It sure is! Latest satellite imagery is being used to authenticate existence of some of the hidden ancient cities.
The amount of effort by distortionist European historians, including people like Romila Thapar, is indicative that either they couldn't comprehend the complex history and culture, or they were running against time to Prove something to someone before they themselves perished!
"Every historian has depth; It's either filled with garbage, or a recollection of fine memory of eras bygone."
Rahul
From: Shantanu Pahi <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Reply-To: Shantanu Pahi <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: Rahul Sandeshyani <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Subject: Re: Aryan Invasion theory ? Date: Tue, 24 Feb 2004 15:32:12 -0500 (GMT-05:00)
That was a very interesting article.
-----Original Message----- From: Rahul Sandeshyani <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Sent: Feb 23, 2004 12:40 PM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Aryan Invasion theory ?
http://www.indiastar.com/ancient.htm
IndiaStar Review of Books --------------------------------------------------------------------------------
ANCIENT INDIA IN A NEW LIGHT -- four books --
In Search of the Cradle of Civilization by Georg Feuesrstein, Subhash Kak, & David Frawley Wheaton, Illinois: Quest Books, 1995 341 pages $24.95 Tele: 1-708-665-0123
The Myth of the Aryan Invasion of India by David Frawley New Delhi: Voice of India, 1995 (2 / 18 Ansari Road, New Delhi, 110 002)
The Politics of History: Aryan Invasion Theory and the Subversion of Scholarship. by Navaratna Rajaram New Delhi: Voice of India, 1995 (2 / 18 Ansari Road, New Delhi, 110 002)
Return of the Aryans by Bhagwan S. Gidwani Penguin-India, 1994 (also Penguin-Canada) 943 page
Reviewed by C. J. S. Wallia
When I first heard about Gidwani's assertion in Return of the Aryans that the Black Sea and Germany's Black Forest were named in memory of dark-skinned Aryans from India, I thought his suggestion preposterous. Now, after reading the above four books, the suggested origin of these names begins to appear in the realm of the plausible.
The "standard" textbooks on India's early history, written by Eurocentric
historians, have recently been challenged by postcolonial historians.
Several new books question many of the "standard" assertions by presenting
convincing evidence -- linguistic, literary, archaeological, geological
(including recent Indo-French satellite photography), and astronomical. The
postcolonialists call for a thorough rewrite of the erroneous history
textbooks used in schools and colleges worldwide, including, sadly, those in
India.
There never was any "Aryan" invasion of India, nor any "Aryan"-"Dravidian"
war. The term "Arya" meant good, referring to quality of behavior, not race.
Likewise "dasyu" referred to misconduct, not another race. The Rig Veda was
composed not in 1200 B.C.; it was completed in 3700 B.C. The cradle of
civilization is not Sumeria in Mesopotamia, but the Sapta Sindhu, the land
of seven rivers, in northwest India. From the densely populated Sapta
Sindhu, Sanskrit-speaking people migrated to Iran, Greece, and further West.
Commenting on Rajaram and Frawley, Professor Klaus Klostermaier of the University of Manitoba, writes:
"The facts referred to in this work are incontrovertible. The conclusions
drawn have a high degree of plausibility. Consequently, the implications are
nothing less than sensational....Rajaram and Frawley are true pioneers
blazing new trails."
And so is Subhash Kak, Sanskrit scholar and computer scientist, co-author of
In Search of the Cradle of Civilization, who has analyzed the astronomical
code of the Rig Veda. Drawing on Kak's work and other evidence, Rajaram has
established the period 4000-3700 B.C. for the composition of the Rig Veda.
The "standard" textbooks on early Indian history are an example of the adage
that history books are written to reflect the views of the conqueror. In the
late eighteenth century, when many Sanskrit classics, were first translated
into contemporary European languages, they drew great admiration from
Europe's major intellectual luminaries like Voltaire, Goethe, and Hegel. For
example, G.W. F. Hegel wrote that India was"the starting-point for the whole
Western world." Later, in the nineteenth century, the same Hegel dismissed
the Puranas chronologies as fabrications and generally disparaged Indian
history. Why this reversal? Nineteenth century European imperialism
distorted European perceptions and brought forth racist attitudes. The
colonized people and their culture came to be seen as inferior. Hegel's
reversal exemplifies this changed perception.
However, eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European historians had to
contend with a puzzling philological fact: the classical language of India,
Sanskrit, and the classical languages of Europe, Greek and Latin, were
closely related. In the words of William Jones, one of the earliest to make
a systematic study of this resemblance, "... a stronger affinity than could
possibly have been produced by accident; so strong, indeed, that no
philologer could examine them all three, without first believing them to
have sprung from some common source...The Sanskrit language is of wonderful
structure, more perfect than the Greek, more copious than the Latin and more
exquisitely refined than either." An example of the resemblance: the word
for ten is dasha in Sanskrit, deka in Greek, and decem in Latin. Thousands
of Sanskrit words such as pitah, brahta, raja have cognates in nearly all
European languages. Based on the undeniable resemblance of these languages,
philologists termed them Indo-European languages.
==============================
To detoxify yourself from the noxious Eurocentric notions injected by the "standard" history textbooks on India's cultural heritage, peruse these landmark books as soon as possible!
========================
To account for the common origin of Indo-European languages, several nineteenth- century European scholars hypothesized that in ancient times an invasion of India from Europe, by a people who spoke the original Indo-European language -- an "Aryan" invasion--must have occurred. In typical Eurocentric arrogance, they assumed, without any evidence, that the Aryans came from outside India. Principal among these "scholars" were Max Muller and Monier-Williams, both committed to denigrating India's cultural heritage in order to persuade Indians to convert to Christianity.
In a letter to his wife, Max Muller wrote: "This edition of mine and the
translation of the Veda will hereafter tell to a great extent... the fate of
India, and on the growth of millions of souls in that country. It is the
root of their religion, and to show them what the root is, I feel sure, the
only way of uprooting all that has sprung from it during the last 3000
years." Muller's purpose was to uproot Hinduism. Monier-Williams, in a
speech given at Oxford to the Missionary Congress on 2 May 1877, said: "When
the walls of the mighty fortress of Brahminism are encircled, undermined,
and finally stormed by the soldiers of the Cross, the victory of
Christianity must be signal and complete." Some objective scholars, these!
In picking a date for the supposed Aryan invasion of India by a supposed
race of people, Rajaram writes: "Muller was strongly influenced by a current
Christian belief that the creation of the world had taken place at 9:00 a.m.
on 23 October 4004 BC. Assuming the date of 4004 BC for the creation of the
world, as Muller did, leads to 2448 BC for the biblical Flood. If another
thousand years is allowed for the waters to subside and for the soil to get
dry enough for the Aryans to begin their invasion of India, we are left at
around 1400 BC. Adding another two hundred years before they could begin
composing the Rig Veda brings us right to Muller's date of 1200.BC...he used
a ghost story from Somadeva's Kathasaritasagara to support this date." Some
historical research, this!
Reader, to detoxify yourself from the noxious Eurocentric notions injected by the "standard" history textbooks on India's cultural heritage, peruse these two landmark books as soon as possible!
David Frawley, author of many books on Sanskrit literature, including Gods,
Sages, and Kings: Vedic Secrets of Ancient Civilization, sumarizes his views
on Vedic history, society, and geography in The Myth of the Aryan Invasion .
Referring to the famous Battle of the Ten Kings in the Rig Veda, 3700 B.C.,
Frawley writes: "The Vedic war is a question of values, not race. It is a
conflict between spiritual values and materialistic values, which occurs in
all societies. Sometimes arya people become un-arya by a change in values,
as indicated in the battle of Sudas....Even names of famous Vedic kings,
such as Sudas and Devadasa have the ending of das or dasa meaning
'servant'." Sudas ruled the land of Sapta Sindhu, centered around the mighty
Sarasvati river, which flowed from the Himalayas to the Rann of Kutch. After
the Battle of the Ten Kings, many Indians migrated westwards into Iran and
beyond.
Frawley observes that Max Muller, with his hidden Christian agenda, selectively lifted metaphorical passages from the Rig Veda to buttress his"Aryan invasion from Europe" theory. Taken in its entirety the literary evidence shows the Vedic civilization as an indigenous development.
In articles published in various journals Navaratna Rajaram, author of The Politics of History presents a chronological synthesis of ancient Indian civilization. One of the most interesting sections of his work is on the Sulbasutras, 3000 BC.,-- mathematical manuals for the design and construction of Vedic altars. Rajaram notes that A. Seidenberg, an American historian of science, in his paper entitled "Origin of Mathematics," published in the journal Archive for History of Exact Sciences, 1978, "established the Sulbasutras as the basis for the mathematics in Egypt, Babylonia, and Greece. This provides a mathematically rigorous foundation for the derivation of the chronology presented in this book."
The principal author of the Sulbasutras, Baudhayana, a South Indian, "discovered the theorem of Pythagoras some two thousand years before Pythagoras. His work was known in Egypt... as early as 2700 BC. He is the first known of the world's mathematicians." This is the civilization that invented mathematics.
Rajaram proposes a chronology of ancient Indian civilization as beginning
before the archaeological evidence of the Mehrgarh site in the northwest,
circa 6500 BC, the earliest and largest urban site of the period in the
world. This site has yielded evidence for the earliest domestication of
animals, evolution of agriculture, as well as arts and crafts. The horse was
first domesticated here in 6500 BC. Mehrgarh, Harappa and Mohenjodaro are
peripheral cities of the great Sarasvati civilization with more than 500
sites along its banks awaiting excavation. In 4500 BC, Mandhatr defeated the
people of Druhyus, driving them to the west into Iran. 4000-3700 BC was the
Rig Veda period. In 3730 BC occurred the Battle of Ten Kings-- the age of
Sudas and his sage advisors, Vasishtha and Visvamitra. 3600 to 3100 BC was
the late Vedic age during which Yajur, Sama, and Atharva Vedas were
composed. 3100 BC is the date of the Mahabharata, composed by Vyasa. At this
time, the Sarasvati river lost Yamuna because of a tectonic plate shift. It
was the beginning of Kali Yuga. 3000 BC was the late Brahmanic period during
which early Sutras were composed. In 1900 BC, another tectonic plate shift
made Sarasvati lose Sutlej. This dried up Sarasvati, causing massive exodus
of people to the east -- the Ganga valley, whence arose the classical
civilization of India.
With more than 50 maps and illustrations, In Search of the Cradle of
Civilization is a comprehensive book. The book's jacket quotes Deepak
Chopra: "This is a scholarly masterpiece and belongs in the home and library
of every person who wishes to evolve using the wisdom of the ages." One of
its best sections is on the relation between the Indus-Sarasvati and the
Brahmi scripts: by analyzing statistical computer-concordances, Subhash Kak
has shown that"the most frequent letters of the Indus-Sarasvati and the
Brahmi scripts look almost identical and share a rather similar frequency of
occurrence." Kak also found that "the texts on the steatite seals follow
grammatical rules like that of Sanskrit." Although deciphering of the script
remains to be done, he suggests that the Brahmi is derived from
Indus-Sarasvati.
Another excellent section of this book is "The Dravidian Puzzle": the
authors note that "while scholars have identified some twenty Dravidian
'loan words' in the Rig Veda, the Dravidian languages have 'borrowed' at
least fifty percent of their vocabulary from (Aryan) Sanskrit." Moreover,
many Dravidian scholars credit "the creation of Tamil, the oldest Dravidian
tongue, to Agastaya, who figures in the Rig Veda as one of the prominent
sages of his era. The Dravidian kings historically have called themselves
Aryans and have traced their descent through Manu....northern and southern
India share a common culture and religion... God Shiva clearly is synonymous
with the Vedic God Rudra." There was no Aryan invasion, no Dravidian
invasion, no Aryan-Dravidian war. Sanskrit has been shown to include
elements of Munda, the language of the tribals. All three language groups
are indigenous developments.
Bhagwan S. Gidwani's Return of the Aryans, (Penguin-India, also distributed
by Penguin-Canada) a recently published 943-page novel is a highly readable
account of the Sapta Sindhu culture around 5100 BC as well as the migration
of the Aryans from India to the West. It is a monumental work with a cast of
thousands--among them the hero of mythic birth, Sindhu Putra, the
physician-sage Dhanwantar and his wife Dhanwantarti.
In his introduction, the author says, "this novel will give a mosaic of a
long-forgotten past to show that the Aryans did not belong to a different
species, culture or race. Their cradle-grounds were the Sindhu, Ganga and
Dravidian civilizations; and there is an unbroken continuity--spiritual,
social and secular--between the pre-ancient civilizations of Bharat Varsha
and the Aryans of 5000 BC.... The Aryans who left Bharat Varsha were not
warriors or conquerors, not men of genius or madness; they were not
adventurers or soldiers of fortune; and certainly, they were not religious
zealots, fanatics or crusaders. These travellers simply had a dream that led
them on towards the 'unreachable goal of finding a land that was pure and
free from evil--and it was a road that led everywhere but finally nowhere'
and at last they came to realize that there was no land of pure, except what
a man might make of his own efforts."
This prodigiously researched historical novel presents a skillful exposition
of the origin of writing, of mathematics, and technology (agriculture,
metallurgy, boat-building, weaponry) in pre-ancient India. Particularly
engaging are the chapters on the Aryans' journey from India to Mesopotamia,
Egypt, Anatolia, Germany, and futher west. The author gives numerous
examples of rivers and places named in Sanskrit language: Hari river and
Hari rath (Herat), in Afghanistan, Dana (Danube) river in Europe. The Black
Sea, near where they camped for a long time and built boats, and Germany's
Black Forest are named in memory of the dark-skinned Aryans from India.
In 1996, Penguin (Canada) issued a press release that this novel had won the
"Most Outstanding Book of the Year" award from the historical division of
the research and reference center.
I recommend these four books to anyone interested in India's cultural heritage.
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