Sarasvati Civilization

[ramana]

X-posted.. Very good work JamesB



JamesB posted in TSP thread.....



--------

I have looked at the all major Pakistani airbases through google earth, it is with deep regret that I say that none of them got affected due to floods. I have posted below the pictures of airbases most nearest to the Indus river which were most likely to have got affected but they are not affected. I have also made an overlap satellite flood situation images from NASA earth observatory as of August 11 to get a perspective.



Sukkur Air base (not a major airbase to speak of)











Mianwali Air base (a major PAF air base)











Looks like the Indus flooded to 70 km wide swath. And per records this i stwice in ~100 years. So could such a flood have swamped Harappa in ancient times?

[ramana]

I was reading the book "Empires of te Indus" and a section of it documented that the Pakis are busy digging at more sites to bolstrer their idea that AIT happened and the Muslims are only modren equivalents of ancient marauders!

[ramana]

Aunrag Sanghi on

Saraswati Basin

[ramana]

Current Science article on Sarawasti River



http://www.ias.ac.in/currsci/oct25/articles20.htm

[Husky]

I don't know what thread this goes into. Why not here.



Reading the following, I was reminded of how IIRC Konkan GSBs (GSBs from Gomantak to Maharashtra's Ko(n)kanastha/Chitpavan - sp? - Hindu communities) to Kerala Hindus recall the Hindu tradition that Parashurama reclaimed (large swathes of) the Konkan and Kerala land from the Ocean.

Don't quote me on this.





Via rajeev2004.blogspot.com/2011/07/dna-8000-year-old-advanced-civilisation.html



Photos plus captions over multiple pages

www.dnaindia.com/mumbai/slideshow_photos-8000-year-old-advanced-civilisation-in-konkan-coast_1547920

[color="#0000FF"]Photos: 8000-year-old advanced civilisation in Konkan Coast?[/color]

Published: Thursday, May 26, 2011 on 21:13 IST | Updated: Thursday, May 26, 2011 on 21:21 IST



Caption 1:

Did the Konkan coast from Shrivardhan in Raigad to Vengurla in Sindhudurga host a human habitat around 8000 years ago? Did that population have well-developed engineering skills? Was there a unique Konkan culture in existence in 6000BC?



A new archaeological discovery, below sea level along the Konkan coast, could give answers to these questions. And explorers say the answer could well be a big ‘Yes!’





Caption 2:

Researchers have found a wall-like structure that is 24 kilometres long, 2.7 metres tall, and around 2.5 metres wide. The structure shows uniformity in its construction.



“The structure is not continuous throughout the 225 kilometres from Shrivardhan to Raigad, but it is uniform,” said Dr Ashok Marathe, professor, department of archaeology, Postgraduate and Research Institute, Deccan College, Pune.



“It has been found three metres below the present sea level. It has been constructed on the ancient sand beach, which was taken as the base for the construction. Considering the uniformity of the structure, it was obvious that the structure is man-made and not natural.”





Caption 3:

The joint expedition carried by Deccan College and the central government’s department of science and technology, was in progress from 2005.



“We were actually studying the impacts of tsunamis and earthquakes on the western coast when we first found this structure in Valneshwar,” said Marathe. “Then we started talking with the locals and fisherfolks and we got news about more such structures below water.”





Caption 4:

Marathe added that, the uniformity also shows that the people who built it belong to the same culture from Shrivardhan to Vengurla.

However, deciding the age of the structure was done on the basis of sea level mapping.





Caption 5:

Bottom of the wall



“There have been extensive studies about the sea water coming inside the land,” said Marathe. “The wall’s base, that is ancient sand, is about six metres below the present sea level. Based on the calculations, experts from the National Institute of Oceanography found the age of the wall as around 6000 BC.”



According to him, the sea was away from its present coastline in 6000 BC and this wall could have been an effort to prevent the sea water from coming inside the human habitat.

[color="#800080"](Why do people keep saying things like "6000 BC" - according to the BC/AD timeline, there *was* no "6000 BC", where about 4004 "BC" is the max going backwards. But if, like the rest of us, you think that the planet existed for longer than that, you'd be using BCE and CE - for expressing things in a timeline that the west can understand.)[/color]





Caption 6:

Middle of the wall



The discovery has raised a number of questions.



How were these huge stones of Laterite and Deccan Trap variety transported to the coast?



What exactly was the purpose behind building the wall?



If the date of the walls is true then is it from around the same time as the Indus Valley Civilisation?



Why has there been no mention of this civilisation till now?



Marathe, who will retire in July 2011, has asked more people to come forward to take his work ahead and to try to find answer to these questions.





Caption 7:

Top of the wall



In the wake of a number of power projects coming on the Konkan coast and the growing discontent about the projects, this discovery could prove vital.



Marathe, though does not have much hope from the government mentioned that this, if studied properly could be a major chapter of human being’s history.



“It is now up to the government how they treat my finding,” he said.

[color="#800080"](How do people think a christogovt will treat the finding of something older than "4004 BC"?)[/color]

Reading the following, I was reminded of how IIRC Konkan GSBs (GSBs from Gomantak to Maharashtra's Ko(n)kanastha/Chitpavan - sp? - Hindu communities) to Kerala Hindus recall the Hindu tradition that Parashurama reclaimed (large swathes of) the Konkan and Kerala land from the Ocean.

Don't quote me on this.

Seems I wasn't imagining it:



a) Konkan GSBs (Gomantak etc):

http://www.gsbkonkani.net/konkani.htm

Konkans and Konkani :

In our Puranas and other ancient writings there is a mention of 'Sapta Konkana' or seven Konkans. These seven Konkans were in the west coast of India. Although Konkani language is identified with an area geographically, it is surprising that only we, the Gowda Saraswat Brahmins are called 'konkanis', 'konkans' or 'konkanigaru'. To amplify further, although many others have Konkani as their mother-tongue, they are not called 'konkanis'. With this we can infer that originally we were the people who propagated and encouraged this language. In the above referred Konkanpatti even today we are referred to as Brahmins and not Konkanis as we are Gowda Saraswat Brahmins carrying out the duties expected of Brahmins.



Gowda Saraswat Brahmins :

Even this name Gowda Saraswat Brahmins refers to the places. Our ancestors in the days of yore, resided on the banks of the River Saraswati. There was a very severe drought lasting for many years as a result of which the river got dried up and they had to leave the place. They moved eastwards and reached a place called "Trihotrapura", the present day "Tiruhut" in the state of Bihar. In the olden days the Vedic literature was called "thrayee" and the "ritvijs" participating in the "yajnas" were "hotas". Therefore the very name "Trihotrapura" suggests that it could have been a prominent centre for learning Vedas. Incidentally this township was in Gowda Desha comprising of the present day states of Bihar and Bengal. The very name Gowda Desha was associated with the production of "guda" - jaggery. On account of our residing in both the Gowda Desha and Saraswat country, we acquired the name of Gowda Saraswat Brahmins. The subsequent story is known to everyone. [color="#800080"](Even to me it seems[/color] [color="#0000FF"]Lord Parashurama acquired and reclaimed land from the sea in the western part of our country which came to be known as Parashurama Srishti. To officiate the sacrifices he was going to perform, Lord Parashurama invited our ancestors and thus we reached Gomantak, the present day Goa.[/color]

Two things:

1. What, Bihar's entire history is not purely Buddhist as everyone always pretends it's ever been whenever they speak of its history? You mean to say it was a very Vedic Hindu centre at some point, long before Buddha and Buddhism even existed? "Ya don't say."





2. It's strange. I was going to get round to commenting on a bit from the news that mentioned "Witzel invades Thrissur to terrorise Hindus conducting Vedic rite". In specific, the comment was going to be about what it seemed to indicate concerning both Namboodiris's deeper ancientry in the south than is generally allowed and their indigenousness to Bharatam (I never suspected them of being anything but indigenous, but some absurd rumours had been set in motion in recent times that they weren't.) More on this some other time and in that thread on the Thrissur yagnya, if I can find it again.



I was going to mention in that future post how the only remaining brahmana communities which were still threatened with having an alien identity imposed on them by modern/alien history-writing were the GSBs and Chitpavans:

- The latter have variously been declared as Greeks elseZoroastrian Persians, since "apparently" they just "washed up on the Indian shore with no memory of their past. Ask any Chitpavan. 'Therefore' they *must* be Greek/Zoroastrian Persian, they couldn't possibly be indigenous Indians forget native brahmanas."

- TSPers have laughably attempted to declare GSBs (and all SBs) to be "jews who originally settled in Kashmir" all in order to claim Aishwarya Rai as a fellow 'abrahamic' or something. Except that bit of wishful thinking failed in multiple ways: as Aishwarya Rai explains of her family, they are Tulu, i.e. one of the ancient Hindoo communities that speaks one of the 5 ancient "dravoodian" tongues. A community that didn't wander south from the Saraswati River, from the little I know.



Anyway, as ridiculous as all that desperate nonsense about GSBs being aliens sounds (then again, oryans are japhetics and israelis are semites while dravoodians are hamites, when will Hindoos be free of biblical impositions?) the west took the story peddled by TSP about Rai seriously for some time, with several famous movie sites quoting some mad TSPer's book on Aishwarya Rai about how GSBs were supposedly originally Jewish people from Israel and that Aishwarya - on account of her light eyes and being from Mangalore where not only Tulus but also Konkanis reside - "must therefore be" a GSB-er and "hence it followed that she is of Jewish origins".

And if those multi-level jokes weren't carried too far already as it was, some American Jewish sites started alluding to not only Aishwyara Rai but also other Hindus of SB communities as being of Jewish origin.



Curious though. More than one Brahmana community has been slandered with an alien origin, as if their own view of their indigenous Indian + Hindoo (in this case brahmana) identity is entirely to be ignored. As if they couldn't possibly have passed on their religion from one generation to the next.



While Aishwarya Rai's indigenousness was never truly encroached on (since ignorant TSP's don't know anything about the south, and probably didn't know about Tulus) - lucky her - I'm curious whether one can read the above news as vindicating the SBs at last as being indigenous. (To think Hindus have to keep putting the never-ending stream of lies questioning their ancestry to rest.) In other words, my question is: could this bit of news free the SBs of the recently-invented christoislamic slander that they are supposedly "aliens and not even originally Hindu - they're pretending to be hereditary brahmanas i.e. of a Vedic history" and the accusations that they are somehow "Jews".



If the above does have any bearing on the movement of the GSBs into the Konkan, it could push the western-imposed timeframe of "4000 BCE is when the SBs dispersed from the Saraswati" to an earlier date.





b ) Oh look, seems I was not wrong about Kerala either:



en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filearshuramsaraswats.jpg

[color="#800080"](Image caption[/color]



Description Parshuramsaraswats.jpg

English: This painting showing Lord enarasurama, an avatar of Lord Vishnu asking Lord en:Varuna, God of the waters to recede to make land known as Kerala from Kanyakumari to Gokarna for the Brahmins. A number of myths and legends persist concerning the origin of Kerala. One such myth is the creation of Kerala by Parasurama, a warrior sage. The Brahminical myth proclaims that Parasurama, an avatar of Mahavishnu, threw his battle axe into the sea. As a result, the land of Kerala arose and was reclaimed from the waters.Parasurama was the incarnation of Maha Vishnu. He was the sixth of the ten avatars (incarnation) of Vishnu. The word Parasu means 'axe' in Sanskrit and therefore the name Parasurama means 'Ram with Axe'. The aim of his birth was to deliver the world from the arrogant oppression of the ruling caste, the Kshatriyas. He killed all the male Kshatriyas on earth and filled five lakes with their blood. After destroying the Kshatriya kings, he approached assembly of learned men to find a way of penitence for his sins. He was advised that, to save his soul from damnation, he must hand over the lands he had conquered to the Brahmins. He did as they advised and sat in meditation at Gokarna. There, Varuna -the God of the Oceans and Bhumidevi - Goddess of Earth blessed him. From Gokarna he reached Kanyakumari and threw his axe northward across the ocean. The place where the axe landed was Kerala. It was 160 katam (an old measure) of land lying between Gokarna and Kanyakumari. Puranas say that it was Parasuram who planted the 64 Brahmin families in Kerala, whom he brought down from the north in order to expiate his slaughter of the Kshatriyas. According to the puranas, Kerala is also known as Parasurama Kshetram, ie., 'The Land of Parasurama', as the land was reclaimed from sea by him.

Still following on from my elaborate guessing game (hey if western indologicals can start theorising grandiose theories about their unverifiable ancestors/history based on very neutral/silent data, can't I play my much fairer game of considering/imagining a relation between the Parashurama narrative and archeological discoveries?) -

So, onward with my hypothesising:

If the discovery off the coast does end up having some sort of connection to the above Parashurama narrative after all, does this mean people will finally stop threatening Parashurama with being a Persian/having reclaimed land in Persia (or whatever it was that they were threatening him with, I can't properly recall)?





Oh well, I guess we'll never know as long as Dharmics continue to allow christianism to rule over them: Like I said, if given half a chance, the christogovt will do its evil-christo-best to bury anything that predates "4004 BC". And certainly if such things were to turn out to have any bearing on Hindus, their history and indigenousness (and their ancestral Hindooness).

[roosevelt92]

there is lot of civilization in Indian History... its hard to remember their culture...

[sumishi]

[size="3"]I found this 2002 article -- The Enigma of India's Origins -- written by a Westerner.

Makes for a very interesting read, tying up a few things discussed in this thread.

I submit it to you gurus for perusal.



[/size][indent][size="3"]

[size="4"]The Enigma of India’s Origins[/size]



The Dating of New Discoveries in the Gulf of Cambay Upsets the Orthodox Scenario for the Dawn of Civilization

David Lewis



With three quarters of the planet covered by water, it’s been said we know more about the surface of Venus than about that which lies beneath the sea. Yet this may be changing. The discovery of what may be a lost city off the coast of western Cuba startled the archeological world in the spring of 2001. Reports from Havana spoke of massive stone blocks stacked at a depth of 2,100 feet in perpendicular and circular formations, some resembling pyramids. Researchers in a miniature submarine described the area as an urban development, with structures that may once have been roads and bridges.



Because a prediluvian “lost city” does not fit into the accepted paradigm of prehistory, the halls of orthodoxy remain silent on the matter—at least for now. And while those halls still stand, other recent discoveries have begun to seriously erode their foundations. Finding the ruins of an ancient, submerged civilization raises more questions than it answers and causes more problems than it solves. How did the land and its structures sink? What could have prompted such a large-scale cataclysm? When did civilization on Earth actually begin? What do we really know about the ancient past and human origins? And how does the establishment of science, so fixed in its doctrines, grapple with the potential demise of its most cherished presumptions?



If the lost city of the Caribbean wasn’t enough, about the same time an equally startling discovery occurred twenty-five miles off the coast of Gujurat, India. The discovery took place in that part of the Arabian Sea known as the [color="#8b0000"]Gulf of Cambay[/color]. India’s National Institute of Ocean Technology (NIOT) turned up some amazing sonar images from the gulf’s depths while scanning for pollution levels. Using equipment that penetrates the sea floor, marine experts discovered a pattern of distinct, [color="#8b0000"]man-made formations across a five-mile stretch of seabed[/color].



According to reports published worldwide, NIOT’s sonar-imaging technology detected what appeared to be the stone pillars and collapsed walls of at least two cities. The site was described as part of an ancient river valley civilization not unlike the [color="#8b0000"]River Saraswati[/color] of the Rig Veda, thought to be mythical but—according to recent independent findings by Indian scientists—has been proved to have flowed to Gujurat. Divers at the Gulf of Cambay site later retrieved from depths of 120 feet two thousand man-made artifacts, including pottery, jewelry, sculpture, human bones, and evidence of writing, according to The Times of London.



“Underwater structures that have been found along the Gulf of Cambay, Gujarat, indicate an ancient township that could date back anywhere before or during the Harappan civilization,” Science and Technology Minister Murli Manohar Joshi told the world at a press conference in May 2001.



Joshi’s initial guess was that the five-mile-long site was four thousand to six thousand years old and had been submerged by an extremely powerful earthquake. But in January 2002, carbon dating revealed that an artifact from the site was astonishingly ancient, between 8,500 and 9,500 years old (the oldest known civilization in the world by thousands of years). This was a time when, according to orthodox archeological standards, India should have been peopled with primitive hunter-gatherers and a few settlements, not the inhabitants of a lost civilization.



The author and underwater researcher Graham Hancock described buildings at the site as being hundreds of feet in length, with drains running along the streets. “If the case is made [for the age of the underwater cities], then it means that the foundations are out of the bottom of archeology,” Hancock said.



The scope and sophistication of the site dismantles the specific belief that civilization began five thousand years ago in Sumeria, according to Hancock, even as the alternative scholarship movement, of which he is a central figure, in general challenges orthodox views about human origins. In the orthodox (Darwinist) view, life, and then human beings, emerged extremely slowly from highly improbable accidental causes over a period of time necessitated by laws of probability.



The theoretical four-billion-year age of the planet was determined not by scientific or geologic evidence, according to the science writer Richard Milton (author of Facts of Life: Shattering the Myth of Darwinism), but by estimating how long it should have taken for accidental life to have occurred, given the extreme improbability of life having occurred at all through random, material causes.



Civilization followed, according to the scenario, after the theoretical “out-of-Africa” migration (about 100,000 years ago), fairly recently in prehistory. Evidence of extremely ancient civilizations, or of severe cataclysmic disruptions (those resembling mythical events that may have shaped the ancient world), throws a wrench into the conventional machinery. Discoveries that reveal civilizations having existed several thousand years earlier than previously thought are greeted with disbelief, consternation, silence. Evidence, then, of modern man having lived, say, 250,000 years ago in South America is considered preposterous and heretical, although the evidence for it exists.



Other views, modern and ancient, portray life as having emerged by more mysterious means, not by a series of astronomically improbable accidents, not through a biblical creationist scenario, but by virtue of some other unknown agency. This other, unknown agency, an all-pervasive life force more in keeping with The Tao of Physics than Origin of Species, is such as that evidenced in Eastern healing disciplines and codified impressionistically in the world’s mythologies.



In this latter view, the idea that prehistoric civilizations existed needs not be rejected due to a presumption that life evolved from material causes alone over an arbitrary time line necessitated by improbability. Tradition in India has always held, in fact, that Indian culture predates all understanding, being virtually timeless, stretching into the mists of antiquity from whence sprang the gods and myth—the non-space/non-time reality of modern theoretical physics.



As we shall see, certain mythical traditions maintain that the landmass of ancient India greatly exceeded its present size, and even that it stretched from Australia to Madagascar, perhaps as an archipelago. As with the archeological discovery of Troy, once thought to be a myth, it must be recognized that at least some of India’s supposedly mythical traditions are rooted in historical fact. This leads to the idea of an “Asian Atlantis,” which may seem fantastic, but early geologists believed such a continent existed. The notion may again be gaining credence after the discoveries in the Gulf of Cambay and given NIOT’s intention to investigate other submerged archeological sites off Mahabalipuram and Poompuhar in Tamil Nadu.



Current conceptions of Western scholars conflict with traditional Indian beliefs about such things, but that wasn’t always the case. In the mid to late nineteenth century, when scientific ideas about human origins had begun to take shape in Europe, early geologists and archeologists accepted the idea of a biblical flood, lost continents (for which they found much evidence), and a landmass in the Indian Ocean—the great Southern Continent of the British naturalist Alfred Russell Wallace.



Even today, mainstream science believes such landmasses as Gondwanaland and Pangaea existed, although they are relegated to the extremely ancient epochs of 180 to 200 million years ago, in keeping with beliefs about the age of the planet necessitated by an admittedly improbable evolutionary process. And consider the South Asian traditions that mimic the findings of the early geologists, those who say an inhabited continent existed across what are now the Indian Ocean, the Arabian Sea, and the Bay of Bengal. These traditions live to this day in the lore of southern India, Sri Lanka, and the islands of the Andaman Sea.



“In a former age,” an ancient Sri Lankan text states, “the citadel of Rawana (Lord of Lanka), 25 palaces and 400,000 streets were swallowed by the sea.”



The submerged landmass, according to one ancient account, rested between Tuticoreen on the southwest Indian coast and Manaar in Sri Lanka. This submerged landmass was not a landmass of the size envisioned by the early geologists, but—if it actually existed—a submerged portion of the Indian subcontinent just the same.



Another cultural tradition, cited in Allan and Delair’s Cataclysm! Compelling Evidence of a Cosmic Catastrophe in 9500 B.C., that of the Selungs of the Mergui Archipelago off southern Burma, also speaks of a sunken landmass: “. . . formerly [the] country was of continental dimensions, but the daughter of an evil spirit threw many rocks into the sea . . . the waters rose and swallowed up the land. . . . Everything Another cultural tradition, cited in Allan and Delair’s Cataclysm! Compelling Evidence of a Cosmic Catastrophe in 9500 B.C., that of the Selungs of the Mergui Archipelago off southern Burma, also speaks of a sunken landmass: “. . . formerly [the] country was of continental dimensions, but the daughter of an evil spirit threw many rocks into the sea . . . the waters rose and swallowed up the land. . . . Everything alive perished, except what was able to save itself on one island that remained above the waters.”



One of the Tamil epics of southern India, the Silappadhikaram, frequently mentions a vast tract of land called [color="#8b0000"]Kumara Nadu[/color], also known as Kumari Kandam, stretching far beyond India’s present-day coasts. Ancient south Indian commentators wrote in detail of a prehistoric “Tamil Sangham,” a spiritual academy situated in that ancient land. They wrote also of the submersion of two rivers, the Kumari and the Pahroli, in the middle of the continent, and of a country dotted with mountain ranges, animals, vegetation, and forty-nine provinces. This Pandya kingdom, according to tradition, reigned from 30,000 B.C.E. to 16,500 B.C.E. At least one branch of modern-day south Indian mystics claims a direct lineage from those extraordinarily ancient times, when their spiritual progenitors were said to have achieved extremely long lives through yogic techniques.



And India’s epic poem the Mahabharata, dated by non-Westernized Indian scholars to five thousand years before Christ, contains references to its hero, Rama, gazing from India’s present-day west coast into a vast landmass now occupied by the Arabian Sea, an account supported by the recent underwater discoveries. Less celebrated Indian texts even mention advanced technology, in the form of aircraft used to transport the society’s elite and wage war.



The writings describe these aircraft in detail and at great length, puzzling scholars and historians. The great Indian epics, what’s more, vividly describe militaristic devastation that can be equated only with nuclear war. Was there, at one time, not just an ancient civilization in India, but an advanced ancient civilization?



Flying machines . . . lost continents . . . are these mythical tales of mythical lands or do these ancient references provide us with a historical record long forgotten and then dismissed by Western science as fantasy?



To answer that question, we must look at the history of scholarship as it pertains to India. Since the nineteenth century, Western scholars have dismissed the historical significance of the cultural traditions of ancient peoples, those of southern Asia included. With a decidedly ethnocentric bias, the experts reinterpreted history as it was taught in the East. Having found, for example, that root words of India’s ancient [color="#8b0000"]Sanskrit [/color]turn up almost universally in the world’s major languages, Western scholars devised an [color="#8b0000"]ethnocentric scheme[/color] to explain the phenomenon—one that modern Indian intellectuals have come to accept.



A previous European people must have once existed, the scholars imagined—an [color="#8b0000"]Indo-European race[/color] upon which the world, including India, drew for its linguistic roots and genetic stock. The scholars also expropriated the [color="#8b0000"]Aryans [/color]of ancient India to flesh out this scenario. This Aryan race, they told us, derived from Europe and then invaded the Indus Valley in the north of India—making Sanskrit and Vedic culture relatively young and a product, rather than a progenitor, of Western civilization.



The “Aryan invasion” theory has since fallen into disrepute. James Schaffer, of Case Western University, a noted archeologist specializing in ancient India, had this to say on the matter. “The archeological record and ancient oral and literate traditions of south Asia are now converging.”



In other words, India’s mythology is being proved historically accurate. Schaffer then wrote. “A few scholars have proposed that there is nothing in the ‘literature’ firmly placing the Indo-Aryans outside of south Asia, and now the archeological record is confirming this. . . . We reject most strongly the simplistic historical interpretations [of Western scholars], which date back to the eighteenth century. . . . These still prevailing interpretations are significantly diminished by European ethnocentrism, colonialism, racism . . .”



Southern India, a land whose cultural roots are said by some to stretch into an even more profound antiquity than do those of the north, suffered a similar fate. Speakers of a proto-Dravidian language, the forerunner of a family of languages spoken in the south—and some say of Sanskrit itself—entered India from the northwest, the Western scholars insist. Both invasion theories were necessitated by Western beliefs, at first about the Garden of Eden theory of origins and then, with the arrival of the [color="#8b0000"]Darwinists[/color], beliefs about the widely held out-of-Africa theory.



But the Aryan invasion theory has been debunked. No skeletal evidence shows any difference between the supposed invaders and the indigenous peoples of India. And satellite imagery now shows that the ancient Harrapan civilization of the Indus Valley, and Mohenjo-Daro, probably declined and disappeared due to climatic changes, the drying up of the mythical Saraswati River, rather than to the descent of imaginary invaders. The demise of the Aryan invasion theory, though, and the recently discovered underwater ruins open a Pandora’s box for orthodox scholars regarding the past—not just India’s past, but that of the human race. If Sanskrit predates the world’s other languages, and if ancient civilizations existed where there are now seas, how can prehistory be explained in modern Western terms?



And how much of the actual history of India is still obscured by ethnocentricism, colonialism, or scientific materialism? The demise of the Aryan invasion theory may represent only the tip of the iceberg of misconceptions about the age and nature of ancient India, her culture, her people, and her accomplishments.



It has long been claimed that Mother India was born in a time before all myth began, when rishis, men of great wisdom and phenomenal spiritual attainment, walked on Earth. This ancient India dates to the times out of which the epic poems the Ramayana, the Mahabharata, and the ancient traditions of Tamil Nadu in the south grew. The Tamil Nadu was a land whose culture is said by some to predate that of the north, having once existed as part of Kumari Kandam and dating to a staggering 30,000 B.C.E.



A great deluge inundated Kumari Kandam, obscure texts of the Siddhanta tradition of Tamil Nadu reportedly say. This is a notion echoed in the writings of Colonel James Churchward and W. S. Cervé, both of whom claim knowledge of texts, Indian and Tibetan, respectively, that speak of a long-lost continent situated in the East.



While continental drift theory presumes the extremely slow and uniform movement of landmasses over many hundreds of millions of years, a great deal of evidence exists that Earth’s surface changed rapidly and violently in recent prehistory. A great sudden extinction of mammals and plants took place on the planet around the end of the last ice age, perhaps as recently as 12,000 years ago. Hundreds of mammal and plant species disappeared from the face of the earth, many of the carcasses having been driven by flooding into deep caverns and charred piles the world over. Modern science has been unable to adequately explain this event, and unwilling to consider what seems obvious, based on the evidence.



D. S. Allan and J. B. Delair, in Cataclysm! Compelling Evidence of a Cosmic Catastrophe in 9500 B.C., amass a formidable quantity of known evidence corroborating the flood/conflagration legends stored in the world’s mythological record. If we suspend belief in the textbook accounts of prehistory, Allan and Delair fill the void in a convincing way, replacing gradualist doctrines that involve extremely slow glacial movements (which are supposed to have accounted for the great extinction) with what seems to have been, upon a review of the evidence, a worldwide, phenomenal disaster that submerged landmasses and ruptured Earth’s crust.



Much of the evidence centers on southern Asia. Records gathered by the Swedish survey ship Albatross in 1947 reveal a vast plateau of hardened lava for at least several hundred miles southeast of Sri Lanka. The lava, evidence of a severe rupture in Earth’s crust, fills most of the now submerged valleys that once existed there. The immense eruption that gave off the lava may have coincided with the downfall of Wallace’s Southern Continent (aka Kumari Kandam), for which much zoological and botanical evidence exists that would give such a landmass a recent date, according to Allan and Delair, not the 180 million years that orthodoxy ascribes to such a continent. The lost cities of the Gulf of Cambay may have suffered a similar fate, at the same time or as a result of unstable tectonic conditions resulting from the initial disturbance—an asteroid, perhaps, or a displacement of Earth’s crust—that caused the recent extinction and destruction of the ancient cities.



Among the troves of evidence compiled by early geologists and resurrected by Allan and Delair are Asian bone caves filled with diverse species of recent prehistoric animals from around the world. These carcasses could have been driven to their final resting places only by vast amounts of water moving across the globe. In light of Allan and Delair’s work, other evidence such as India’s Deccan trap, a vast triangular plain of lava several thousand feet thick covering 250,000 square miles, and the Indo-Gangetic trough, a gigantic crack in Earth’s surface stretching from Sumatra through India to the Persian Gulf, can be interpreted as evidence of a cataclysm that ruptured Earth’s crust, submerged various landmasses, and caused the great extinction.



Other titillating fragments of anomalous evidence suggest a pervasive if not advanced seafaring or even airborne culture having once existed in ancient India—for example, the identical nature of the Indus Valley script to that found at Easter Island on the other side of the Pacific Ocean. Initial reports suggest, it should be noted, that the script found recently in the Gulf of Cambay resembles the Indus Valley script. According to certain south Indian researchers, the indecipherable scripts are written in a proto-Tamil language, which would link the culture of distant Easter Island and its famous megalithic statues with ancient southern India, Kumari Kandam—an idea echoed in the lore of Easter Islanders about a lost continent to the West from which their people originated.



With the recent advent of underwater archeology, records of the past are being rewritten. More research is needed, as well as more expeditions into treacherous waters and the depths of the world’s oceans; but more than ever, textbook scenarios of prehistory are drowning of their own weight while scenes of a more glorious past rise to the surface via acoustic imaging. Past being prologue, those images are of interest not to academics alone, but to all who would solve the mystery of human origins.

[/size]

[/indent]

[sumishi]

deleted duplicate post <img src='http://www.india-forum.com/forums/public/style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/angry.gif' class='bbc_emoticon' alt=':angry:' />

[ramana]

WoW. Sumishi please post in BRF also.

[sumishi]

[size="3"][quote name='ramana' date='11 September 2011 - 11:07 AM' timestamp='1315718986' post='112825']

WoW. Sumishi please post in BRF also.

[/quote]

In which thread, ramana garu?

[/size]

[sumishi]

[size="3"] Here's a followup 2002 article to the one by David Lewis I posted a few posts above: The Enigma of India's Origins.



Written by Michael Cremo, who identifies himself as a "Vedic" creationist. Needless to say, the mainstream/propagandastream "scholars" are generally hammer and tongs after him.



[/size][indent][size="3"]

[size="4"]Will India’s Sunken City Sink the Aryan Invasion Hypothesis?[/size]

-- Michael Cremo



In January, I attended a conference in Hyderabad, India, at which Dr. Murli Manohara Joshi, the Indian government’s minister for science and technology, was present. He confirmed that oceanographic researchers of the National Institute of Ocean Technology, part of his ministry, had found remnants of a sunken city in the Gulf of Cambay, 30 kilometers off the shore of northwestern India. Sonar photographs of the ocean bottom revealed large, rectangular, walled structures extending 9 kilometers along the banks of an ancient riverbed, now 40 meters underwater. To confirm that the sonar images did represent a human habitation site, the researchers dredged up over 2,000 artifacts, including semiprecious stones, stone tools, and human bones. A piece of wood from the underwater site yielded a radiocarbon date of about 9,500 years.



If this age holds up, the sunken city in the Gulf of Cambay represents the oldest city in the world, at 7,500 B.C. Jericho, in Palestine, previously thought to be the oldest urban settlement, goes back to only 7,000 BC and is much smaller in size.



Just as important as the age of the city is the cultural identity of its inhabitants. If it turns out that the inhabitants were part of the Vedic culture of India, this could revolutionize Indian history.



The historical writings of ancient India, the Puranas, tell of Vedic civilization existing in India not only 9.500 years ago, but much further back in time. Indeed, the Puranas record the existence of Vedic civilization in India going back hundreds of thousands, even millions of years.



When European powers like Great Britain came to dominate India during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, European scholars were reluctant to accept the great antiquity of Indian civilization. They were also troubled by the apparent connection between the ancient Sanskrit language of India and the European languages. If the historical and linguistic evidence were to be taken at face value, it would appear that the Indian civilization was more ancient that the European civilization, and that the European civilization was in fact descended from the Indian civilization. To avoid this conclusion, European colonial scholars concocted the idea Europe was the source of the Indian civilization. They proposed that a branch of the Aryan European people migrated from southern Russia (or some other nearby place) into India around 1,500 B.C. This Aryan migration concept remains in force today, among most European and many Indian historians and archaeologists. They insist that cities in the Indian subcontinent older than 3,500 years, such as Harrapa and Mohenjo Daro, were not Vedic, even though many lines of evidence suggest they were.



One thing is certain. The ancient Sanskrit historical writings make no mention of a migration from a homeland outside India. Furthermore, all of the place names in northern India are of Sanskrit origin. If the Sanskrit-speaking people were invaders, we would expect that many names of mountains, rivers, and places should reflect an earlier language, just as many thousands of geographical names in North America (Mississippi, Massachusetts, Connecticut, etc.) reflect the language of the pre-European inhabitants.



The time scale of the Indian civilization was particularly troubling to the early European colonial scholars. In the eighteenth century, most European scholars and scientists, relying on Biblical accounts, believed that the earth itself was less than ten thousand years old. So the vast expanses of time recorded in the ancient Sanskrit historical writings seemed impossible, although some few European scholars did take the long chronologies of Indian history seriously, much to the dismay of their colleagues. In 1802, in his book A Historical View of the Hindu Astronomy, John Bentley said about one of these European intellectual traitors: “By his attempt to uphold the antiquity of Hindu books . . . . he endeavours to overturn the Mosaic account, and sap the very foundations of our religion: for if we are to believe in the antiquity of Hindu books, as he would wish us, then the Mosaic account is all a fable, or a fiction.” Of course that is not really true, because then as well as now, some theologians have interpreted the “days” in the Biblical creation accounts as being cosmologically long days. Still, the short Biblical chronology was dominant at that time.



Bentley regarded the vast time periods of Indian history to be a recent invention by the brahmanas of India, who desired “to arrogate to themselves that they were the most ancient people on the face of the earth.” Unable to tolerate this, Bentley suggested that the Puranic histories should be compressed to fit within the few thousand years of the Biblical short chronology. And that is what happened.



So, on one hand, we have the ancient Sanskrit historical writings, which tell us that the Vedic culture has been present in India for hundreds of thousands, even millions, of years. And on the other hand, we have archaeologists and historians who tell us that these accounts are fictional, and that Vedic culture entered India only about 3,500 years ago. Any cities in the Indian subcontinent that are older than this are attributed to the Harrapan culture, which is not considered Vedic by most mainstream researchers.



If it turns out that the 9,500-year-old sunken city in the Gulf of Cambay was inhabited by people of Vedic culture, this would, of course, completely destroy the fiction that Vedic culture came into India by an Aryan migration from Europe or Central Asia some 3,500 years ago. It would instead lend support to the ancient Sanskrit histories, and open the way for research showing that the history of Vedic culture in India goes even further back in time.



Perhaps this is why Harvard University archaeologist Richard Meadow says, “The discovery is important enough to launch an international collaborative study as was done to uncover the sunken ruins of the Titanic.” (India Today, Feb. 11, 2002, pp. 45-46) On the surface, that sounds like an attractive offer. But Meadows, who has done extensive research at Harrapa, is one of the archaeologists, who is strongly upholding the current Aryan migration hypothesis, and he has already complained about “wild guesses” about the implications of the sunken city in the Gulf of Cambay. It may be that an international project, with people like Meadows exercising control, could be used to channel the direction of the research and conclusions in such a way as to not threaten the reigning Aryan migration hypothesis.



[color="#8b0000"]My advice to the Indian scientists in charge of the research: if there is any international involvement, make sure that you do not lose control of the direction and results of the research.[/color]



The sunken city in the Gulf of Cambay is not the first to be found in the region. In the 1970s, not far to the north, the Indian marine archaeologist S. Rao announced the discovery of ruins of a sunken city in the ocean waters offshore from the present-day town of Dvaraka. Could these be the remains of the fabled city of Dvaraka described in an ancient Sanskrit work called the Shrimad- Bhagavatam? According to this work, Dvaraka, with its palatial buildings and wide avenues, was the capital of the godking Krishna, who is identified in the Shrimad- Bhagavatam as the principal avatar of God. The Bhagavatam states that as soon as Krishna left this world, about five thousand years ago, the ocean covered Dvaraka. One problem with Rao’s discovery is that he gave an age of just 3,500 years to the underwater ruins he discovered. This leads me to suspect that either the date he gave is wrong or that the remains of the Dvaraka of Krishna’s time lie further out to sea. The existence of the newly discovered sunken city in the Gulf of Cambay 9,500 years ago make the existence of a 5,000 year-old Vedic city in the same region all the more likely.



Architectural remains of ancient India’s Vedic culture are to be found not only underwater, but also still standing on the Indian subcontinent. During my recent lecture tour in South India, following the Hyderabad conference, I saw, for example, the Mallikarjuna temple in Vijayawada, in the state of Andhra Pradesh. The temple is situated on a hill overlooking the Krishna River. The present temple structure was built in the tenth century A.D. by King Tribhuvana Malla of the Chakukya dynasty, but according to tradition, the first temple on the site was built by King Yudhisthira, one of the heroes of the epic Mahabharata, about five thousand years ago. There are hundreds of such sites throughout India, many of them of far greater reputed antiquity. One of my goals is to find archaeologists in India willing to help document the true antiquity of such monuments.



But for now the focus is underwater, on the sunken city in the Gulf of Cambay. If it turns out to be a city of the Vedic culture, it could sink the Aryan migration idea for good.

[/size][/indent]

[ramana]

Sumishi, In Distorted History thread in GDF.

[ramana]

http://www.livescience.com/20614-collaps...ation.html

..Huge Ancient Civilization’s Collapse Explained

By Charles Choi, LiveScience Contributor |



The mysterious fall of the largest of the world's earliest urban civilizations nearly 4,000 years ago in what is now India, Pakistan, Nepal and Bangladesh now appears to have a key culprit — ancient climate change, researchers say.



[Related: Earliest evidence of Bethlehem found]



Ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia may be the best known of the first great urban cultures, but the largest was the Indus or Harappan civilization. This culture once extended over more than 386,000 square miles (1 million square kilometers) across the plains of the Indus River from the Arabian Sea to the Ganges, and at its peak may have accounted for 10 percent of the world population. The civilization developed about 5,200 years ago, and slowly disintegrated between 3,900 and 3,000 years ago — populations largely abandoned cities, migrating toward the east.



"Antiquity knew about Egypt and Mesopotamia, but the Indus civilization, which was bigger than these two, was completely forgotten until the 1920s," said researcher Liviu Giosan, a geologist at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts. "There are still many things we don't know about them." [Photos: Life and Death of Ancient Urbanites]



Nearly a century ago, researchers began discovering numerous remains of Harappan settlements along the Indus River and its tributaries, as well as in a vast desert region at the border of India and Pakistan. Evidence was uncovered for sophisticated cities, sea links with Mesopotamia, internal trade routes, arts and crafts, and as-yet undeciphered writing.



[Slideshow: Rare treasure trove of ancient jewelry found]



"They had cities ordered into grids, with exquisite plumbing, which was not encountered again until the Romans," Giosan told LiveScience. "They seem to have been a more democratic society than Mesopotamia and Egypt — no large structures were built for important personalitiess like kings or pharaohs."



Like their contemporaries in Egypt and Mesopotamia, the Harappans, who were named after one of their largest cities, lived next to rivers.



"Until now, speculations abounded about the links between this mysterious ancient culture and its life-giving mighty rivers," Giosan said.



Now Giosan and his colleagues have reconstructed the landscape of the plain and rivers where this long-forgotten civilizationdeveloped. Their findings now shed light on the enigmatic fate of this culture.



"Our research provides one of the clearest examples of climate change leading to the collapse of an entire civilization," Giosan said. [How Weather Changed History]



The researchers first analyzed satellite data of the landscape influenced by the Indus and neighboring rivers. From 2003 to 2008, the researchers then collected samples of sediment from the coast of the Arabian Sea into the fertile irrigated valleys of Punjab and the northern Thar Desert to determine the origins and ages of those sediments and develop a timeline of landscape changes.



"It was challenging working in the desert — temperatures were over 110 degrees Fahrenheit all day long (43 degrees C)," Giosan recalled.



After collecting data on geological history, "we could reexamine what we know about settlements, what crops people were planting and when, and how both agriculture and settlement patterns changed," said researcher Dorian Fuller, an archaeologist with University College London. "This brought new insights into the process of eastward population shift, the change towards many more small farming communities, and the decline of cities during late Harappan times."



[Slideshow: Glimpse of ancient war in Jerusalem tunnel]



Some had suggested that the Harappan heartland received its waters from a large glacier-fed Himalayan river, thought by some to be the Sarasvati, a sacred river of Hindu mythology. However, the researchers found that only rivers fed by monsoon rains flowed through the region.



Previous studies suggest the Ghaggar, an intermittent river that flows only during strong monsoons, may best approximate the location of the Sarasvati. Archaeological evidence suggested the river, which dissipates into the desert along the dried course of Hakra valley, was home to intensive settlement during Harappan times.



"We think we settled a long controversy about the mythic Sarasvati River," Giosan said.



Initially, the monsoon-drenched rivers the researchers identified were prone to devastating floods. Over time, monsoons weakened, enabling agriculture and civilization to flourish along flood-fed riverbanks for nearly 2,000 years.



"The insolation — the solar energy received by the Earth from the sun — varies in cycles, which can impact monsoons," Giosan said. "In the last 10,000 years, the Northern Hemisphere had the highest insolation from 7,000 to 5,000 years ago, and since then insolation there decreased. All climate on Earth is driven by the sun, and so the monsoons were affected by the lower insolation, decreasing in force. This meant less rain got into continental regions affected by monsoons over time." [50 Amazing Facts About Earth]



Eventually, these monsoon-based rivers held too little water and dried, making them unfavorable for civilization.



"The Harappans were an enterprising people taking advantage of a window of opportunity — a kind of "Goldilocks civilization," Giosan said.



Eventually, over the course of centuries, Harappans apparently fled along an escape route to the east toward the Ganges basin, where monsoon rains remained reliable.



"We can envision that this eastern shift involved a change to more localized forms of economy — smaller communities supported by local rain-fed farming and dwindling streams," Fuller said. "This may have produced smaller surpluses, and would not have supported large cities, but would have been reliable."



This change would have spelled disaster for the cities of the Indus, which were built on the large surpluses seen during the earlier, wetter era. The dispersal of the population to the east would have meant there was no longer a concentrated workforce to support urbanism.



"Cities collapsed, but smaller agricultural communities were sustainable and flourished," Fuller said. "Many of the urban arts, such as writing, faded away, but agriculture continued and actually diversified."



These findings could help guide future archaeological explorations of the Indus civilization. Researchers can now better guess which settlements might have been more significant, based on their relationships with rivers, Giosan said.



It remains uncertain how monsoons will react to modern climate change. "If we take the devastating floods that caused the largest humanitarian disaster in Pakistan's history as a sign of increased monsoon activity, than this doesn't bode well for the region," Giosan said. "The region has the largest irrigation scheme in the world, and all those dams and channels would become obsolete in the face of the large floods an increased monsoon would bring."



The scientists detailed their findings online May 28 in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

[Meluhhan]

http://www.telegraphindia.com/1111121/js...778606.jsp

Bones kill myth of happy Harappa - Study shows gender discrimination

Gwen Robbins Schug looks at a Harappan human bone at the Anthropological Survey of India in Calcutta



New Delhi, Nov. 20: A study of human bones from the ruins of Harappa has revealed signs of lethal interpersonal violence and challenged current thinking that the ancient Indus civilisation was an exceptionally peaceful realm for its inhabitants.



An American bioarchaeologist has said that her analysis of skeletal remains from Harappa kept at the Anthropological Survey of India, Calcutta, suggests that women, children and individuals with visible infectious diseases were at a high risk of facing violence.



Gwen Robbins Schug studied the skeletal remains of 160 individuals from cemeteries of Harappa excavated during the 20th century. The burial practices and injuries on these bones may be interpreted as evidence for social hierarchy, unequal power, uneven access to resources, and outright violence, she said in a presentation earlier this week at a meeting of the American Anthropological Association in Montreal, Canada.



“The skeletal remains from Harappa tell us a compelling story about social suffering and violence,” said Robbins Schug. “The violence was present in low frequency at Harappa, but it affected some communities more than others,” she said.



She found signs of accidental injuries on skeletal parts, but the majority of head injuries appeared to be the result of clubbing. The prevalence of such head injuries was about six per cent — a low figure for an ancient state-society. However, the distribution of the head injuries across gender and class appeared striking.



About half the female skeletons from one cemetery had severe head injuries caused likely by blows from clubs. In another pit of bones, which archaeologists call area G, 22 per cent skeletons had acute head trauma as well as chronic highly-visible infectious diseases.



“The individuals in area G appeared marginalised even in burial — they suffered the most extreme injuries and had the highest prevalence of diseases, and they were interred just beyond a sewage drain,” Robbins Schug told The Telegraph.



Area G also had skeletal remains of children similarly affected. A male adult skull showed a sword cut between the eye sockets, another male skeleton had an early version of craniotomy (brain surgery) to deal with a head injury. But no female or child skeletons showed evidence of such treatment. This could imply a hierarchy in access to a medical care, Robbins Schug said, or the victims had received fatal blows.



Harappa was among the largest and most populous cities in the Indus civilisation between 2600 BC and 1900 BC.



While Anthropological Survey of India researchers had recognised the injuries on human bones from Harappa decades ago, the injuries remained largely uninvestigated.



Most research until now had been directed at arguing that the injuries on the bones were not due to an Aryan invasion and, one archaeologist said , there has been no systematic effort to understand the cause of injuries or interpret their significance.



“This study shows how bones can give us insight into ancient societies,” said Veena Mushrif-Tripathy, an archaeologist who specialises in skeletal biology at the Deccan College, Pune, who was not associated with the study.



“The Indus cities had large complex societies in some ways similar to our modern societies and it would have been surprising if we had no evidence of interpersonal violence," Mushrif-Tripathy said.Several scholars had earlier proposed that town plans of Harappa and other Indus cities indicate social hierarchy. Some researchers have suggested that an autocratic priest ruler exercised control over access to resources.



An Indian anthropologist Anek Ram Sankhyan said earlier research on the skeletal remains from the Indus cities had independently suggested that women had lower levels of nutrition than men. “Dental enamel studies have hinted at gender-based nutritional discrimination,” said Sankhyan who had collaborated with Robbins Schug earlier this year in analysing the male skull with the evidence for craniotomy.



The Indus civilisation experienced a period of decline between 1900 BC and 1700 BC, although what caused this decline remains unclear. Some researchers have attributed the eventual fall of the civilisation to climate change, others have linked it to changes in trade patterns and economy.



Archaeologists say there is need for caution in interpreting the new observations. The finding that women, children and infected individuals appeared to be disproportionately exposed to violence may be used as arguments for a society where the status of women was lower than that of men, and where people with visible infectious diseases were viewed as social outcasts, said Mushrif-Tripathy.



Mushrif-Tripathy had collaborated with Robbins Schug in an earlier study of skeletal remains from Balathal in Rajasthan where they had observed evidence of leprosy in a skeleton dated from 1500 BC.



Social exclusion of people affected by leprosy was practiced in various cultures during medieval times, Mushrif Tripathy said. But, she said, without written records from the Indus civilisation, “It is impossible to say whether this was violence through actions of individuals or under direction of the state,” she said.



A University of Cambridge archaeologist Jane McIntosh had about a decade ago in her book on the Indus civilisation described it as an exceptionally “peaceful realm” where everyone led a comfortable existence under the benevolent leadership of a dedicated priesthood. The research by Robbins Schug, supported by the US India Educational Foundation, has challenged that assumption through bones that have carried tales across the centuries.

[balai_c]

^^ The above mentioned report is already over 6 months old. Strange to observe that there has been no reaction from any important person /institution pertaining to archeology/history so far. Not a peep from any of the usual suspects. As far my personal opinion goes, this is a one off report. The "investigation"s could be sporadic attempts at social engineering- especially these remarks give away their intentions-

Gwen Robbins Schug studied the skeletal remains of 160 individuals from cemeteries of Harappa excavated during the 20th century. The burial practices and injuries on these bones may be interpreted as evidence for social hierarchy, unequal power, uneven access to resources, and outright violence, she said in a presentation earlier this week at a meeting of the American Anthropological Association in Montreal, Canada.

Attempts at denigrating using the usual assortment of words-social hierarchy, unequal power, uneven access to resources, trying to play down the truth that Harappa was a peaceful equal culture, with high degree of social autonomy.

An Indian anthropologist Anek Ram Sankhyan said earlier research on the skeletal remains from the Indus cities had independently suggested that women had lower levels of nutrition than men. “Dental enamel studies have hinted at gender-based nutritional discrimination,” said Sankhyan who had collaborated with Robbins Schug earlier this year in analysing the male skull with the evidence for craniotomy.

[ramana]

Article in Pioneer, 6 June 2012

The Saraswati Civilisation

Author: Rajesh Singh



A fresh study by a group of international scientists confirms the dominant role of Saraswati river in sustaining the so-called Indus Valley Civilisation.





A new study titled, ‘Fluvial landscapes of the Harappan civilisation’, has concluded that the Indus Valley Civilisation died out because the monsoons which fed the rivers that supported the civilisation, migrated to the east. With the rivers drying out as a result, the civilisation collapsed some 4000 years ago. The study was conducted by a team of scientists from the US, the UK, India, Pakistan and Romania between 2003 and 2008. While the new finding puts to rest, at least for the moment, other theories of the civilisation’s demise, such as the shifting course of rivers due to tectonic changes or a fatal foreign invasion, it serves to strengthen the premise that the civilisation that we refer to as the Indus Valley Civilisation was largely located on the banks of and in the proximity of the Saraswati river.



More than 70 per cent of the sites that have been discovered to contain archaeological material dating to this civilisation’s period are located on the banks of the mythological — and now dried out — river. As experts have been repeatedly pointing out, nearly 2,000 of the 3,000 sites excavated so far are located outside the Indus belt that gives the civilisation its name.



In other words, the Indus Valley Civilisation was largely and in reality the Saraswati River Civilisation. Yet, in our collective consciousness, numbed by what we have been taught — and what we teach — we continue to relate this ancient civilisation exclusively with the Indus Valley. For decades since Independence, our Governments influenced by Leftist propaganda, brazenly refused to accept even the existence of the Saraswati river, let alone acknowledge the river’s role in shaping one of the world’s most ancient civilisations. In recent years, senior CPI (M) leader Sitaram Yechury had slammed the Archaeological Survey of India for “wasting” time and money to study the lost river. A Parliamentary Standing Committee on Transport, Tourism and Culture which he headed in 2006, said, “The ASI has deviated in its working and has failed in spearheading a scientific discipline of archaeology. A scientific institution like the ASI did not proceed correctly in this matter.”



Yet, on occasion after occasion, scientific studies have proved that the Saraswati did exist as a mighty river. According to experts who have studied the map of all relevant underground channels that are intact to date and connected once upon a time with the river, the Saraswati was probably 1500 km long and 3-15 km wide.



The latest study, whose findings were published recently in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, too is clear on the river’s existence and its role in sustaining the ancient civilisation. The report said that the Saraswati was “not Himalayan-fed by a perennial monsoon-supported water course.” It added that the rivers in the region (including Saraswati) were “indeed sizeable and highly active.”



Will the new findings lead to a fresh thinking on the part of the Government and an acknowledgement that the time has come to officially rename the Indus Valley Civilisation as the Saraswati-Indus Civilisation? But the UPA regime had been in denial mode for years, much like the Left has been for decades. As the then Union Minister for Culture, Jaipal Reddy told Parliament that excavations conducted so far had not revealed any trace of the lost river. Clearly, for him and his then Government, it meant that the river was the creation of fertile minds fed by mythological books with an even more fertile imagination. The UPA Government then went ahead and slashed the budget for the Saraswati River Heritage Project — which had been launched by the NDA regime. The project report had been prepared in September 2003, envisaging a cost of roughly Rs 32 crore on the scheme. The amount was ruthlessly pruned to less than five crore rupees. In effect, the project was shelved.



However, despite its best efforts to do so, the UPA could not completely ignore the facts that kept emerging about the reality of the river and the central role which it had played in the flourishing of the so-called Indus Valley Civilisation. In a significant shift from its earlier stand that probes conducted so far showed no evidence of the now invisible Saraswati river, the Government admitted half-way through its first tenure in office that scientists had discovered water channels indicating (to use the scientists’ quote) “beyond doubt” the existence of the “Vedic Saraswati river”. The Government’s submission came in response to an unstarred question in the Rajya Sabha on whether satellite images had “established the underground track of Saraswati, and if so, why should the precious water resources not be exploited to meet growing demands?”



The Union Water Resources Ministry had then quoted in writing the conclusion of a study jointly conducted by scientists of Indian Space Research Organisation, Jodhpur, and the Rajasthan Government’s Ground Water Department, published in the Journal of Indian Society of Remote Sensing. Besides other things, the authors had said that “clear signals of palaeo-channels on the satellite imagery in the form of a strong and powerful continuous drainage system in the North West region and occurrence of archaeological sites of pre-Harappan, Harappan and post-Harappan age, beyond doubt indicate the existence of a mighty palaeo-drainage system of Vedic Saraswati river in this region… The description and magnanimity of these channels also matches with the river Saraswati described in the Vedic literature.”



Interestingly, the Archaeological Survey of India’s National Museum has been as forthright on the issue. This is what a text put up in the Harappan Gallery of the National Museum says: “Slowly and gradually these people evolved a civilisation called variously as the ‘Harappan civilisation’, the ‘Indus civilisation’, the ‘Indus Valley civilisation’ and the ‘Indus-Saraswati civilisation’.” The text further elaborates on the importance of the river: “It is now clear that the Harappan civilisation was the gift of two rivers — the Indus and the Saraswati — and not the Indus alone.”



There is another interesting aspect to the new study by the group of international scientists that deserves mention. The report has discounted the possibility of ‘foreign invasion’ as one of the causes of the ancient civilisation’s decline. But, long before this report was published, NS Rajaram, who wrote the book, Saraswati River and the Vedic Civilisation, had noted that the discovery of the Saraswati river had “dealt a severe blow” to the theory that the Aryans had invaded India, which then had the Harappan Civilisation. The theory supposes that the Harappans were non-Vedic since the Vedic age began with the coming of the Aryans.



But, since the Saraswati flowed during the Vedic period, the Vedic era ought to have coincided with the Harappan age. Rajaram says in his book that the Harappan civilisation “was none other than the great river (Saraswati) described in the Rig Veda. This means that the Harappans were Vedic.”



Not just that, experts have pointed out for long that there is no evidence of an invasion, much less from the Aryans who ‘came from outside’. Rajaram, like many others had concluded that the drying up of the Saraswati river and not some ‘invasion’ was the principal cause for the civilisation’s decline.



However, the latest study by the international group leaves a question mark on the origins of the river. The report claims that Saraswati was not a Himalayan river. But, several experts believe that the river originated from the Har-ki-Dun glacier in Gharwal. Let’s wait for the final word.



(The accompanying visual is a reconstruction of the gateway and drain at Harappa by Chris Sloan. Courtesy: Jonathan Mark Kenoyer, University of Wisconsin-Madison and www.sewerhistory.org)

Fluvial Landscapes of Harappa Civilization

[ramana]

Paging Dr Kaly.



SaiK on BRF found this pdf which tries to decipher the Indus script using in Sanskrit letters.





SAIK



---------------------

was this linked here earlier.. found it on chacha

https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=...0139,d.aWM



INDUS SCRIPT DECIPHERING

by

Kurt SchUdmann

[Husky]

This may belong here. Forgot. Though people would probably have already seen it. Last year's New Scientist.

On Saraswati-Sindu Civilisation (SSVC), neutered as "IVC" by christian history-writing.



newscientist.com/article/mg22129613.700-withering-monsoon-may-have-doomed-past-asian-society.html#.VL3tcyzudv8

Withering monsoon may have doomed past Asian society



19 March 2014

Magazine issue 2961. Subscribe and save

For similar stories, visit the In Brief Topic Guide



Read more: Click here to read the original, longer version of this story



RAIN, rain, go away. The Indian summer monsoon abruptly weakened 4200 years ago. The ensuing drought may have led to the collapse of the Indus Valley Civilisation.



This lost society flourished around the Indus river, in what is now Pakistan and north-west India. It was at its height from 2600 BC to 1900 BC, but after that its cities were mysteriously abandoned.



Yama Dixit and her colleagues at the University of Cambridge dug up snail shells from Kotla Dahar, a lake near one of the cities. The shells record changes in the lake's water level in their composition.



The team found that the lake was deep from 4500 to 3800 BC. Although it shallowed a little up to 2200 BC, after this time there was a sharp drop in the water level, suggesting the summer monsoon abruptly weakened for 200 years, meaning less rainfall (Geology, doi.org/rvt).



(The collective memory/oral traditions of Saraswat brahmanas of leaving Saraswati area upon a drought, before they then branched out in time. I can't remember whether they dated it to 4000 BCE or 4000 BP. But is this first migration of the SBs related to the events of the above period?

But the overlap of the long-standing oral tradition with the area and events certainly does add lots of quaint question-marks to the whole AIT/AMT/ATT scenario of - when was it now - what's variously dated to 1800 BCE to 1100BCE to even 900 BCE.

And also, the recently-invented ideology/religion "dravoodianism" has NO memory of actual being at the Saraswati-Sindhu region let alone of any drought. And it's too late to attempt back-projection too.)



The Indus valley people relied on the monsoon for crops, says Dixit. "It is inevitable that they were affected." The dates of the drought don't match perfectly with the collapse, but Dixit says both are uncertain.



The idea is credible because the results agree with data elsewhere, says Supriyo Chakraborty of the Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology in Pune.



Shifts in the monsoon have also been linked to the fall of China's Tang dynasty, and of the Mayan civilisation in South America, both around AD 900.



This article appeared in print under the headline "Withering monsoon may have doomed past society"

Full-length version:



newscientist.com/article/dn25219-withering-monsoon-may-have-doomed-past-asian-society.html#.VL3tgSzudv8

Withering monsoon may have doomed past Asian society



17:39 13 March 2014 by Sandhya Sekar

For similar stories, visit the Climate Change Topic Guide



The Indian summer monsoon abruptly weakened 4200 years ago. The ensuing drought may have led to the collapse of the advanced Indus Valley Civilisation.



A complex society flourished on the banks of the Indus river, located in what is now Pakistan and north-west India, and was at its height between 2600 BC and 1900 BC. Cities like Harappa and Mohenjo-daro were well planned, and the society even developed its own script. But after 1900 BC, the cities of the Indus Valley Civilisation were gradually abandoned. Nobody knows why.



Yama Dixit and her colleagues at the University of Cambridge excavated in Kotla Dahar, a lake close to one of the civilisation's greatest cities, Rakhigarhi in Haryana. They unearthed the shells of snails called red-rim melanias, and used them to reconstruct changes in climate over the last 5000 years.



The snails use oxygen from the lake water to make their shells. But when water evaporates from the lake, the lighter form of oxygen, oxygen-16, is lost to the air and heavier oxygen-18 builds up. So shells with more oxygen-18 reflect periods of drought.



End times



Dixit found that Kotla Dahar was a deep freshwater lake between 4500 and 3800 BC. It then started getting shallower, until about 2200 BC, when the summer monsoon suddenly weakened for 200 years.



That would have been bad news for the people living there. The Indus Valley Civilisation depended on the monsoons for their crops, says Dixit. "It is inevitable that they were affected by a pronounced drought of this kind."



The dates of the drought do not match perfectly with the date of the collapse, but Dixit says both figures are quite uncertain.



By itself, the lake is not representative of the entire civilisation, says Supriyo Chakraborty of the Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology in Pune. "But the authors have compared their results with various other observations and found agreement, giving credence to their claim," he says.

Global drying



It is not the first time shifts in the monsoon have been linked to the collapse of civilisations.



Around AD 900 one of China's biggest empires, the Tang dynasty, collapsed. At the same time, halfway across the world, the Mayan civilisation in South America all but disappeared. Records from a lake in China show that stronger winds made the summer monsoon fail, causing widespread drought.



Dixit says the drying events at AD 900 and 2200 BC were both linked to shifts in the position of the Intertropical Convergence Zone, a band of cloud that runs east to west in the tropics and has a big influence on rainfall. "These climate phenomena were not regional but global in nature," she says.



Journal reference: Geology, DOI: 10.1130/G35236.1

connection.ebscohost.com/c/articles/95089290/withering-monsoon-may-have-doomed-past-society

[Husky]

Not SSVC. But something as old.



timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/kolkata/Varanasi-is-as-old-as-Indus-valley-civilization-finds-IIT-KGP-study/articleshow/51146196.cms

Varanasi is as old as Indus valley civilization, finds IIT-KGP study

Jhimli Mukherjee Pandey | Feb 25, 2016



Kolkata: It's a perfect example of science meeting faith and technology buttressing myth. A detailed study conducted by IIT-Kharagpur - using GPS, one of the latest tech tools - could well turn the clock back on Varanasi, indicating that the holy town has been a continuous human settlement since the days of the Indus Valley Civilization, around 6000 years ago.



The project, funded by the Union ministry of human resources development (it has released Rs 20 crore just for the first phase), has even attracted the attention of Prime Minister Narendra Modi. The PM made it a point to explore the project's progress on Sunday at Varanasi, when he met the IIT-Kgp faculty members and inquired about its possibilities and scope.



The results that have come from a detailed geo-exploration (exploration conducted through GPS technology) conducted by seven IIT-Kgp departments, tracing the different stages through which civilization progressed, and how Varanasi has been able to maintain continuity as a living civilization, unlike comparable seats of human settlement in the world. The researchers have dug 100-metre-deep boring holes all over Varanasi to conclude that there is evidence of continuous settlement at least till 2000BC. There are enough indications that by the time the data collection is over, there would be enough to prove that this date can be pushed back to about 4500BC.



The oldest part of this civilisation has been traced to the Gomati Sangam area of Varanasi, as indicated by the underground layers that have already been tested.



It is perhaps time to take a re-look at India's history. IIT Kharagpur is about to make an explosive announcement. It is ready to put the clock 6000 years back on Varanasi, bringing it at par with the Indus valley civilisation, if not older. What's more, the seven departments of IIT Kgp, that are working on the project, are tracing the different stages through which the civilisation has progressed and has yet been able to maintain its continuity as a living civilisation, unlike comparable ancient civilisations around the world.



The project, which is completely funded by the union ministry of human resources development, has attracted the attention of none less than Prime Minister, Narendra Modi, who made it a point to explore its progress on Sunday at Varanasi, when he met the IIT Kgp faculty members and inquired about the possibilities and the scope of the project.



The results that have come from a detailed geo exploration through the GPS conducted through 100 metre deep bore holes all over Varanasi shows continuous settlement history till 2000 BC. The indicators are that at the end of data collection, this will be put back another '1500 years to establish the final habitable antiquity of Varanasi at 4500 BC.



The geo-exploration, that is being conducted jointly with the British Geological Survey, has already established the existence of Naimisharanya, a forest that finds mention in the Vedas and in the Kashipurana. This forest was considered mythological all these years.

(Handy. Before christoislamicommunits or crypto variants can claim that it is some Hindutva or Hindoo conspiracy: apparently the British Geological Survey was involved in establishing "the existence of Naimisharanya". I think that should shut up naysayers, who're no doubt rearing to go into immediate denial mode.

Q: why is the British Geological Survey interested in Indian ur-history? Is this interest in any way related to the kind behind that alien journal article which declared - as if it were a well-established fact known to all - that western civilisation originated in the the IVC? [url="http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1702492"]"On the Origins of Western Law and Western Civilization (in the Indus Valley)"[/url])



The researchers are also trying to set up a riverine route from Kolkata to Varanasi to Prayag (Allahabad). "Since ancient times, people used this route but the advent of the railways stopped it. We are trying to re-establish that route," said Joy Sen, a senior faculty member of the school of architecture and planning, who is also the chief of the project that has been christened Sandhi. The other departments that are involved in sandhi are humanities and social sciences, computer science, information technology, electrical, electronics and telecommunications and oceanography. The riverine route will be developed to carry tourists, said sources.



Separate heritage trails leading to the five oldest ghats - Asi, Kedar, Dasashwamedh, Panchaganga and Rajghat - are also being created. "We are tracing the ashrams of ancient yogis and spiritual leaders of all religions that dotted the lanes leading to the ghats. Some of these are extinct now, some dilapidated. We will reclaim and restore as much as possible," Sen explained.



A large part of the project, which began in August last year, aims at creating a green rim and reclaiming the greenery and waterbodies that dotted the entire zone from Sarnath to the campus of Benares Hindu University. Efforts are on to remove encroachment and illegal constructions so that the earlier ecosystem is reclaimed as far as possible. "Varanasi has been the seat of all religions and their holy men, who will all be represented elaborately in the project. Efforts are also being made to establish special zones in areas that are dominated by old age homes and shelters for widows," Sen added.





Language, music and iconograohy play a major role in Sandhi. Old texts like Kashipuran or Skandapuran, Mahabharata and Ramayana and the Buddhist text Anguttaranikaya are being re-read for descriptions of Kashi and Kashiraj that were considered mythological all these years.





"We are encountering surprises every day. What was thought to be lore or myth is gradually getting established as history, and that is our biggest achievement," Sen said.



The MHRD is completely funding the project and has already released Rs 20 crores for it.

Wait. History (the world) didn't start at 4004 years before christ? :Alsjemenou:

I don't think christianity will approve.

[Husky]

1. njsaryablog.blogspot.com/2016/01/harappan-interments-at-rakhigarhi.html

Friday, 29 January 2016

Harappan Interments at Rakhigarhi, Haryana

This is a nice study on Rakhigarhi, it has also given some intriguing parallels of funeral customs which are found in the Vedic texts.

Harappan Interments at Rakhigarhi, Haryana

Abstract :



The excavations at Rakhigarhi ( 29° 17' 30" N ; 76° 06' 50'' E ) have reported skeletal series of the Harappans both from cemetery and habitation area. Interment archaeology is quite unique as it unfolds a distinct funerary mechanism for highlighting gender, besides other mortuary features commonly recorded at Kalibangan and Farmana.

Yog. academia.edu/20195157/Harappan_Interments_at_Rakhigarhi_Haryana

The above entry by blog owner Nirjhar007 seems to imply that aDNA from skeletons at IVC may have a chance to turn out to be meaningful. Ah, didn't read the following well last time: burial and cremation were both done in Harappa, but after 2000 BCE cremation seems to have become more common. That sounds more promising for IVC aDNA then.



varnam.nationalinterest.in/2009/09/a-4000-year-old-lepers-tale/

Another point is regarding the burial; after 2000 BCE, burial was uncommon except for some special cases like infants and spiritual people. Harappan skeletons were both cremated — there is evidence at Sanauli at least — and buried, but true burials are very few compared to expected numbers. Many archaeologists believe that cremation must have been widely practised by Harappans. Also, at Dholavira and other sites, dozens of graves turned out to be without any bones which implies symbolic burials.

2. Belongs in this thread too (post 469 of the Unmasking AIT thread):

"Chimera" in Vedic tradition mirrored in IVC iconography, and discussions about Greek "chimera"