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March 8 - April 13, 2023
Most ancient civilizations have a myth about the Great Flood. There is the well-known biblical story of Noah and his Ark. The Sumerians mention the Great Flood in the epic of Gilgamesh. The Indians have the legend about Manu who was warned about the coming flood by the god Vishnu.
Notice the similarity with the story of Noah. Indeed, many cultures around the world have a story about the Great Flood and one wonders if it is a memory of this period of climate change and coastal flooding.
prevalence of a strong matrilineal streak.
The study analysed the genes of 6600 men and found that the oldest strains of the R1a haplogroup are found in the Indian subcontinent (approximately 15,500 years old) compared to Eastern Europe (12,500 years old) and Northern Europe (6900 years old). This is again consistent with a post-Ice Age migration from the south to the north.
Firstly, remember that none of them is a ‘pure race’,
The traditional view locates the discovery of agriculture in the Middle East before it spread to other parts of the world. There is some evidence that this may have been generally true for Europe as it was repopulated after the Ice Age from the south and east.
We now know that farming emerged independently in many parts of the world and that the Indian Ocean rim had multiple clusters.
Baluchistan, now part of Pakistan, suggested that this was the first place in the subcontinent to witness agriculture-based settlements.
Interestingly, agriculture appears to have spread to southern India much later.
very little evidence of early farming settlements along the south-east (i.e. Tamil and Andhra) coast.
After decades of debate, it is now accepted by most serious scholars that the Ghaggar is the same river that the earliest Hindu texts refer to as the Saraswati.6
there are far more settlements clustered around the course of the Saraswati than along the Indus.
The Harappans did not build great monuments like the pyramids but they outmatched their Egyptian and Sumerian peers in terms of population size, the sophistication of their cities and the sheer geographical reach of their civilization.
humped cattle have their origins in India
Till as recently as the 1960s, the Indian rupee was used as legal tender in Oman, Qatar, Bahrain and the UAE! For a while, the Reserve Bank of India even issued a special Gulf rupee for use in these countries. It was only when the Indian rupee sharply devalued in June 1966 that these countries began to issue their own currencies (Bahrain had already made the shift a few years earlier).
The traditional view was that the Rig Veda was composed by so-called Aryans who came to India from Central Asia around 1500 BC. The problem is that the date is entirely arbitrary
The Rig Veda itself mentions no invasion/migration and suggests no knowledge of Central Asia.
One of the hymns clearly places the river between the Yamuna and Sutlej—exactly where the dry riverbed of the Ghaggar is located.
This would suggest that the text was certainly written before 2000 BC and most likely before 2600 BC—
after all this blending, the majority of Indians are most closely related to each other irrespective of their ancient origins. Sorry if this scientific finding offends any ‘pure race’ advocates!
castes do seem to be quite fluid in the oldest Indian texts and become much more rigid in later writings (although endogamous, the relative positions of most castes continued to be fluid into modern times).
The Bronze Age largely bypassed southern India, perhaps due to the paucity of copper ores in the region.
Then, late in the third millennium BC, they did something amazing—they invented iron technology! The traditional view is that iron was introduced to India by invaders from Central Asia. Archaeological finds over the last two decades suggest instead that India was the likeliest place where iron was first mass produced.
Long dismissed as myths, one wonders if these oral histories contain a memory of real population movements.
Thus, one of the unintended consequences of early Iron Age migrations seems to be that the world has come to celebrate the birthday of an ancient god from Haryana!
Today we think of the Yemeni as being Arab but till the advent of Islam, south-eastern Arabia was home to a culture that was quite distinct from that of the rest of the peninsula.
The descendants of these migrations are the Munda-speaking tribes, such as the Santhals, who are scattered all over eastern and central India. A somewhat later wave survives today as the Khasis of the state of Meghalaya. Thus it came to be that India’s population mix includes people who speak languages related to Vietnamese and Khmer!36
North east
The folk tales and legends of South East Asia recall the Great Flood.
Great floods
Iron Age epic Mahabharata
Mahabharata in iron age
Nevertheless, the epic makes it clear that the Sinhalese retained a memory of their Bengali–Odiya origins when the Mahavamsa was composed and compiled almost a thousand years later. The Sinhalese link to eastern India matches genetic, linguistic and cultural evidence and survives in many little ways.
the lion on the Sri Lankan flag and Durga’s lion share the same cultural origins.
Nevertheless, the Greeks seemed to believe that India was the eastern most inhabited country and that there were only oceans and deserts beyond it. The Persians probably fed them fabulous tales about the exotic East.
ancients had gone around the Cape of Good Hope a good two thousand years before Vasco Da Gama!
The treaty between Seleucus and Chandragupta handed the Indians a large chunk of territory extending over Afghanistan and Baluchistan. One of Seleucus’s daughters was also given in marriage to a Mauryan prince, perhaps Chandragupta himself or his son Bindusara.
This was followed by four years of a bloody civil war in which Ashoka seems to have killed all male rivals in his family. Buddhist texts mention that he killed ninety-nine half-brothers
Ashoka would invade Kalinga in 262 BC whereas we know from minor rock edicts that Ashoka had converted to Buddhism more than two years earlier. No Buddhist text links his conversion to the war and even Ashoka’s eulogists like Charles Allen agree that his conversion predated the Kalinga war.
If Ashoka was genuinely remorseful, he would have surely bothered to apologize to the people whom he had wronged. Far from it, he doesn’t even offer to free the captives.
genocide perpetrated by the emperor many years after he supposedly turned pacifist.15 These were directed particularly at followers of the Jain and Ajivika sects; by all accounts he avoided conflicts with mainstream Hindus and was respectful towards Brahmins. The Ashokavadana recounts how Ashoka once had 18,000 Ajivikas in Bengal put to death in a single episode. If true, this would be the first known instance of large-scale religious persecution in Indian history (but, sadly not the last).
Asokavadana, Asoka and genocide
Ashoka ordered him and his family to be locked inside their home and for the building to be set alight.
Like modern day Muslims
frightening parallels with modern-day fundamentalists who kill cartoonists whom they accuse of insulting their religion.
alternative narrative is based on exactly the same texts and inscriptions used to praise Ashoka.
same scepticism should be evenly applied to all the evidence and not just to portions of the text that do not suit the mainstream narrative.
After Independence, it appears academic historians were further encouraged to build up the legend of Ashoka the Great in order to provide a lineage to Jawaharlal Nehru’s socialist project and inconvenient evidence was simply swept under the carpet.
For some inexplicable reason, Indian’s post-independence historians and archaeologists ignored the Satvahanas and it was only in 2015 that the government finally decided to re-examine sites that had been identified over a century ago by colonial-era researchers.22
Satvahanas
Around 193 BC, a remarkable military leader called Kharavela came to the throne of Kalinga.
Kharavela...Come back of kalinga
Despite these achievements, Kharavela is almost never mentioned in Indian textbooks because history is written in a way that systematically emphasizes a continental viewpoint over the coastal perspective.
period saw a boom in economic activity and mercantile trade. Merchant ships set sail from Satvahana and Kalinga ports, as well as those of the small kingdoms in the far south, to trade as far as Egypt in the west and Vietnam in the East.
Odiya–Bengali seafarers had been visiting and settling in Sri Lanka from the sixth century BC.
This union is said to have founded a lineage that ruled Funan for many generations.
Families, especially women and children, gather at the edge of a waterbody and place paper boats with oil lamps in the water. I witnessed the ritual on a beach near the temple town of Konark.
Check the direction
