Indus-Sarasvati (Harappan) Civilization Vis-a-vis Rigveda


Book Description

Contributed papers presented at an international seminar of Draupadi Trust on the topic of "The Indus-Saraswati (Harappan) Civilization vis-a-vis the Rigveda" held during 26th to 28th March 2015 at India International Centre, New Delhi.




In Search of Vedic-Harappan Relationship


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Contributed papers presented at a seminar organized by Panjab University, Chandigarh.




The Sarasvatī Flows on


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The Indo-Aryan Controversy


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The articles in this survey of the Indo-Aryan controversy address questions such as: are the Indo-Aryans insiders or outsiders?




The Sarasvati Civilisation


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Who were the Harappans? How are they related to present-day Indians? Was there never an "Aryan Invasion"? The Sarasvati Civilization: A New Paradigm in Ancient Indian History brings together evidence from satellite imagery, geology, hydrodynamics, archaeology, epigraphy, textual hermeneutics, and DNA research to place together ancient Indian history in the light of new discoveries and facts which were simply not available to colonial historians of the 19th century and have been overlooked thereafter. At the heart of the ancient Indian Civilization was the mighty Sarasvati river which was in full flow 5000-6000 years ago. 60-80 % of the so-called Indus Valley Civilisation sites which have been discovered are not on the banks of the Indus but on the course of the Sarasvati. The drying-out of the river is the most significant factor in the history and migrations of the ancient Indians. With new evidence, the time has come for a significant paradigm shift in Indology. This book breaks new ground to lay the foundation for an authentic Indian history.




The Rigveda


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In the present volume,the author has confirmed emphatically that India was also the original homeland not only of the Indo-Aryans but also of the Indo-Iranians and the Indo-Europeans.




The Roots of Hinduism


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Hinduism has two major roots. The more familiar is the religion brought to South Asia in the second millennium BCE by speakers of Aryan or Indo-Iranian languages, a branch of the Indo-European language family. Another, more enigmatic, root is the Indus civilization of the third millennium BCE, which left behind exquisitely carved seals and thousands of short inscriptions in a long-forgotten pictographic script. Discovered in the valley of the Indus River in the early 1920s, the Indus civilization had a population estimated at one million people, in more than 1000 settlements, several of which were cities of some 50,000 inhabitants. With an area of nearly a million square kilometers, the Indus civilization was more extensive than the contemporaneous urban cultures of Mesopotamia and Egypt. Yet, after almost a century of excavation and research the Indus civilization remains little understood. How might we decipher the Indus inscriptions? What language did the Indus people speak? What deities did they worship? Asko Parpola has spent fifty years researching the roots of Hinduism to answer these fundamental questions, which have been debated with increasing animosity since the rise of Hindu nationalist politics in the 1980s. In this pioneering book, he traces the archaeological route of the Indo-Iranian languages from the Aryan homeland north of the Black Sea to Central, West, and South Asia. His new ideas on the formation of the Vedic literature and rites and the great Hindu epics hinge on the profound impact that the invention of the horse-drawn chariot had on Indo-Aryan religion. Parpola's comprehensive assessment of the Indus language and religion is based on all available textual, linguistic and archaeological evidence, including West Asian sources and the Indus script. The results affirm cultural and religious continuity to the present day and, among many other things, shed new light on the prehistory of the key Hindu goddess Durga and her Tantric cult.




Understanding Collapse


Book Description

In this lively survey, Guy D. Middleton critically examines our ideas about collapse - how we explain it and how we have constructed potentially misleading myths around collapses - showing how and why collapse of societies was a much more complex phenomenon than is often admitted.




The R̥igvedic People


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