Aryan Invasion/migration Theories & Debates -2

[sumishi]

X-posting from topic Sarasvati Civilization

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[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.



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[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.

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