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Authors: Klaus K. Klostermaier
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chronology.” They date back to the third millennium B.C.E. Greek accounts tell of Indian royal lists going back to the seventh millennium B.C.E.
The
Ṛgveda
itself shows an advanced and sophisticated culture, the product of a long development, “a civilisation that could not have been delivered to India on horseback”
(In Search of the Cradle
, p. 160).
Painted Gray Ware culture in the western Gangetic plains, dated c.1100 B.C.E., has been found connected to (earlier) Black and Red Ware.
As already remarked, there is no hint in the Veda of a migration of the people that considered it its own sacred tradition. It would be strange indeed if the Vedic Indians had lost all recollection of such a momentous event in supposedly relatively recent times – much more recent, for instance, than the migration of Abraham and his people, which is well attested and frequently referred to in the Bible. In addition, as has been established recently through satellite photography and geological investigations, the Saraswatī, the mightiest river known to the Rgvedic Indians, along whose banks they established numerous major settlements, had dried out completely by 1900 B.C.E. – four centuries before the Āryans were supposed to have invaded India. One can hardly argue for the establishment of Āryan villages along a dry river bed.
When the first remnants of the ruins of the so-called Indus civilization came to light in the early part of the twentieth century, the proponents of the Āryan invasion theory believed they had found the missing archeological evidence: here were the “mighty forts” and the “great cities” which the war-like Indra of the
Ṛgveda
was said to have conquered and destroyed. It then emerged that nobody had destroyed these cities and no evidence of wars of conquest came to light: floods and droughts had made it impossible to sustain large populations in the area, and the people of Mohenjo Daro, Harappa and other places had migrated to more hospitable areas. Ongoing archeological research has not only extended the area of the Indus civilization but has also shown a transition of its later phases to the Gangetic culture. Archeo-geographers have established that a drought lasting two to three hundred years devastated a wide belt of land from Anatolia through Mesopotamia to northern India around 2300 B.C.E. to 2000 B.C.E.
Based on this type of evidence and extrapolating from the Vedic texts, a new story of the origins of Hinduism emerges which reflects the self-consciousness of Hindus and which attempts to replace the “colonial-missionary Āryan invasion theory” by a vision of “India as the Cradle of Civilisation.” This new theory considers the Indus civilization as a late Vedic phenomenon and pushes the (inner-Indian) beginnings of the Vedic age back by several thousands of years. One of the reasons for considering the Indus civilization “Vedic” is the evidence of town planning and architectural design, which required a fairly advanced algebraic geometry – of the type preserved in the Vedic
Śulvasūtras
. The widely respected historian of mathematics, A. Seidenberg, concluded, after studying the geometry used in building the Egyptian pyramids and the Mesopotamian citadels, that it reflected a derivative geometry – that is, a geometry derived from the Vedic
Śulva-sūtras
. If that is so, then the knowledge (“Veda”) on which the construction of Harappa and Mohenjo Daro is based cannot be later than that civilization itself. 9
While the
Ṛgveda
has always been held to be the oldest literary document of India and was considered to have preserved the oldest form of Sanskrit, Indians have not taken it to be the source for their early history. For them,
Itihāsa-Purāṇa
served that purpose. The language of these works is more recent than that of the Vedas and the time of their final redaction is much later than the fixation of the Vedic canon. However, they contain detailed information
The
Ṛgveda
itself shows an advanced and sophisticated culture, the product of a long development, “a civilisation that could not have been delivered to India on horseback”
(In Search of the Cradle
, p. 160).
Painted Gray Ware culture in the western Gangetic plains, dated c.1100 B.C.E., has been found connected to (earlier) Black and Red Ware.
As already remarked, there is no hint in the Veda of a migration of the people that considered it its own sacred tradition. It would be strange indeed if the Vedic Indians had lost all recollection of such a momentous event in supposedly relatively recent times – much more recent, for instance, than the migration of Abraham and his people, which is well attested and frequently referred to in the Bible. In addition, as has been established recently through satellite photography and geological investigations, the Saraswatī, the mightiest river known to the Rgvedic Indians, along whose banks they established numerous major settlements, had dried out completely by 1900 B.C.E. – four centuries before the Āryans were supposed to have invaded India. One can hardly argue for the establishment of Āryan villages along a dry river bed.
When the first remnants of the ruins of the so-called Indus civilization came to light in the early part of the twentieth century, the proponents of the Āryan invasion theory believed they had found the missing archeological evidence: here were the “mighty forts” and the “great cities” which the war-like Indra of the
Ṛgveda
was said to have conquered and destroyed. It then emerged that nobody had destroyed these cities and no evidence of wars of conquest came to light: floods and droughts had made it impossible to sustain large populations in the area, and the people of Mohenjo Daro, Harappa and other places had migrated to more hospitable areas. Ongoing archeological research has not only extended the area of the Indus civilization but has also shown a transition of its later phases to the Gangetic culture. Archeo-geographers have established that a drought lasting two to three hundred years devastated a wide belt of land from Anatolia through Mesopotamia to northern India around 2300 B.C.E. to 2000 B.C.E.
Based on this type of evidence and extrapolating from the Vedic texts, a new story of the origins of Hinduism emerges which reflects the self-consciousness of Hindus and which attempts to replace the “colonial-missionary Āryan invasion theory” by a vision of “India as the Cradle of Civilisation.” This new theory considers the Indus civilization as a late Vedic phenomenon and pushes the (inner-Indian) beginnings of the Vedic age back by several thousands of years. One of the reasons for considering the Indus civilization “Vedic” is the evidence of town planning and architectural design, which required a fairly advanced algebraic geometry – of the type preserved in the Vedic
Śulvasūtras
. The widely respected historian of mathematics, A. Seidenberg, concluded, after studying the geometry used in building the Egyptian pyramids and the Mesopotamian citadels, that it reflected a derivative geometry – that is, a geometry derived from the Vedic
Śulva-sūtras
. If that is so, then the knowledge (“Veda”) on which the construction of Harappa and Mohenjo Daro is based cannot be later than that civilization itself. 9
While the
Ṛgveda
has always been held to be the oldest literary document of India and was considered to have preserved the oldest form of Sanskrit, Indians have not taken it to be the source for their early history. For them,
Itihāsa-Purāṇa
served that purpose. The language of these works is more recent than that of the Vedas and the time of their final redaction is much later than the fixation of the Vedic canon. However, they contain detailed information
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