submergedHere the author ilango adigal speaks about sea around kumari submerging the puhar(keveri pattinam) port.Silappadikaram’also describes Kadal Vadimpalampa Nindra Pandyan said to have thrown his spear towards the sea. The sea retaliated by swallowing a large area including Pahruli river and Panmalai Adukkam.

Manimekalai says,
Records the same incident of the puhar being engulfed by sea. Both silapathikaram and manimekalai both not being eyewitness accounts and known for gross exageration of facts clearly talk sea engulfing the city of puhar.

Kalittogai
Sangam literary work, `Kalithogai’ (Mullaikkali, verse number 4) calls it `Kadal vowal.’ The poem says that when tidal waves swept away his land, the Pandya monarch did not despair, but forged ahead into the territories of Cheras and Chozhas and brought the invaded country under his sway, thus making good the loss of territory due to the sea-swell. This is somewhat reminiscent of the siddha purush sage Agathiyar which I have already mentioned earlier in this article.

Sri Lanka together with India, Indonesia and Malaysia were a part of this continent. Many islands in the Pacific and Indian oceans are remnants of this continent that in ancient time covered the whole area of today’s ocean

The lost continent of Kumari Kandam

It turns out that everything does not actually come from India, it comes from Kumari Kandam. And by everything, I do mean everything.

“Homo Dravida” first evolved in Kumari Kandam; it is the cradle of civilization; the birthplace of all languages in general and of the Tamil language in particular. This is where the first and second great ages (Sangams?) of the Tamils happened, not in India, but in the true Dravidian homeland, further south.

R. Mathivanan, then Chief Editor of the Tamil Etymological Dictionary Project of the Government of Tamilnadu, in 1991 … [produced] the following timeline …:

ca. 200,000 to 50,000 BC: evolution of “the Tamilian or Homo Dravida”,
ca. 200,000 to 100,000 BC: beginnings of the Tamil language
50,000 BC: Kumari Kandam civilisation
20,000 BC: A lost Tamil culture of the Easter Island which had an advanced civilisation
16,000 BC: Lemuria submerged
6087 BC: Second Tamil Sangam established by a Pandya king
3031 BC: A Chera prince in his wanderings in the Solomon Island saw wild sugarcane and started cultivation in Tamilnadu.
1780 BC: The Third Tamil Sangam established by a Pandya king
7th century BC: Tolkappiyam (the earliest extant Tamil grammar)… [Link]

The continent was destroyed by three large floods which wiped out most of the golden civilization with it:

It is believed by some Tamil scholars that the first academy existed at southern Maturai and was terminated by sea devouring the city. The Pandya king established a second academy at Kapadapuram. Again, the sea devoured the city. The Pandya king established the third academy in present Maturai (far away from sea coast).

The tsunami of December 26, 2004 vividly demonstrated the destructive force of tidal waves and what havoc the attendant deluges could cause. It was, however, not unknown to the ancient Tamils who occupied southern India from that time. Their traditions refer to extensive lands submerged in the remote past that had once existed in the Indian Ocean, south of Kanya Kumari or Cape Comorin. They had indeed a word for such happenings. They called it kadatkol – meaning the sea devouring the land.
The name of the lost lands is Kumari Kandam. At the time of those inundations, they were home to a high Tamil civilisation that hosted the First and Second Tamil Sangams or Acadamies of Advanced Learning. The Tamil language and literature as well as the philosophy and culture were cultivated and fostered through such Sangams. The works of these two Sangams were lost when the cities in which they were created were submerged by such inundations. Though the tradition of these Tamil Sangams and the deluges which destroyed them lived on, there was no historical evidence forthcoming to back them until very recently. There was an article in Godavaya, Sri Lanka 14 March 2009:

“Marine archaeologists have just discovered evidence of a large submerged landmass southeast of Sri Lanka. They believe it could be a legendary lost island closely linked to the culture and history of Sri Lankan people.
The discovery was made by a team of Dutch and Sri Lankan scientists based on satellite maps and underwater sample extractions from the deep sea. Preliminary data need to be verified by a deep sea submersible expedition during 2009 – 2010, according to a member of the research team who did not want to be identified.
The landmass is estimated to be between 450,000 and 475,000 square kilometres, which is about seven times the total land area of Sri Lanka.
This could well be the long lost island of Irisiyawa, which is euphemistically mentioned in our chronicles and hinted at in the writings of Greek historians, said Dr Godwin Samarawickrama, a maritime historian at the Indian Ocean Institute based in Melacca, Malaysia.
He added: The existence of such an island has been speculated and talked in hush-hush terms among divers and archaeologists for decades. This is the Indian Ocean`s own version of Atlantis!
Irisiyawa`s existence is first mentioned in the Sri Lankan chronicle of Culavamsa. Sinhalese Sandesa (message poem) writers in the 14th to 16th centuries often refer to the enormous psychological effect by sunken Irisiyawa on royal families, aristocracy and ordinary people. Some say the legacy of Irisiyawa has continued well into the twenty first century.

Other experts are more sceptical, and point out long-standing speculations about Kumari Kandam, a legendary sunken landmass said to have been located to the south of present-day Kanyakumari District at the southern tip of India. Some also call it Lemuria, a continent that existed in ancient times and sank beneath the ocean as a result of a geological, often cataclysmic, change. There is no scientific evidence to support these claims.
Sri Lanka must quickly assert its historical and territorial claims over the newly discovered sunken island, said Gajaba Vidyadheera, a senior lecturer in history at the University of Peradeniya. If not, other countries and cultures can stake their own claims, leading to disputes and even international litigation.
But the marine archaeology team who made the discovery advise caution. We need much more evidence before even considering any claims, and historical and cultural speculation could only muddy the deep waters, said a Dutch member of the team, none of who would make any statement on the record.

In recent years, much evidence has been found of maritime activity in and off the southern coast of Sri Lanka. In late 2008, an underwater search of the seas around Godavaya, Hambantota district, carried out by the Central Cultural Fund, revealed the wreck of a ship, possibly dating back to the 1st Century AD. If confirmed, this could be the oldest shipwreck in the Indian Ocean.
Sri Lanka with its 65,610 square kilometres is currently ranked at No 121 out of 231 countries and territories according to their land area. If the estimated landmass of submerged Irisiyawa is added, this would immediately boost Sri Lanka`s ranking to around 50, comparable to that of Thailand with 513,120 sq km.
The archipelago nation of Maldives, which lies to the southwest of Sri Lanka, has only 298 sq km and ranks No 201, the smallest country in Asia.
Atlantis is a legendary island mentioned by Greek philosopher Plato. While no hard evidence for its existence has yet been found, it has fascinated many historians, writers and explorers for centuries.

Recent genetic Studies have shown that there were no GENETIC DIFFERENCES between North and South Indians. Please refer to —– “A prehistory of Indian Y chromosomes: Evaluating demic diffusion scenarios”. Proceedings of National Academy of Sciences of United States of America ; 103(4) carried out on 26 Jan 2004. . Genetically speaking, ANCIENT NORTH INDIANS (ANI) came to this land some 40,000 years from Middle East and ANCIENT SOUTH INDIANS (ASI) entered South India through Australia some 60,000 years back——What ever genetic differences existed between ANI and ASI that was some 40,000 years back is . Here is an extract from a study report on ” ARYAN-DRAVID -DIVIDE” MYTH-Study:-

“———-.A study of 132 individuals, 560,000 single-nucleotide polymorphisms in 25 different Indian groups were analyzed, providing strong evidence in support of the notion that modern Indians are a hybrid population descending from two pre-historic, genetically divergent populations[citation needed], one of which, referred to as the ‘Ancestral North Indians’, 40,000 years ago and the other, called the ‘Ancestral South Indians’, 60,000 years ago. The intermingling of ANI’s and ASI’s happened in the same period as the ANI’s first appeared, 40,000 years ago ——-” .

When I went through this article I was so dumb struck? Here are all the evidences to show that the very basis of Human evolution, its physical, social, cultural on which the popular science rests and on the basis of which we learned about homo sapiens, is so wrong.

Here are more evidences of a mythical place, a place we may call anything, Lemuria? Or Kumari kandam ? or whatever. . It lies on southeast India’s Coromandel coast facing the Bay of Bengal between modern Tamil Nadu and Sri Lanka. Its immediate offshore area has been the subject of marine archaeological investigations by India’s National Institute of Oceanography since the 1980′s — and numerous non-controversial finds of man-made structures dated between the third century AD and the third century BC have been made in the “inter-tidal zone” close to shore at depths down to 6 feet (approximately 2 metres).

These finds of structures in shallow water (some so shallow that they are exposed at low tide) have been quite widely written-up in the archaeological literature. But for some reason other discoveries that the NIO has made in deeper water off Poompuhar have attracted no attention at all. Most notably these other discoveries include a second completely separate group of structures fully three miles from the Poompuhar shore in water that is more than 70 feet (23 metres) deep. The lack of interest is surprising because to anyone with even minimal knowledge of post-glacial sea-level rise their depth of submergence is – or should be – highly anomalous. Indeed according to Glenn Milne’s sea-level data the land on which these structures were built last stood above water at the end of the Ice Age more than 11,000 years ago.

Graham Hancock in his book ” UNDERWORLD” SAYS “Is it a coincidence that there are ancient Tamil flood myths that speak of a great kingdom that once existed in this area called Kumari Kandam that was swallowed up by the sea? Amazingly the myths put a date of 11,600 years ago on these events — the same timeframe given by Plato for the end of Atlantis in another ocean.”

Like the cities in the Gulf of Cambay the underwater structures three miles offshore of Poompuhar were first identified by an instrument called sidescan sonar that profiles the seabed. One structure in particular was singled out for investigation and was explored by divers from India’s National Institute of Oceanography in 1991 and 1993. Although they were not at that time aware of the implications of its depth of submergence — i.e. that it is at least 11,500 years old — the 1991 study confirms that it is man-made and describes it as:

a horse-shoe-shaped object, its height being one to two metres. A few stone blocks were found in the one-metre wide arm. The distance between the two arms in 20 metres. Whether the object is a shrine or some other man-made structure now at 23 metres [70 feet] depth remains to be examined in the next field season.

The 1993 study refines the measurements:

The structure of U-shape was located at a water depth of 23 metres which is about 5 kilometres off shore. The total peripheral length of the object is 85 metres while the distance between the two arms is 13 metres and the maximum height is 2 metres Divers observed growth of thick marine organism on the structure, but in some sections a few courses of masonry were noted

Graham Hancock took to the expedition himself along with the scientist of National Institute of oceanography. He remarks “After 1993, no further marine archaeology was conducted along the Poompuhar coast until 2001 when I arranged with the NIO to dive on the U-shaped structure with funding from Channel 4 television in Britain and the Learning Channel in the US. Exclusive footage of the structure was filmed and is shown in episode 2 of the Underworld television series. Chapter 14 of the book is a report of our dives at Poompuhar, and what we found there.

Dr A.S. Gaur of the NIO told me on camera that it would have required “a very great technology” to build the U-shaped structure — one far beyond the abilities of known cultures in India 11,500 years ago. For Dr Gaur this is a reason to doubt the accuracy of the sea-level-data which suggests that the structure was submerged so long ago. However the NIO have not yet been successful in recovering any datable materials or artefacts that could tell us its age more directly (for example by C-14 or TL tests).

My own expedition to Poompuhar with the NIO in 2001 was limited to diving on the U-shaped structure and one neighbouring structure. But what’s really exciting is that more than 20 other large structures are known to be located in the same area down to depths of more than 100 feet. These have so far been identified only by sidescan sonar and never yet explored by divers. I’ve organised an expedition jointly with India’s National Institute of Oceanography and John Blashford-Snell’s Scientific Exploration Society in Britain to map and investigate these other structures in March/April 2002.

The Cambay and Poompuhar discoveries are both reported in depth for the first time in Underworld and set into the proper context of the flood myths and inundation history of the broader regions to which they belong.

If they are what they seem to be — a caution I must repeat since so little research has actually been done by anyone — then they signal an exciting new era in Indian archaeology in which the investigation of submerged ruins will play an increasingly important role. How do the Poompuhar finds compare with those in Cambay? Are they both parts of the same lost civilisation? Or do they perhaps represent two separate Ice Age cultures, one based in the north and the other in the south of the subcontinent?

Further exploration, involving divers, sonar scans and the recovery and analysis of artefacts will provide the answers.

And for reasons that I explain in Underworld, I think India’s most ancient scriptures, the Vedas, also have a lot to tell us. There are tremendously good reasons to disbelieve the scholarly consensus (certainly the consensus amongst Western scholars) that the Vedas were composed as late as 1500 B.C. Parts of them probably do date from then; but some of the hymns could be much older than that — carried down by oral traditions from much earlier times. I think it all goes back to the Ice Age.” Therefore Bal Gangadhar Tilak was not wrong when he said that the Vedic civilization was the civilization of the last Ice Age and the last glacial and that this was the civilization which was the mother of all civilization that flourished in the world after 11000 years BC or 13000 Years from present.

Scientists have acknowledged that the language, the people, the culture and the literature are some of the oldest to be found on earth – anywhere. A Wikipedia snippet says:

“Tamil Nadu’s history dates back to pre-historic times. Archaeological evidence points to this area being one of the longest continuous habitations in India. In Adichanallur, 24 km (15 mi) from Tirunelveli, archaeologists from the Archaeological Survey of India unearthed 169 clay urns containing human skulls, skeletons and bones, plus husks and grains of rice, charred rice and Neolithic Celts, giving evidence confirming them to be of the Neolithic period, 3800 years ago”

Scientists have actually uncovered a large amount of giant eggs and skeletons of Sauropods (huge Reptilian Dinosaurs) in the area. I mention this because some of the sangam (the oldest Tamil literature, most of which is lost) mentions Reptilian-like beings living alongside humans. Ancient Tamil literature may also be among the earliest to mention flying chariots, a concept later discovered in other cultures and religious texts:

There are also references to the rivers Pahruli and Kumari, that are said to have flowed in a now-submerged land. The Silappadhikaram, a 5th century epic, stating that the “cruel sea” took the Pandiya land that lay between the rivers Pahruli and the many-mountained banks of the Kumari, to replace which the Pandiyan king conquered lands belonging to the Chola and Chera kings (Maturaikkandam, verses 17-22).
Adiyarkkunallar, a 12th century commentator on the epic, explains this reference by saying that there was once a land to the south of the present-day Kanyakumari , which stretched from the Pahruli river in the north to the Kumari river in the south. This land was divided into 49 territories, which he names as 7 coconut territories (elutenga natu), 7 Madurai territories (elumaturai natu), 7 old sandy territories (elumunpalai natu), 7 new sandy territories (elupinpalai natu), 7 mountain territories (elukunra natu), 7 eastern coastal territories (elukunakarai natu) and 7 dwarf-palm territories (elukurumpanai natu). All these lands, he says, together with the many-mountained land that began with KumariKollam, with forests and habitations, were submerged by the sea. Two of these territories were supposedly parts of present-day Kollam and Kanyakumari districts.
BBC reports the following further evidence which suggests volcanic eruptions may have some effect to this said land. Scientists have discovered the remains of a “lost continent” beneath the waves of the Indian Ocean. Drilling by the Joides Resolution research vessel, which traverses the seas extracting samples from beneath the sea floor, suggests that the continent, about a third the size of present day Australia, sank from sight only 20 million years ago. A recovered sample of the ‘lost continent’. It lies beneath the southern Indian Ocean. Called the Kerguelen Plateau, it is one of the most remote places on Earth. The Joides Resolution, the world’s largest research vessel, bored a series of holes through the undersea plateau, which is about two kilometers below the ocean surface. Spores and pollen It brought to the surface many types of rocks associated with explosive volcanism, as well as sedimentary rocks similar to those found in India and Australia. Sending the drill bit down to the sea floor. “We found abundant evidence that much of the Kerguelen Plateau formed above sea level,” said Dr Mike Coffin of the University of Texas.”Wood fragments, a seed, spores and pollen recovered in 90 million year-old sediment from the central Kerguelen Plateau indicates that it was above sea level.”Scientists believe that it rose out of the ocean about 110 million years ago, following a series of huge volcanic eruptions. Small dinosaurs 50 million years ago, it may have been covered in lush ferns, moist with tropical humidity. The ‘core store’ on the Joides Resolution Small dinosaurs would have hidden in the undergrowth stalking their prey.20 million years ago, it started to sink beneath the waves of what is now the Indian Ocean. Scientists hope that studying the region will help them understand the break-up of Australia, India and Antarctica.

In conclusion I would like my readers to read an article which was published in THE HINDU NEWSPAPER.

THE HINDU DATED 11.02.2011

THANJAVUR: Scientific citations found in Tamil literature can be used as geological time scale to measure the geographical events of the earth over the past 40,000 years said S.Ramasamy, Vice-Chancellor, Gandhigram Rural Institute — Deemed University, Dindigul, here on Thursday. Inaugurating a seminar on disaster management citations in Tamil Literature organised by the Department of Industries and Earth Sciences at Tamil University here, Dr.Ramasamy said that scholars speak volumes about the poetic aspects of Tamil Literature but fail to note the scientific citations in them. When they are identified, studied and understood, the citations indicate various geological events and topography of the earth. Satellite pictures of earth and computer simulation corroborate the scientific citations found in Tamil Literature, Dr.Ramasamy said.

He cited examples from Silappathikaram, Thiruvilaiyadalpuranam, and Kamba Ramayanam to drive home his point . In Silappathikaram, Kavunthiyadigal says that Madurai is earthquake prone. Satellite pictures also reveal that Madurai, Kambam, Theni, Kottayam are earthquake prone. Kamba Ramayanam reveals that Lord Rama took the sea route that is safe and where “sea current due to waves is less” to reach Sri Lanka. Lord Rama visits Vedaranyam and Manalmelkudi but does not cross the sea there, as the sea is rough and the wind currents are strong. Finally he crosses the sea at Rameswaram , where the sea is calm. There are also references to marine transgressions, tsunami, tectonic movement of earth plate, sea level change, and earth movement in the Tamil literary works.

A joint research by Geologists, Tamil Scholars, Epigraphists, Ocean Study experts can throw light on “Kumari Kandam”, Dr.Ramasamy said, and released a CD of papers to be presented in the seminar. M.Rajendran, Vice-Chancellor of Tamil University, released the compendium of papers to be presented in

The author has a masters degree in Anthropology from Calcutta University

An Atlantis in the Indian Ocean (Review of Stephen Oppenheimer’s Eden in the East)

2011-06-04T15:12:00.000+05:30

An Atlantis in the Indian Ocean (Review of Stephen Oppenheimer’s Eden in the East)
Posted on May 26, 2011 by Ahmad Samantho| Leave a comment
An Atlantis in the Indian Ocean
(Review of Stephen Oppenheimer’s Eden in the East)

Koenraad Elst

One of the many insulting epithets thrown at AIT disbelievers is that they are no better than “Atlantis freaks”. Actually, this is not entirely untrue. Some AIT skeptics who have applied their minds to reconstructing ancient history, have indeed thought of centres of human habitation in locations now well below sea-level. When Proto-Indo-European was spoken, the sea level was still recovering from the low point it had reached during the Ice Age, about 100 metres lower than the present level. It was in the period of roughly twelve to seven thousand years ago that the icecaps melted and replenished the seas, so that numerous low-lying villages had to be abandoned.
After all, it is a safe bet that more than half of mankind lived in the zone of less than 100 m above sea level. In the context of the present debate on global warming, it is said that a rise in sea level of just one metre would be an immense catastrophe for countries like Bangla Desh or the Netherlands. The Maledives would completely disappear with a rise of only a few metres. But more importantly, most big population centres today are located just above sea level: Tokyo, Shanghai, Kolkata, Mumbai, London, New York, Los Angeles etc. If the sea level would rise 100 m, most population centres including entire countries would become a sunken continent, a very real Atlantis. Consequently, there is nothing far-fetched in assuming the existence of population centres and cultures, 10 or 15 thousand years ago, in what are now submarine locations on the continental shelf outside our coastlines.

In a recent book, Eden in the East: the Drowned Continent of Southeast Asia (Phoenix paperback, London 1999 (1998)), Stephen Oppenheimer has focused on one such part of the continental shelf: the region between Malaysia, Sumatra, Java, Borneo, Thailand, Vietnam, China and Taiwan, which was largely inhabitable during the Ice Age. Thinking that this was then the most advanced centre of civilization, he calls it Eden, the Biblical name of Paradise (from Sumerian edin, “alluvial plain”), because West-Asian sources including the Bible do locate the origin of mankind or at least of civilization in the East. In some cases, as in Sumerian references, this “East” is clearly the pre-Harappan and Harappan culture, but even more easterly countries seem to be involved.

Oppenheimer is a medical doctor who has lived in Southeast Asia for decades. He is clearly influenced by Marxism, e.g. where he dismisses religion as a means to “control other people’s labour”, with explicit reference to Karl Marx’s Das Kapital (p.483). His book is based on solid scientific research (genetic, anthropological, linguistic and archaeological), and is in that respect very different from the numerous Atlantis books which draw on “revelations” and “channeling”.

The most airy type of evidence, in its massiveness nonetheless quite compelling, is comparative mythology: numerous cultures, and especialy those in the Asia-Pacific zone, have highly parallel myths of one or more floods. These are not opaque allusions to Freudian events in the subconscious but plainly historical references to the catastrophic moments in the otherwise long-drawn-out rise of the sea level after the Ice Age. For, indeed, this rise was not a continuous process but took place with occasional spurts, wiping out entire tribes living near the coast. The last such sudden rise took place ca. 5500 BC, after which the sea level fell back a few metres to the present level.

According to Oppenheimer, the Southeast-Asian Atlantis, provisionally called Sundaland because it now is the Sunda shelf, was the world leader in the Neolithic Revolution (start of agriculture), using stones for grinding wild grains as early as 24,000 ago, more than ten thousand years older than in Egypt or Palestine. Before and especially during the gradual flooding of their lowland, the Sundalanders spread out to neighbouring lands: the Asian mainland including China, India and Mesopotamia, and the island world from Madagascar to the Philippines and New Guinea, whence they later colonized Polynesia as far as Easter Island, Hawaii and New Zealand.

Oppenheimer aligns with the archaeologists against the linguists in the controversy about the homeland of the Austronesian language family (Malay, Tagalog, Maori, Malgasy etc.): he locates it in Sundaland and its upper regions which now make up the coasts of the Southeast-Asian countries, whereas most linguists maintain that southern China was the land of origin. Part of the argument concerns chronology: Oppenheimer proposes a higher chronology than Peter Bellwood and other out-of-China theorists. My experience with IE studies makes me favour a higher chronology, for new findings (e.g. that “pre-IE” peoples like the Pelasgians and the Etruscans, not to speak of the Harappans, turn out to have been earlier “Aryan” settlers) have consistently been pushing the date of the fragmentation of PIE back into the past.
Another reason for not relying too much on the theories of the linguists is that Austronesian linguistics is a very demanding field, comprising the study of hundreds of small languages most of which have no literature, so the number of genuine experts is far smaller than in the case of IE, and even in the latter case linguists are nowhere near a consensus on the homeland question. Linguistic evidence is very soft evidence, and usually the data admit of more than one historical reconstruction, so I don’t think there is any compelling evidence against a Sundaland homeland hypothesis. Conversely, archaeological and genetic evidence in favour of the spread of the Austronesian-speaking populations from Sundaland seems to be sufficient.

It is quite certain that some of these Austronesians must have landed in India, some on their way to Madagascar, some to stay and mix with the natives. Hence the presence of some Austronesian words in Indian languages of all families, most prominently ayi/bayi, “mother” (as in the Marathi girls’ names Tarabai, Lakshmi-bai etc.), or words for “bamboo”, “fruit”, “honey”. More spectacularly, linguists like Isidore Dyen have discerned a considerable common vocabulary in the core lexicon of Austronesian and Indo-European, including pronouns, numerals (e.g. Malay dva, “two”) and terms for the elements. Oppenheimer doesn’t go into this question, but diehard invasionists might use his findings to suggest an Aryan invasion into India not from the northwest, but from the southeast.

But he does mention the legend of Manu Vaivasvata saving his company from the flood and sailing up the rivers of India to settle high and dry in Saptasindhu. Clearly, the origins of Vedic civilization are related to the post-Glacial flood, probably the single biggest migration trigger in human history.

The Tamils have a tradition that their poets’ academy or Sangam existed for ten thousand years, and that its seat (along with the entire Tamil capital) had to be moved thrice because of the rising sea level. They also believe that their country once stretched far to the south, including Sri Lanka and the Maledives, a lost Tamil continent called Kumarikhandam. If these legends turn out to match the geological evidence quite neatly, our academics would be wrong to dismiss them as figments of the imagination. But the Indian or Kumarikhandam counterpart to Oppenheimer’s book on Sundaland has yet to be written. This indeed is probably the most important practical conclusion to be drawn from this book: extend India’s history by thousands of years with the exploration of now-submarine population centres.

Another language family originating in some part of Sundaland was Austro-Asiatic, which includes the Mon-Khmer languages in Indochina (its demographic point of gravity being Vietnam) but also Nicobarese and the Munda languages of Chotanagpur, at one time possibly spoken throughout the Ganga basin. It is the Mundas who brought rice cultivation from Southeast Asia to the Ganga basin, whence it reached the Indus Valley towards the end of the Harappan age (ca. 2300 BC). In this connection, it is worth noting that Oppenheimer confirms that “barley cultivation was developed in the Indus Valley” (p.19), barley being the favourite crop of the Vedic Aryans (yava). Unlike the Mundas who brought rice cultivation from eastern India and ultimately from Southeast Asia to northwestern India, and unlike the Indo-European Kurgan people whose invasion into Europe can be followed by means of traces of the crops they imported (esp. millet), the Vedic Aryans simply used the native produce. This doesn’t prove but certainly supports the suspicion that the Aryans were native to the Indus Valley.
Concerning the political polemic, the usual claim that the caste system with its sharp discrimination was instituted by the invading Aryans to entrench their supremacy is countered by the finding that even the most isolated tribes on India’s hills turn out to have strict endogamy rules, often guarded with more severe punishments for inter-tribal love affairs than exist in Sanskritic-Hindu society. Here, Oppenheimer confirms that in the Austro-Asiatic and Austrone-sian tribal societies, where many of India’s tribals originate, inequality is deeply entrenched: “Yet the class structure which cripples Britain more than any other European state, is as nothing compared with the stratified hierarchies in Austronesian traditional societies from Madagascar through Bali to Samoa. (…) This consciousness of rank is thus clearly not something that was only picked up by Austronesian societies from later Indian influence.” (p.484) Social hierarchy is not a racialist imposition by the Aryans, but a near-universal phenomenon especially pronounced among Indo-Pacific societies including most non-Aryan populations.

Stephen Oppenheimer makes a very detailed and very strong case for the importance of the culture of sunken Sundaland for the later cultures in the wide surroundings. India too certainly benefited of certain achievements imported from there. What is yet missing is a similar study for the equally important and likewise neglected culture of the sunken lands outside India’s coast.

© Dr. Koenraad Elst, 2002.

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In Search of Atlantis — Getting Closer

2011-05-10T16:03:00.000+05:30

A new perspective. Please read the article till the end.

IS VEDIC CIVILIZATION THE REMNANTS OF THE LEGENDARY ATLANTIS

2011-03-02T17:17:00.001+05:30

'Follow the link and follow the thought. You are free to reach your own conclusions.

IS VEDIC CIVILIZATION THE REMNANTS OF THE LEGENDARY ATLANTIS | Weisman CPA

2010-12-09T15:11:00.000+05:30

IS VEDIC CIVILIZATION THE REMNANTS OF THE LEGENDARY ATLANTIS | Weisman CPA

New Dates for Egypt's Pharaohs - ScienceNOW

2010-11-26T14:26:00.000+05:30

New Dates for Egypt's Pharaohs - ScienceNOW

The Harappan Civilization by Tarini J. Carr

2010-11-10T12:04:00.000+05:30

The Harappan Civilization by Tarini J. Carr

Sunken Ice Age City Off Indian Coast Carbon Dating Says 7,500 B.C. [newilluminati.blog-city.com]

2010-10-09T13:03:00.000+05:30

Sunken Ice Age City Off Indian Coast Carbon Dating Says 7,500 B.C. [newilluminati.blog-city.com]

Antiquity of Vedic Civilization | Socyberty

2010-10-09T13:02:00.000+05:30

Antiquity of Vedic Civilization | Socyberty

Ramayan, Bhagavad Gita , Vedas & Upanishads: The false Aryan Invasion Theory - 8

2010-10-07T08:58:00.000+05:30

Ramayan, Bhagavad Gita , Vedas & Upanishads: The false Aryan Invasion Theory - 8

The Hindu : States / Tamil Nadu : A Dravidian Solution to the Indus Script Problem

2010-07-12T13:39:00.000+05:30

The Hindu : States / Tamil Nadu : A Dravidian Solution to the Indus Script Problem

Unsolved and Ignored Mysteries

2010-06-25T15:44:00.000+05:30

A very interesing Post Read from
Unsolved and Ignored Mysteries

Decoding the Ancient Script of the Indus Valley

2010-04-12T16:59:00.000+05:30

Decoding the Ancient Script of the Indus Valley

Chess, Goddess and Everything: Gujarat Forged Trade with Harappans

2010-03-29T17:52:00.000+05:30

Chess, Goddess and Everything: Gujarat Forged Trade with Harappans

A must read book on Indian civilization

2010-03-29T17:45:00.000+05:30

An article from Organzer.

A must read book on Indian civilization
By Dr Vaidehi Nathan

How Deep are the Roots of Indian Civilization? Archaeology Answers, Dr. B. B. Lal , Aryan Books International, Pp 150 (PB), Rs. 390.00

ARCHAEOLOGY in India has been one of the most argued subjects among the academics. It has been influenced by ideological bias, scanty research into primary sources and most important of all the lack of interest on the part of the government to support, sponsor and spread the information on the deep roots of our history and civilization. Hence, the book by one of the most renowned archaeologists B B Lal on the Indian civilization has come as a fresh breath. Lal, an academic of international repute and author of several acclaimed books has written How Deep are the roots of Indian Civilization? Archaeology Answers. Adopting narrative style, he has minimised the academic lingo and made it easy for a common reader to sail with the content.

Right at the outset, the book connects today’s reader with our forefathers thousands of years ago, by pointing out the similarities in rituals and daily practices. The tradition of applying sindoor in the centre parting on the forehead by married women has been observed in the terracotta figurines that have been carbon dated to be circa 2800-2600 BCE (Before Common Era), even before what is known as Harappan civilization. Bangles and the ‘chauk’ on the forehead were also in vogue then, as they are now. Utensils similar to the ones in common use now in our kitchens have also been excavated from the Harappan region. The tradition of bead craft in Gujarat region too dates back to thousands of years.

The excavations yielded six-faced dice, evidences of chess game and reading and writing material like takhtis. Some of the commonly narrated bedtime stories, like the cunning fox that makes the crow drop the food on its beak and the intelligent crow that made water rise in the pot by dropping pebbles into it have been found in illustrations in vases and jars, indicating these stories have been coming down generations for thousands of years. They prove an incontrovertible continuity in our culture and habitation. Lal has dedicated the book to his illustrious student Dr SP Gupta.

In the dedication he writes, “Dedicated to my most beloved student Dr SP Gupta whose pursuit of knowledge, balanced judgement, unflinching devotion, self-sacrifice and institute-building capacity

will ever remain enshrined in the annals of Indian Archaeology.”

Gold, silver, copper and bronze were known to the Harappan people, so were horses and spokes wheels. For decades the Indian students had been taught in their history text books that these were unknown to the Harappan civilization. Lal roundly dismisses the Aryan invasion theory and provides unassailable proof for his argument. He is equally dismissive of the recent academic propaganda of an Aryan ‘immigration,’ implying that they were a nomadic community. He quotes the Rigveda and the Satpathabrahmana to fortify his position that there was neither invasion from outside nor immigration within and that the Vedic people, the Harappan people and the present Indian society are a continuum of the same race and civilization. Says he, “Looking back, one finds that the most ancient civilization of India, known variously as the Harappan, Indus or Indus-Sarasvati civilization, was indeed remarkable in many respects. It may not have given to the world the high-rising pyramids of Giza or the immensely rich royal tombs of Ur, but it has shown how an ideal and well balanced community lives – in which the differences between the rich and the poor are not glaring. In the other two countries, symbolised by the pyramids and the royal tombs, the haves had it all, while the have-nots none at all.” This observation is very much an illustration of our concepts of vasudeva kutumbakam and the Ram Rajya, where everyone was happy and none sad on account of materialistic disparities.

Some of the most famous archaeologists in modern India are Britishers, like Sir Mortimer Wheeler and Sir John Marshall. Though their contribution to the study of Indian archaeology cannot be disputed, they have tended to jump to conclusions and pronounce judgements on excavations, influenced by their own academic upbringing and prejudice. Lal, who calls Wheeler his guru does not hesitate to point out the incongruities in their arguments.

The heavily illustrated book is a precious work Lal has done to the cause of understanding our civilization. It must be included in the curriculum of young classes so that they imbibe the wealth of knowledge of our ancient and glorious past. It is a must read for every Indian. There are a few printer’s devils, which one hopes will be corrected in the subsequent editions. Lal needs no introduction. He was the Director General of the Archaeological Survey of India (1968-72) and took early retirement when he was 51 to pursue his research programmes. He has excavated several sites and made immense contribution. His publications include 150 seminal research papers and several books.

(Aryan Books International, Pooja Apartment, 4B, Ansari Road, New Delhi-110 002; aryanbooks@gmail.com)

VEDIC CIVILIZATION THE PROGENITOR OF EGYPTIAN CIVILIZATION

2010-01-11T17:25:00.001+05:30

Given below is an intersting article from Amlan Roychowdhury. You can get to know him better through his website http://amlanroychowdhury.webs.com/

In one of my earlier article, which I wrote probably a year back, I have mentioned about the similarities, that I came across, between the Vedic Civilization and that of the Egyptian Civilization. Even then I would like to enumerate a few of the striking similarities to keep my readers informed and hence it will be easier for them to understand the context of this article.

I was reading a book by Bob Bryer, a renowned Egyptologist, titled “The Murder OF Tutankhamun”. While reading the book I found that there were some very fundamental similarities between the then Egyptian civilization and that of the present Vedic civilization i.e. the Hindus living wherever they are.

The similarities can be enumerated as follows:

When Tutankhamen’s Father Akhenaten, the pharaoh, shifted his capital to a place called Amarna and erected a temple dedicated to the Sun god and naming the temple as The Karnak Temple. The sun god in the Hindu pantheon is an important deity and a temple dedicated to the Sun God is situated in the state of Orissa build in 1278 CE by Narasimha Deva. This temple is called KARNAK TEMPLE. We do see a similarity don’t we?

3 In the Egyptian phonetics the word “Wadi” prounced as waadi means beautiful valley, lush and green . In the devnagri phonetics of which the language Hindi is a derivative the word “Wadi” also means the same thing.

Seeing these similarities I had a mind to do a more or less detailed study of these two civilization with an eye to the antiquity of the vedic civilization.

The two most important epics of the vedic civilization is the “Mahabharata” and “The Ramayana”. These two epics are not just a figment of somebody’s imagination but are in fact, FACTS that has been chronicled. The Ramayana is dated some 8000 years BC and The Mahabharata is dated to 5000 years BC. ( refer my articles on Ramayana and Mahabharata ). These dates do indicate that the Vedic civilization was a reality and a civilization that was thriving with all its majesty and grandeur all along the banks of Saraswati River, Indus River, and the Ganges. This civilization was technically very advanced. The vedic literature including the four Vedas and the Upanishads have volumes of scientific treatise known as “Kala”. There are in fact thirteen such Kalas written by various sages.

The first that needs to be mentioned is the encyclopedic Shastra which was called Akshara-Laksha. This was written by sage Valmiki. All kinds of mathematics including modern geometry, Algebra, Trigonometry, Physics, Applied mathematics, mineralogy, Hydels, the methods of measuring air heat and even electricity, and geography are said to have been treated in this treaties. The next science of importance is the Sabda –Shastra written by Kandika Rishi which deals with sounds, echoes of moving and non moving objects in creation.It also deals with mechanically reproducing sound, measuring their pitch and velocity. Sage Sakatayana is the author of Lakshana Shastra which deals with the science of determinig the sex in animate and inanimate creation. Sage Kashyapa is the author of Shilpa Shastra and it comprises of 22 chapters.307 varieties of shilpas including 11 types of construction like Temples, Palaces, Hall, etc. Earlier writers on this subject were Vishwakarma, Maya, Maruti and Chayapurusha their thoughts have been incorporated in the above Shastra. The science of Metal called the dhatuvada was written by ashwini kumaras.In it are 7 chapters which deals with dhatus or the primary substances their combinations and transmutation. Alchemy or converting copper into gold etc has been described in this work.

Ashwini Kumar was a great rishi who also authored the Visha Shastra. This is also an exhaustive work where 32 different types of poison their properties, their preparation and their antidotes. The next in line is the science of fine arts which was composed by sage Bhima and this treatise is called chitra karma shastra. The uniqueness of this science was that students were taught to recreate a person after seeing a single strand of hair or nail. Highly advanced form of forensic science? Then there is the Mala Shastra which deals with gymnastics and sports necessary for preservation of health .

Sage Vatsyana has composed a work on Ratna Pariksha which means testing of gems. Sage Vyasa is said to have composed a work on artha shastra which had three chapters on ways of earning money legitimately. Sage agastya[agastya muni] is the originator of Shakti Shastra. Atomic fission and nuclear science formed a part of this science.

Yantra Shastra by Sage Bharadwaj explains 339 types of terrestrial vehicle,783 types of boats and ships and 101 types of airships by use of mantras Tantras and artificial means.

I have just mentioned a few of the Kalas only to impress upon my readers that this civilization was far more superior than any other inhabitation during that period. AND somewhere during this period there was a global catastrophe that compelled this civilization to shift base and somewhere during this period Egypt emerged. When we talk of Vedic civilization’s geographical distribution we do not put them in the political boundary of India as it is today. Vedic civilization extended from Iran in the west through Afghanistan Pakistan, India, Tibet, Nepal all the way to Burma and Java Borneo Sumatra archipelago in the East. Therefore it would not have been difficult for the large group of people to shift to Egypt from, let’s say, Iran. Now when the large group shifts to a new place and starts to settle what will change in them is their material culture as that is determined by the environment and the prevalent conditions. What will not change is the social organization, the rituals, the religious process, and the language.

The name Egypt comes from the word “Ajap” which in Sanskrit is Ajapati which signifies Lord Ram as the most illustrious forbearer of the Aja clan. Aja was the grandfather of lord Ram. The word Ram means God and like the Vedic tradition where the rulers were considered as being representatives or descendants of God, the Egyptians also considered their Pharaoh as God or their descendants and their Pharaoh was also named as Ramesis I or II. Here I would like to mention one of the interesting fact about the sphinx. The pyramids have been dated as 3000 years BC and the Sphinx is dated to be 6000 Years BC. This means that when the pyramids were being made, the sphinx stood in front of them as a reminder of a civilization which was antique to them and full of intrigue.

Dr.S.K.Balasubramaniam in his book “Hindu Mythology as prehistory” says that the history of Egypt goes back to thousands of year in time to the period of Yayati who had two wives namely devayani and Sharmishtha. Yayati,by some forces of nature became prematurely old and was thus very depressed. He asked his Eldest son Yadu who was from Devayani to relieve him from his predicament by exchanging his youth with the old age. Yadu refused to do the needful and so did all other sons. It was Puru the youngest and the son from Sharmishtha who agreed to help his father. Henve he was crowned the sovereign of the world superceding his elder brothers. Purus decendants were the Puravas later became known as the Pharaohs of Egypt who ruled over his father’s domain with the elder brothers as subject to him.

According to Count Biornsttierna in his book “The theogony of the Hindus” has lot of information on the Vedic culture in ancient Egypt. It says that the temples of upper Egypt are of greater antiquity than those of the lower Egypt and consequently the religion of Egypt, according to the testimony of those monument, came from India. The chronicles found in the temple of Abydos and Sias testify that the religion of Egypt proceeded from India. Professor Brugsh agrees with this view and in his book “The History Of Egypt” mentions, “We have a right to more than suspect that India, in 8000 Years BC, sent a colony of emigrants who carried with them their art and advanced civilization into what is known as Egypt. The Egyptians came according to their records from a mysterious land now known to lie on the shores of Indian ocean” In this context it will not be prudish on my part to say that 8000 years BC was the period when Lord ram ruled over the Indian subcontinent and that is why Egypt got its name from Lord Ram’s grandfather “Aja”.

In Nav Bharat Times ( A reputed news paper in India ) dated 18th April 1967 reported that in one of the excavation that was being conducted in the Egyptian Pyramid date 3000 years BC and engraved verse from Bhagawad Gita was found. The verse was “vasami jirnani yatha vhiaya” This means “as a person puts on new garment, giving up the old ones, the soul similarly accepts a new material body giving up the old and the useless ones”. This actually explains the ritual of the mummy making and the elaborate burial system in the Egyptian civilization where efforts are made to make the soul comfortable with all necessary things because they believed that the soul will need all these till it finds a material body. Reincarnation in short. Among the vedic people,The Hindus of today, each and every one believes in this concept. This find certainly boost the idea that Egypt was either a part of Vedic culture or was formed by the emigrants from India.

Professor P.N.Oak in his world famous book “world vedic Heritage” says that the Egyptians called India as the land of Punt or rather Pankht and regarded it as their divine land peopled by Punts meaning Pundits, sages, seers, and Gods. Further evidence of the Vedic roots of the Egyptian area, as mentioned in the book “ Proof of Vedic Cultures Global Existence” by Stephan Knapp, is noticed when we understand that Rama was spelled as Rham in the west. Later the “R” was dropped and consequently the African school text books asserting that Africans are Kushites ( Subject of Kush son of Ram ) mention Ham as the father of Kush. The twin brother of Kush was Luv and the region named after him was known in Sanskrit as Laviya, now pronounced as Libya.

Count Biornsttierna again says ,in the same book, “ on comparing the religious system between the Egyptian civilization and the Vedic civilization we are struck by theie resemblance to each other.The principal of trinity with that of unity, the pre-existence of the soul,its transmigration, the division of caste into priest, warriors, traders, and agriculturists are the cardinal points of both system. Even the symbols are same on the shores of The Ganges and The Nile. Thus we find the Lingam of the shiva temples of India in the Phallus of the Ammon temples of Egypt. We find the lotus as a symbol of the sun both in India and in Egypt, and we find symbols of immortality of the soul both in India and Egypt. The power of rendering barren women fruitful is ascribed to the Temple of Shiva in India is also ascribed to the temple of Ammon in Egypt.”

Indian contacts with the Western world date back to prehistoric times. Trade relations, preceded by the migration of peoples, inevitably developed into cultural relations. Evidence of Indian contact with the ancient civilizations to her west, however is certain. Knobbed pottery vases came to Sumer from India and so did cotton. In the Akkadian tongue, Indian cotton was expressed by ideographs meaning “vegetable cloth.” Assurbanipal (668-626 B.C) cultivated Indian plants including the “wool-bearing trees” of India. According to the Skandha Purana, Egypt (Africa) was known as Sancha-dvipa continent mentioned in Sir Willliams Jones’ dissertation on Egypt. At Alexandria, in Egypt, Indian scholars were a common sight: they are mentioned both by Dio Chrysostom (c. 100 A.D.) and by Clement (c. 200 A.D.) Indirect contact between ancient India and Egypt through Mesopotamia is generally admitted, but evidence of a direct relationship between the two is at best fragmentary. Peter Von Bohlen (1796-1840) German Indologist, compared India with ancient Egypt. He thought there was a cultural connection between the two in ancient times. There are elements of folk art, language, and rural culture of Bengal which have an affinity with their Egyptian counterparts and which have not been explained satisfactorily in terms of Aryan, Mongolian, or Dravidian influences. There are similarities between place names in Bengal and Egypt and recently an Egyptian scholar, El Mansouri, has pointed out that in both Egypt and India the worship of cow, sun, snake, and river are common.

Recently, more definitive evidence suggesting contact between India and Egypt has become available. A terracotta mummy from Lothal vaguely resembles an Egyptian mummy and a similar terracotta mummy is found also at Mohenjodaro. In this context it is of interest to note that the Egyptian mummies are said to have been wrapped in Indian muslin. Characters similar to those on the Indus seals have also been found on tablets excavated from Easter Island. Of all the Egyptian objects and motifs indicating some contact between India and Egypt during the Indus Valley period, “the cord pattern occurring in a copper tablet in the Indus Valley and on three Egyptian seals is the most striking link between the two countries. Gordon Childe has said, “In other words, in the third millennium B.C. India was already in a position to contribute to the building up of the cultural tradition that constitutes our spiritual heritage as she notoriously has done since the time of Alexander.”

Neither historical events nor cross-cultural currents can explain the unique parallels in the myths and imagery of ancient Egypt and India. Walafrid Strabo (c. 809–849) German scholar has said: “The lotus flower, sacred to Buddha and to Osiris, has five petals which symbolizes the four limbs and the head; the five senses; the five digits; and like the pyramid, the four parts of the compass and the zenith. Other esoteric meanings abound: for myths are seldom simple, and never irresponsible.” In fact, Hinduism’s pervading influence seems to go much earlier than Christianity. American mathematician, A. Seindenberg, has, for example, shown that the Shulbasutras, the ancient Vedic science of mathematics, constitute the source of mathematics in the antique world of Babylon to Greece: “The arithmetic equations of the Shulbasutras were used in the observation of the triangle by the Babylonians as well as in the edification of Egyptian pyramids, in particular the funeral altar in the form of pyramid known in the Vedic world as smasana-cit.”The flower so prolific in the imagery of both India and Egypt, grows out of the waters and opens its petals to be warmed by the sun: to be fertilized. From the earliest imagery in stone at Sanchi, of the first century BC in India, the lotus is associated with Sri, the goddess of fertility, who is later invoked as Lakshmi, the goddess of wealth and abundance – being worshipped by Buddhists, Jains, and Hindus alike. The lotus is held in each hand by Surya, signifying the fertilizing powers of the sun as he travels through the universe.

In Egypt, the blue lotus appears in the earliest wall paintings of the VI Dynasty at the pyramids of Saqqara and in all funerary stelae. They are offered to the deceased, and held in the hand as thought they possess the power to revitalize them: to bring the deceased back to life. Carved out of blue lapis, along with the golden falcon and the sun that are the symbols of the god Horus, the lotus appears among the funerary treasures from the tomb of Tutankhamen.

The lotus then, becomes a leitmotiv, a symbol most apt since its links the waters with the sun, the earth to sky – signifying fertility and regeneration in both Egypt and India. For, it is the seed of the plant which spells out the cycle of birth-decay-death and rebirth that forms the essential pattern of belief in these two riverine and agricultural societies. In India and Egypt, the rivers Saraswati and Ganga and the Nile have brought sustenance to the land and nourished these civilizations which have survived five millennia. Both these rivers, the Ganga and the Nile, are personified and worshipped. They provide the dramatic backdrop against which myths and indeed created, to explain the topographic conditions of the land.

From its source in the Himalayas to the Bay of Bengal, the Ganga flows some two thousand five hundred kilometers, through the rich deltaic region which is known as Aryavarta, in the most densely populated area of India. Puranic myths recount the divine origins of Ganga, as she fell from heaven to earth in response to penance performed by the sage Bhagiratha: to bring the powers of water to an earth parched for over a thousand years. At the seventh century seaport of Mahabalipuram in south India, this epic theme is entirely carved out of a granite rock spanning almost fifty feet. A natural cleft in the rock allows the rain water to pour down in great torrents – as though this were the descent of a mighty river. Besides this cleft are carved the serpentine forms of the naga devatas (snake divinities), the sun and the moon, the gandharvas and kinnaras (celestial beings), the hunters and animals of the forest – all of them rejoicing in this great event where the divine rive is celebrated as the savior of all mankind. Here is a spectacular instance of the way in which myth is used to relate man to the environment. In this myth one senses an acute awareness of the ecological balance which needs to be maintained: of the vapors of the sea rising to the sky through heat, described in the myth as tapas, and then falling back to earth as the divine river, to flow down through the matted locks of Lord Shiva, on to the Himalayas, to flow back into the ocean.

As in India, so in Egypt, the river is personified in human form. A sandstone relief from the temple of Rameses II at Abydos depicts Hapi, god of the Nile, holding a pair of blue lotus stalks in his hands; suspended from the god’s right arm is the ankh, the symbol of life. Unlike the Ganga, the blue god of the Nile is male, but with one female breast to symbolize his role as nourisher – releasing the waters each year to provide sustenance to mankind. The main presiding deity of the Egyptian pantheon is Osiris, like Yama, god of the dead, whose story of life, death and regeneration has been transmitted to us in great detail by Plutarch. Some extraordinary parallels with the Osirian myth are found among the myths and images of India. Lord Vishnu lied recumbent on the bed of the ocean asleep, as indeed Osiris lied prostate and dead on a bier. The Hindi word for cow means also “ray of illumination,” and in Egyptian lore a cow is sometimes depicted as the source of light in the sky.

Significant also is the fact that Lieutenant Speake, when planning his discovery of the source of the Nile, secured his best information from a map reconstructed out of Puranas. (Journal, pp. 27, 77, 216; Wilford, in Asiatic Researches, III). It traced the course of the river, the “Great Krishna,” through Cusha-dvipa, from a great lake in Chandristhan, “Country of the Moon,” which it gave the correct position in relation to the Zanzibar islands. The name was from the native Unya-muezi, having the same meaning; and the map correctly mentioned another native name, Amara, applied to the district bordering Lake Victoria Nyanza.

“All our previous information,” says Speake, “concerning the hydrography of these regions, originated with the ancient Hindus, who told it to the priests of the Nile; and all these busy Egyptian geographers, who disseminated their knowledge with a view to be famous for their long-sightedness, in solving the mystery which enshrouded the source of their holy river, were so many hypothetical humbugs. The Hindu traders had a firm basis to stand upon through their intercourse with the Abyssinians.” (source: Periplus of the Erythrean Sea – W.H. Schoff p. 229-230).

Modern scholars claim that Akhenaton was the worlds first known monotheist. However, the fact is, he was actually reviving an ancient monotheistic religious tradition. Unknown to most is the true nature of this religion. This religion was not only vedic, but was actually an indiginous Egyptian form of Vaisnavaism. Research has proven Akhenaton’s vedic roots through his familial connections to the Hurrian/Mitanni peoples. Everyone agrees that the Mitanni were a Sanskrit speaking and writing people and they worshipped the vedic gods. What is forgotten is the fact that Akhenaton’s father, his mother, and wife were all related to the vedic Mitanni. Thus, it is no surprise that Akhenaton’s religion has so many vedic similarities. The research of BhaktiAnanda Goswami has proven the Vaishnava nature of his religion. In ancient Egyptian religion, creation began from the form of NHRYN (Narayan) lying on the primordial waters. A lotus grows from His navel, and on this lotus appears the four armed and four headed Heliosphanes (Brahma) who speaks creation. Ancient Mediterranean Vaishnavism can be properly understood when we compare it to the authentic Vaishnava scriptural sources especially Bhagavad-Gita, and Srimad Bhagavatam, where the viratarupa (Universal Form) conception of the Supreme Lord is revealed. For example, Krishna’s self revelation in the “I Am” verses of the Bhagavad-Gita directly parallels the great hymns of HR-Heri of ancient Egypt. Therefore, ancient Egyptian religion considered HR-Heri the origin of all gods and deities. That is why they used the name HR-Heri or Asu (Vasu) along with deities considered to be aspects of Heri. Thus, the god of wealth was called KPHR/Kepe-Heri because in the Gita Krishna says “·I am Kubera”.At the age of eighteen years, he came into complete power of the Kingdom. It was at this time that he proclaimed his faith in One God-The Sun, which he designated by the name of Aton, ie. The Disk or Fiery Orb. He publicly proclaimed his faith in Aton, as the God of Gods. Some have claimed that as a Sun worshipper, Akhnaton was more of an Animist Nature worshiper rather than a devotee of a Supreme Godhead. However Akhnaton’s own words confirm that this is not the case. Akhnaton spoke of the Sun disk as being the Eye of Aton and a representative of Aton’s Power. In the Bhagavad Gita, the Sun is described as one of the unlimited eyes of God’s Universal Form. In the Brahma-Samhita the Sun is also described as the Eye of God. Akhnaton’s reverance of the Sun is properly understood in this context.

The symbol of Aton, as presented by Akhnaton, was an image of the Sun Disc with many sunrays extending out, ending in hands, in a kind of triangle shape. Some scholars have also pointed out that the shape of the Pyramids represents the Sun’s beams shining down to Earth, in a triangle shape, with the top being the Source and spreading out ever wider as it reaches the Earth. The similarity between Akhnaton’s Aton and Surya is indeed striking. The Sanskrit description of the Divine source of light corresponds perfectly with the picture of Aton given in the Egyptian King’s hymns.

The Puranas have a remarkable connection with one of the most important discoveries of the 19th century. In 1858, John Hanning Speke (1827-1864) – Speke was commissioned in the British Indian Army in 1844 – made the discovery that Lake Victoria was the source of the River Nile in Africa. Speke wrote that to some Indian Pundits (Hindu scholars) the Nile was known as Nila, and also as Kaali. Nila means blue and Kaali means dark – both apt descriptions for the Nile near its source. These are mentioned in several Puranas including the Bhavishaya. This went against the conventional wisdom, for Lake Victoria was unknown at the time. Sir Richard Burton, the leader of the Nile expedition, had identified Lake Tangyanika as the source. Speke, however, following upon the advice of a Benares (Varansi) Pundit, insisted that the real source was a much large lake that lay to the north. Following this advice Speke went on to discover Victoria. The Pundit had also told him that the real source were twin peaks as Somagiri, ‘Soma’ in Sanskrit stands for moon and ‘giri’ means peak, and Somagiri therefore are none other than the fabled Mountains of the Moon in Central Africa! The Pundit must have known all this. He published his book Journal of the Discovery of the Source of the Nile in 1863.

The similarities of Egyptian civilization’s, science and religion with the Vedic knowledge are even more amazing than the ones mentioned about the Jews. Specifically,in the philosophical and religious field. The details of the temple worship practiced in Egypt are strikingly similar to Vedic temple worship, including the three sandhya meditations on the sun (Ammon-Ra, the main Deity in Egypt), the form of God as both male and female (Osiris/Isis, assimilated with the Sun and the Moon), the bathing, dressing and decoration of the Deity (with red cloth, still considered in India as the traditional color of cloth to be offered to Deities), arati with the offerings of food and incense, etc. The Egyptian Book of the Dead is an almost exact replica of the Tibetan Book of the Dead, which is coming to us through the Yaksa Saivite Tantric tradition of Himalayas, which strongly influenced the Vajrayana Buddhism or Lamaism. Egyptian priests had a complicated knowledge about the various subtle bodies and astral traveling (as Tantric Buddhists do), and some bits of knowledge about yoga, too. Egyptian priests were strictly vegetarian (not even eating eggs), followed brahmacarya vows and abstained from intoxicants, and went through several initiations in order to practice their service. Meat was only consumed by them in later periods, and exclusively coming from fire sacrifices. (It is therefore very misguiding to say that Brahmins “became vegetarian” in a later period, after detaching themselves from their “origins” as Jews).

They were also in charge of medicine and astrology, and had an immense knowledge about both. Even the temple decorations used the lotus flower as a symbol of purity and beauty. The list could go on and on. Many ancient Greek scholars (including Plato, Pythagoras, etc.) traveled both to Egypt and to India to get their knowledge. While reading Plato’s and Pythagoras’ teachings, we find exactly the same Vedic knowledge explained in Greek language. Now we know from the Puranas that at the times of Parasurama avatara, the ksatriya kings of Bharata varsa were scattered all over the planet while fleeing the avatara’s killing wrath. We know that a group of such ksatriyas, followed by their family priests and retinue, reached ancient Egypt and established a kingdom there. Other groups settled in South America, Mesopotamia, Northern Europe, and in the lost continent of Atlantis mentioned by Plato and others. Striking similarities can be observed, for example the pyramids that can be found almost exactly identical in South America, Mesopotamia and Egypt. And which also resemble the large and high domes of the most ancient Vedic temples.

There are evidences galore that Vedic civilization was the precursor of all major civilization in the world. Similarities between the Egyptian civilization and the Vedic civilization and the evidence of the later being the progenitor of the earlier is but one example.

There are plenty of similarities between Vedic and Celtic civilization, between Vedic and Anatolian civilization, between Vedic and Mayan civilization etc. The question is the similarities between one and many.

Bibliography:

http://www.hinduwisdom.info/India_and_Egypt.htm

http://www.stephen-knapp.com/christianity’s_similarities_with_hinduism.htm

http://www.veda.harekrsna.cz/connections/Judaism.php

Proof of Vedic Culture’s Global existence by Stephen Knapp

History of India by John Keay

Underworld by Graham Hancock

World Vedic Heritage By Prof: P.N.Oak

Author has a masters degree in anthropology from Kolkata University.
His website http://amlanroychowdhury.webs.com

Indus civilisation reveals its volumetric system

2009-11-17T11:45:00.000+05:30

Indus civilisation reveals its volumetric system

T.S. Subramanian

Combination of ‘V’ signs and linear strokes were used to indicate volumes

— Photo credits: Bryan Wells

(Above) The three pots from Harappa with volumetric inscriptions on them. Calculations indicate that the Indus volumetric system is based on multiples of 9.24 litres. (Below) A reconstruction of broken bangles from the Moneer area of Mohenjo-Daro. The number of reconstructed bangles (17) matches the number from the sealing text on the pot that had the broken bangles inside. The other photo shows Indus fish signs.

CHENNAI: The Indus civilisation had a volumetric system with inscriptions on ceramic vessels (glazed pots from Harappa) indicating that the sign ‘V’ stood for a measure, a long linear stroke equalled 10, two long strokes stood for 20 and a short stroke represented one, according to Bryan Wells, who has been researching the Indus script for more than 20 years.

These markings on the pots are identical to those found on the incised tablets and bas-relief tablets also found in Harappa, said Dr. Wells, who earned his Ph.D. from Harvard University for his thesis on “The Epigraphic Approaches to Indus Writing.” It is to be published as a book in 2010.

Besides, a ceramic vessel from Mohenjo-Daro, which had fragments of blue-coloured bangles inside, had one long stroke and seven short strokes inscribed on it. When these broken pieces were reconstructed with a computer, they turned out to be 17 bangles. This again established that one long stroke equalled 10 and each short stroke one, Dr. Wells said. He described the findings as “an important discovery” and “very interesting.”

Dr. Wells has proposed that “these sign sequences [sign ‘V’ plus numerals] are various values in the Indus volumetric system. The bas-relief tablets might have been used as ration chits or a form of pseudo-money with the repetitive use of ‘V’ paired with ||, |||, |||| relating to various values in the Indus volumetric system. The larger the ceramic vessel, the more strokes it has. This postulation can be tested by detailed measurements of whole ceramic vessels with clear inscriptions.”

For instance, he recently measured the volume of the three pots from Harappa, which are now with the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI) at Purana Quila in New Delhi. While the smallest of them had three long strokes and a ‘V’ sign, the bigger one had six long strokes and a ‘V’ sign and the biggest seven long strokes and a scale inscribed below it. When he measured their volumes, Dr. Wells found that the pot with three long strokes had an estimated volume of 27.30 litres, the vessel with six long strokes 55.56 litres and the one with seven 65.89 litres. Thus, the calculated value of one long stroke was 9.24 or approximately 10 litres.

Dr. Wells (58), who is now a Senior Researcher in the Institute of Mathematical Sciences, Taramani here, has also focussed on creating an adequate sign list and corpus for the Indus script and the structural analysis of the Indus texts.

He said he first saw the pictures of these pots with markings in the “Corpus of Indus Seals and Inscriptions,” edited by Asko Parpola and his colleagues. When he learnt that the pots were with the ASI at Purana Quila, Dr. Wells travelled there to measure their volumes.
No coincidence

It was Michael Jansen, another researcher on Indus civilisation, who discovered the pot with broken bangles at Mohenjo-Daro in 1987. What intrigued Dr. Wells was the text of one long stroke and seven short strokes inscribed on it. When he reconstructed these broken pieces, using their internal circumferences, with a computer, he found that 17 bangles must have remained intact inside. Besides, the rake sign in the Indus script had a value of hundred and the double rake sign, 200. “This is completely regular” and “not a result of coincidence,” he said. When the ‘V’ sign with linear strokes that occurred on the Harappan tablets were found repeated on a number of ceramic vessels, “it gave me the idea that the ‘V’ sign is probably a measure,” Dr. Wells explained.

It was possible that wages were paid in grain (from these vessels) dispersed from a centralised storage facility, or in the case of incised tablets, material for construction projects and other short-term projects was distributed. He asserted that “there is archaeological evidence bearing on this issue in the form of standardised ceramics with texts describing their contents.”
“Fish” for weights

Dr. Wells agreed with another Indus scholar Steve Bonta’s (Pennsylvania State University) theory that the “fish” sign in the script stood for weights. According to Dr. Bonta, the fish sign occurred frequently with numbers in the script and in clusters too. He later found that the Akkadian Sargonic texts referred to the weight systems of Dilmun (Bahrain) as “minus.” The system of weights from Dilmun was exactly the same as that of the Indus system. Dr. Bonta, who speaks Tamil, realised that “min” in Tamil meant fish. “So our theory is that the term “minus” is derived from the Indus and that the fish are weights,” Dr. Wells said. There were fish signs with one long stroke, two long strokes, a single rake or a double rake. “So the sign graph is doubling and the value is doubling. I think this is too much of a coincidence. But I am aware that a lot of people will disagree with me on the fish sign,” he added.

Why Did Indus Harappan Saraswati River Civilization End

2009-10-21T17:42:00.000+05:30

EXCERPTS FROM AN INTERSETING BLOG

Ever wonder what was ongoing in the rest of the world while the environmental disasters befell Egypt when the Jews escaped the Nile Delta region for the promised land of Canaan? Offshore Egypt are the submerged stone ruins of the old kingdom cities of Menouthis and Heraklion, five miles from shore east of Alexandria, and fifty miles from shore in the Gulf of Cambay off northwest India are the ruins of two huge cities in a hundred feet of water, all obviously submerged when the sea level rose, comporting with the orthodox and correct notion that the Indus Valley Civilization declined in the 1500 B.C. timeframe, when all the great ancient civilizations in the middle latitudes also suffered catastrophic drying, and that sea level rise which consumed many port cities now found on the seafloor worldwide.

Those extensive subsea ruins in the Gulf of Cambay, to state it again, are fifty miles from shore in a hundred feet of water! No wonder the mainstream scientists working with the History, National Geographic, and Discovery channels don’t want to talk about it, because they say the Ice Age ended circa 10000 B.C., while their same teams of archaeological experts say the Indus Valley Civilization began circa 2000 B.C. and ended circa 1500 B.C., so the submerged ruins are a great source of consternation and embarassment for them, all the more reason to clamor for documentaries about these submerged ruins, and those all over the world as well, consumed by the sea when the Ice Age ended, obviously much later than the experts are saying.

I’ve read reports that the iranian government has discovered ruins in the Persian Gulf, not surprising at all really, when you consider most of the Persian Gulf is less than a hundred feet deep, while a thousand miles to the east are those submerged ruins in the Gulf of Cambay in a hundred feet of water, fifty miles from shore, of the Indus Valley Civilization, also known as the Rama Empire, who was a son of Kush, son of Ham, also known as Cham, hence the name in Gulf of Chambay, named by the ancients there, so with the great Elamite civilization (namesake Elam son of Shem) having founded the archaic cities such as Jiroft of southern Persia, why not look to the Persian Gulf for their cities which must have been consumed by the sea like the others when the Ice Age ended?

Symbols akin to Indus valley culture discovered in Kerala

2009-10-21T17:38:00.000+05:30

ARTICLE FROM HINDUSTAN TIMES
C S Narayanan Kutty, Press Trust Of India
Kozhikode, September 29, 2009
First Published: 11:38 IST(29/9/2009)
Last Updated: 11:42 IST(29/9/2009)
A rock engraving, indicating clear remnants of Harappan culture, has been found in the Edakkal caves in neighbouring Wayanad district, linking the Indus Valley civilisation with South India.

"There had been indications of remnants akin to the Indus Valley civilisation in Karnataka and Tamil Nadu, but these new findings give credence to the fact that the Harappan civilisation had its presence in the region too and could trace the history of Kerala even beyond the Iron Age," historian M R Raghava Varier said.

The unique symbols integral to the Indus Valley culture traced in Harappa and Mohanjedaro region that stretched upto Pakistan, were found inside the caves during recent excavations by the State Archaeological Department.

Of the identified 429 signs, "a man with jar cup", a symbol unique to the Indus civilisation and other compound letters testified to remnants of the Harappan culture, spanning from 2300 BC to 1700 BC, in South India, Varier, who led the excavation at the caves told PTI.

The "man-with-the-jar" symbol, an integral remnant commonly traced in parts where the Indus Valley civilisation existed, has even more similarities than those traced in Karnataka and Tamil Nadu, he said.

Computers unlock more secrets of the mysterious Indus Valley script

2009-09-17T17:55:00.000+05:30

Computers unlock more secrets of the mysterious Indus Valley script (8/19/2009)

Four-thousand years ago, an urban civilization lived and traded on what is now the border between Pakistan and India. During the past century, thousands of artifacts bearing hieroglyphics left by this prehistoric people have been discovered. Today, a team of Indian and American researchers are using mathematics and computer science to try to piece together information about the still-unknown script.

The team led by a University of Washington researcher has used computers to extract patterns in ancient Indus symbols. The study, published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, shows distinct patterns in the symbols' placement in sequences and creates a statistical model for the unknown language.

"The statistical model provides insights into the underlying grammatical structure of the Indus script," said lead author Rajesh Rao, a UW associate professor of computer science. "Such a model can be valuable for decipherment, because any meaning ascribed to a symbol must make sense in the context of other symbols that precede or follow it."

Co-authors are Nisha Yadav and Mayank Vahia of the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research and Centre for Excellence in Basic Sciences in Mumbai; Hrishikesh Joglekar of Mumbai; R. Adhikari of the Institute of Mathematical Sciences in Chennai; and Iravatham Mahadevan of the Indus Research Centre in Chennai.

Despite dozens of attempts, nobody has yet deciphered the Indus script. The symbols are found on tiny seals, tablets and amulets, left by people inhabiting the Indus Valley from about 2600 to 1900 B.C. Each artifact is inscribed with a sequence that is typically five to six symbols long.

Some people have questioned whether the symbols represent a language at all, or are merely pictograms of political or religious icons.

The new study looks for mathematical patterns in the sequence of symbols. Calculations show that the order of symbols is meaningful; taking one symbol from a sequence found on an artifact and changing its position produces a new sequence that has a much lower probability of belonging to the hypothetical language. The authors said the presence of such distinct rules for sequencing symbols provides further support for the group's previous findings, reported earlier this year in the journal Science, that the unknown script might represent a language.

"These results give us confidence that there is a clear underlying logic in Indus writing," Vahia said.

Seals with sequences of Indus symbols have been found as far away as West Asia, in the region historically known as Mesopotamia and site of modern-day Iraq. The statistical results showed that the West-Asian sequences are ordered differently from sequences on artifacts found in the Indus valley. This supports earlier theories that the script may have been used by Indus traders in West Asia to represent different information compared to the Indus region.

"The finding that the Indus script may have been versatile enough to represent different subject matter in West Asia is provocative. This finding is hard to reconcile with the claim that the script merely represents religious or political symbols," Rao said.

The researchers used a Markov model, a statistical method that estimates the likelihood of a future event (such as inscribing a particular symbol) based on patterns seen in the past. The method was first developed by Russian mathematician Andrey Markov a century ago and is increasingly used in economics, genetics, speech-recognition and other fields.

"One of the main purposes of our paper is to introduce Markov models, and statistical models in general, as computational tools for investigating ancient scripts," Adhikari said.

One application described in the paper uses the statistical model to fill in missing symbols on damaged archaeological artifacts. Such filled-in texts can increase the pool of data available for deciphering the writings of ancient civilizations, Rao said.

Note: This story has been adapted from a news release issued by the University of Washington