flute:
Couple of points --the horse association with Aryans is severly disputed at this point.
Modern research shows it is highly unlikely that horses or chariots would have made it across the Karokoran terrain
No 2, the timing of when the RigVeda is written is also not the same as that of Max mueller's contentions. Indications are that the Rig Veda is a lot older than commonly believed.
no 3, Max mueller's later admitted upon serious scrutiny by academic scholars that the concept of Aryan was his invention so to speak. he derived the term from the Sanskrit word "Arya" which means noble.
The vedas are dominated by reference to a great river -- traces of which were never found earlier. This is widely believed to be the saraswati. recent staellite imagery and scientific investigation indicates the saraswati dried up between 5000 - 6000 BC which puts bot the date of the Rig veda, The Indus Valley Civilization and the so called foreign race concepts under severe scrutiny.
The whole concept of a foreign race, whatever they were called was partially based on max Mueller's timeline, which predicated one civilization overridden by another. Mueller was a highly devout Christian and the timeline set at 3500 BC for Indus Vally civilization was to account for the Biblical beginning of the universe, estimated to be 6000 years ago.
The Aryan civilization concept was Mueller's idea of preserving cultural Western hegemony and supriority.
In fact harappan sites have shown a lot of similarities with what are traditionally though to be Aryan sites. The modern interpretation of both Aryans and Dravidians coexisting stems from a lot of these new discoveries and connections.
kban1, I am passionate about this subject and devour everything. Since I am not a scholar I simply hold my opinion. Aryan invasion is now discredited. The only disputed thing is now immigration, this series of waves of immigrants from across Karokoran terrain. To me it is not far fetched, it fits nicely with what happened in Indian subcontinent in later ages.
true about Saraswati. There is strong satellite imagery data which points to reality of an ancient river which many thought to be a mythical river. When Hindus goto Triveni for sacred bath and right now there are only 2 rivers there, everyone thought the third is a mythical river. There is now great evidence to point to a now dried up river.
On top of it, there are many astronomical phenomenon explained in Rig Veda which point to things as they were between 5000-3000BC. There is actually a software which shows you the sky as it was say in 5000BC. Based on the astronomical related verses in Rig Veda, its been deduced that it belonged to that period.
But, there are some seriously unresolved questions like
1. Horse: if rig veda talks so much about horses, why are Indus ruins totally devoid of horse remains or even horse depictions, when there are so many bulls and cows depicted?
2. Metal: Iron remains are not found in Indus while vedic people talk about iron which is a invention of 1500BC.
Going by whatever is on view right now, here is my take. Indus civilization was not destroyed or invaded by anyone outside, but it gradually disintgrated because of drying up of river and civilization simply moved to ganges valley. There are many ways of lives in former indus valley areas which are very very similar to the way depicted in Indus ruins, it points to a certain continuity. The term "aryan" might be a misnomer to depict foreigners but there must have been some assimilation from outside just lke it happened in later ages. Either way, hindusim as we know it, including the vedas etc. were definitely composed in Indian subcontinent. If some of the composers were migrants is irrelevant IMO.
See the following excerpt from Amaritya Sen's "The Arguementative Indian". I do not agree with him in sofar as "Saraswati" being theoretical,but he does make some interesting points...
Re: Indus Valley Civilization and the AryansGiven the priorities of Hindutva, the rewriting of India's history tends to favour internal and external isolation, in the form of separating out the celebration of Hindu achievements from the non-Hindu parts of its past and also from intellectual and cultural developments outside India. (p65)
The problem starts with the account of the very beginning of India's history. The `Indus valley civilization', dating from the third millennium BCE, flourished well before the timing of the earliest Hindu literature, the Vedas, which are typically dated in the middle of the second millennium BCE. The Indus civilization, or the Harappa civilization as it is sometimes called (in honour of its most famous site), covered much of the north-west of the undivided subcontinent (including what are today Punjab, Haryana, Sindh, Baluchistan, western Uttar Pradesh, Rajasthan and Gujarat) - a much larger area than Mesopotamia and Egypt, which flourished at about the same time. It had many special achievements, including remarkable town planning, organized storage (of grain in particular), and extraordinary drainage systems (unequalled, if I am any judge, in the subcontinent in the following four thousand years). (p65)
There is obvious material here for national or civilizational pride of Indians. But this poses an immediate problem for the Hindutva view of India's history, since an ancient civilization-that is clearly pre-Sanskritic and pre-Hindu deeply weakens the possibility of seeing Indian history in pre-eminently and constitutively Hindu terms. (p66)
Furthermore, there is a second challenge associated with India's ancient past, which relates to the arrival of the Indo-Europeans (sometimes called Aryans) from the West, most likely in the second millennium BCE, riding horses (unknown in the Indus valley civilization), and speaking a variant of early Sanskrit (the Vedic Sanskrit, as it is now called). The Hindutva view of history, which traces the origin of Indian civilization to the Vedas has, therefore, the double `difficulty' of (1) having to accept that the foundational basis of Hindu culture came originally from outside India, and (2) being unable to place Hinduism at the beginning of Indian cultural history and its urban heritage. (p66)
Thus, in the Hindutva theory, much hangs on the genesis of the Vedas. In particular: who composed them (it would be best for Hindutva theory if they were native Indians, settled in India for thousands of years, rather than Indo-Europeans coming from abroad)? Were they composed later than the Indus valley civilization (it would be best if they were not later, in sharp contrast with the accepted knowledge)?...There were, therefore, attempts by the Hindutva champions to rewrite Indian history in such a way that these disparate difficulties are simultaneously removed through the simple device of `making' the Sanskrit-speaking composers of the Vedas also the very same people who created the Indus valley civilization! (p67)
The Indus valley civilization was accordingly renamed `the Indus-Saraswati civilization', in honour of a non-observable river called the Sarasvati which is referred to in the Vedas. The intellectual origins of Hindu philosophy as well as of the concocted Vedic science and Vedic mathematics are thus put solidly into the third millennium BCE, if not earlier. Indian school children were then made to read about this highly theoretical `Indus-Saraswati civilization' in their new history textbooks, making Hindu culture - and Hindu science - more ancient, more urban, more indigenous, and comfortably omnipresent throughout India's civilizational history. (p67)
The problem with this account is, of course, its obvious falsity, going against all the available evidence based on archaeology and literature. To meet that difficulty, `new' archaeological evidence had to be marshalled. This was done - or claimed to be done - in a much publicized book by Natwar Jha and N. S. Rajaram called The Deciphered Indus Script, published in 2000. The authors claim that they have deciphered the as-yet-undeciphered script used in the Indus valley, which they attribute to the mid-fourth millennium BCE - stretching the `history' unilaterally back by a further thousand years or so. They also claim that the tablets found there refer to Rigveda's Sarasvati river (in the indirect form of `Ila surrounds the blessed land'). Further, they produced a picture of a terracotta seal with a horse on it, which was meant to be further proof of the Vedic - and Aryan - identity of the Indus civilization. The Vedas are full of references to horses, whereas the Indus remains have plenty of bulls but - so it was hitherto thought - no horses. (p67-68)
The alleged discovery and decipherment led to a vigorous debate about the claims, and the upshot was the demonstration that there was, in fact, no decipherment whatever, and that the horse seal is the result of a simple fraud based on a computerized distortion of a broken seal of a unicorn bull, which was known earlier. The alleged horse seal was a distinct product of the late twentieth century, the credit for the creation of which has to go to the Hindutva activists. The definitive demonstration of the fraud came from Michael Witzel, Professor of Sanskrit at Harvard University, in a joint essay with Steve Farmer. The demonstration did not, however, end references in official school textbooks (produced by the NCERT during the BJP-led rule, ending only in May 2004) to `terracotta figurines' of horses in the `Indus-Saraswati civilization'. (p68)
It is difficult to understand fully why a movement that began with pride in Hindu values, in which the pursuit of truth plays such a big part, should produce activists who would try to have their way not only through falsity but through carefully crafted fraud. (p68)
In trying to invent Indian history to suit the prejudices of Hindutva, the movement took on a profoundly contrary task. The task is particularly hard to achieve given what is known about India's long history. The unadorned truth does not favour the Hindutva view, and the adorned falsity does not survive critical scrutiny. (p69)
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August 11, 2006, 10:14:05 PM