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Showing posts with the label Pre-History

Indus Saraswati: A Mystery

A Railway route was being laid by the British Government in parts of West Punjab and Sindh (present-day Pakistan) in India. They came across a mound amidst the plains near the village of Harappa. Digging through the plain, they discovered burnt bricks of the exact shape and size. So many of them, as though there underneath the mound lies a huge wall of some fort. The Railway work was stopped, and ASI took over. A few years before this, an Italian youth had discovered some weird-looking seals at a site at Kalibangan. Unfortunately, before he could report it to the ASI chief, he was taken ill and died. With this discovery, the Indian subcontinent that Britishers believed had flourished only a few years before Alexander (some put the date around 800B.C.) was forced to shift the date of the beginning of this civilisation by almost a million years. The Vedas, Puranas, and local folktales were something the Indians were proud of; now, for the first time, they had proof of the actual historic...

Indus Valley Civilisation: An Understanding

The River Of The Rig Veda: The mythical river Sarasvati is an unsolved mystery. Sarasvati means a river full of ponds or lakes. This indicated its course might have been through many such lakes or swamps. There are many references to this river in the Rig Vedas as the " Seventh River of the Aryavarta" and " The mother of floods", indicating it was an important river in the land, probably large and perennial and caused floods. Many excavated villages and cities along present-day parts of Haryana, Punjab, Rajasthan and Gujarat indicate the basin of the Sarasvati River. It is described in the Yajur Vedas as the one where the five rivers meet, and in the Brahmanas, there are indications of the disappearance of its lower course and how its large flow decreases.  The  Mahabharata  describes the ultimate drying up of the river before the ushering in of the  Kali Yuga . Many Puranas describe the civilisation lying between  the Ganga  and the  Saraswati . ...