08-17-2007, 07:50 PM
The ancient Hindu and Mayan civilizations exhibit other interesting convergences. Hindu records say that a member of a great race which preceded ours, a highly-developed personage known as <b>Asuramaya</b>, learned all the basic cosmic cycles and used his knowledge to determine the durations of the various geological and cyclical periods of human evolution. <b>The chronology and computations of their still used Tamil calendar, say the Brahmans, are based upon the works of Asuramaya and upon carefully maintained collateral zodiacal records</b>. Their most ancient extant work on astronomy, the Surya Siddhanta, says that Asuramaya lived toward the end of the Krita-yuga, a former age that ended approximately 2,165,000 years before the present. This would place Asuramaya at something less than 2.5 million years ago.
The name Asuramaya is a compound of the two Sanskrit words, Asura and Maya. The personage himself is Maya, the prefix Asura signifying that Maya was of the Asuras, a name given to a certain caste or people of the great prehistoric race that preceded our own, or Aryan humanity. The word Asura derives from surya, Sanskrit for the sun. In accordance with the archaic Indian manner of describing the matter, the astronomer named Maya was said to have gained his knowledge from studying the sun. The sun and its encircling planets also occupied the central attention of the Mayan astronomer caste in Central America.
The early Hindu thinkers visualized the passage of a race from its birth to its close as embracing four distinct phases or yugas, and they said that races overlapped each other in duration. According to their calculations, the world, in other words our present race, entered the fourth of its phases, which they term the Kali yuga or Iron age, in the year 3102 BC. This event coincided with the death of Krishna , whom they describe as an avatara or incarnation of a lofty divine-spiritual being or messiah. His departure from the earth is said to have ushered in new and different conditions affecting our race. Modern students of the ancient Mayan numerical glyphs have found that the dating of major series of events noted on Mayan stelae invariably give such reckonings in terms of the time elapsed since a date known as 4 Ahau 8 Cumhu. They know that for the Maya chroniclers this date represented a commencement point in time-reckoning of such awesome magnitude that it was central to all else in subsequent Maya history; but they don't know what it meant or why it was so important to the latter.
<b>Among other ancient nations only one, the Hindu peoples of the Indian subcontinent, is known to have developed a system of calendrics accounting for such vast periods of time</b>.
For computing the age of the earth and various geological and other epochs, as well as the age of mankind, the learned Brahman caste still employs a Tamil calendar derived from archaic astronomical data, known as the "Tirukkanda Panchanga" (cf. The Secret Doctrine, 2:49-51).
This calendar contains a calculation of something over three hundred millions of years for the age of the present earth since sedimentation occurred, and a period of somewhat more than eighteen million years since the first appearance of our mankind.
The Hindus are also the only older people besides the Mayans who are known to have employed the concept of zero in their mathematics.
When it comes to human history, however, our scholars hesitate and grow uncertain about man as civilized homo sapiens even as late as 10,000 BC, whereas Hindu savants routinely regard him as at least eighteen million years old -- and if we could read more of the Mayan historical records we might find in them a similar calculation.
The Mayans invented a solar "civil" year of 365 days. We know, however, that they made calendrical emendations and developed a more precise notion of solar time than that embodied in our own calendar.
http://www.hinduwisdom.info/Pacific.htm
<img src='http://www.hinduwisdom.info/images/time_difference_ancient_texts2.jpg' border='0' alt='user posted image' />
<i>Accurate time difference of places around the world found in ancient Sanskrit texts</i>
The name Asuramaya is a compound of the two Sanskrit words, Asura and Maya. The personage himself is Maya, the prefix Asura signifying that Maya was of the Asuras, a name given to a certain caste or people of the great prehistoric race that preceded our own, or Aryan humanity. The word Asura derives from surya, Sanskrit for the sun. In accordance with the archaic Indian manner of describing the matter, the astronomer named Maya was said to have gained his knowledge from studying the sun. The sun and its encircling planets also occupied the central attention of the Mayan astronomer caste in Central America.
The early Hindu thinkers visualized the passage of a race from its birth to its close as embracing four distinct phases or yugas, and they said that races overlapped each other in duration. According to their calculations, the world, in other words our present race, entered the fourth of its phases, which they term the Kali yuga or Iron age, in the year 3102 BC. This event coincided with the death of Krishna , whom they describe as an avatara or incarnation of a lofty divine-spiritual being or messiah. His departure from the earth is said to have ushered in new and different conditions affecting our race. Modern students of the ancient Mayan numerical glyphs have found that the dating of major series of events noted on Mayan stelae invariably give such reckonings in terms of the time elapsed since a date known as 4 Ahau 8 Cumhu. They know that for the Maya chroniclers this date represented a commencement point in time-reckoning of such awesome magnitude that it was central to all else in subsequent Maya history; but they don't know what it meant or why it was so important to the latter.
<b>Among other ancient nations only one, the Hindu peoples of the Indian subcontinent, is known to have developed a system of calendrics accounting for such vast periods of time</b>.
For computing the age of the earth and various geological and other epochs, as well as the age of mankind, the learned Brahman caste still employs a Tamil calendar derived from archaic astronomical data, known as the "Tirukkanda Panchanga" (cf. The Secret Doctrine, 2:49-51).
This calendar contains a calculation of something over three hundred millions of years for the age of the present earth since sedimentation occurred, and a period of somewhat more than eighteen million years since the first appearance of our mankind.
The Hindus are also the only older people besides the Mayans who are known to have employed the concept of zero in their mathematics.
When it comes to human history, however, our scholars hesitate and grow uncertain about man as civilized homo sapiens even as late as 10,000 BC, whereas Hindu savants routinely regard him as at least eighteen million years old -- and if we could read more of the Mayan historical records we might find in them a similar calculation.
The Mayans invented a solar "civil" year of 365 days. We know, however, that they made calendrical emendations and developed a more precise notion of solar time than that embodied in our own calendar.
http://www.hinduwisdom.info/Pacific.htm
<img src='http://www.hinduwisdom.info/images/time_difference_ancient_texts2.jpg' border='0' alt='user posted image' />
<i>Accurate time difference of places around the world found in ancient Sanskrit texts</i>