Widely believed theory of Indo-Aryan invasion, often used to explain early settlements in the Indian subcontinent is a myth, a new study by Indian geneticists says. “Our study clearly shows that there was no genetic influx 3,500 years ago,” said Dr Kumarasamy Thangaraj of CCMB, who led the research team, which included scientists from the University of Tartu, Estonia, Chettinad Academy of Research and Education, Chennai and Banaras Hindu University. “It is high time we re-write India’s prehistory based on scientific evidence,” said Dr Lalji Singh, former director of CCMB. “There is no genetic evidence that Indo-Aryans invaded or migrated to India or even something such as Aryans existed”. Singh, vice-chancellor of BHU, is a coauthor.[Indians are not descendants of Aryans, says new study]
Summing up, our results confirm both ancestry and temporal complexity shaping the still on-going process of genetic structuring of South Asian populations. This intricacy cannot be readily explained by the putative recent influx of Indo-Aryans alone but suggests multiple gene flows to the South Asian gene pool, both from the west and east, over a much longer time span. We highlight a few genes as candidates of positive selection in South Asia that could have implications in lipid metabolism and etiology of type 2 diabetes. Further studies on data sets without ascertainment and allele frequency biases such as sequence data will be needed to validate the signals for selection.
The point is that nothing exciting happened following the decline of the Harappan civilization. The Dravidian folklore is just that – folklore. Migrations did happen to the region, but they date to much earlier period before there were Dravidian and Indo-European languages.
When we talk about the Arabian Sea trading network, it usually is implied to mean the time from which the Europeans started sailing through the region. But as Manmadhan Ullatil pointed out in Hubs of the medieval trade, this trading network existed much before this period. In fact the ports along the coast of India and Africa were part of the trading network of the Old World. By studying the Prehistoric movement of plants and animals, we are able to reconstruct the trading patterns and speculate about the traders.
In such a study, something interesting has turned up. Researchers looking into the domestication of banana found that it may have been initially done in New Guinea; wild bananas are found in South Asian rainforests. By looking at the banana phytoliths, it is now believed that bananas reached the Harappan region around 2000 BCE, before the decline of the civilization started and apparently were not used for eating. So what else could they have been used for?
Given the distribution of wild Musaceae in South Asia, and the climate at that time (Asouti & Fuller 2008, Madella & Fuller 2006), it is unlikely that these could derive from the ancient presence of wild Musa or Ensete. The possibility that a species was cultivated as a garden ornamental or as a source of fiber and raw materials (e.g., for paper) cannot be ruled out. Indeed, one of these nonculinary uses of Musa/Ensete might be a more plausible explanation for these phytoliths than an early dispersal of edible cultivated bananas from Island Southeast Asia by the third millennium B.C.[Banana Cultivation in South Asia and East Asia: A review of the evidence from archaeology and linguistics( via Carlos Aromayo)]
The paper says that it is possible that the Indus people used the fiber for making paper. Now if they made paper you would think that the next step would be to assume writing. But claiming that Indus people were literate would violate a lakshmana rekha.
So the next line in this paper says that since few folks think that Indus people were illiterate, this could not have happened. Thus apparently, Indus people got bananas, did not eat them, made paper and threw them away. They could have done anything, except writing on it.
(from Saudi Commission for Tourism and Antiquities)
Recently Saudi Arabian officials claimed they have evidence that horses were domesticated in the Arabian peninsula around 9,000 years back.
“This discovery will change our knowledge concerning the domestication of horses and the evolution of culture in the late Neolithic period,” he told a news conference in Jeddah, according to the Reuters news agency.
“The al-Maqar civilisation is a very advanced civilization of the Neolithic period. This site shows us clearly, the roots of the domestication of horses 9,000 years ago,” he added.
Although humans came into contact with horses about 50,000 years ago, they were originally herded for meat, skins, and possibly for milk.[Saudis ‘find evidence of early horse domestication]
This is shocking: archaeological news from a country which has declared war on archaeology?
The website of the Saudi Commission for Tourism and Antiquities has a large number of photos from al-Maqar. One of the artifacts is a sculpture of a horse around 100 cm long. On this horse, there are signs of a bridle which proves that the horse was domesticated much earlier than what we thought before. While this is interesting news as it pushes the antiquity of horse domestication by a few millenia, it has a serious impact on a version of Aryan Invasion Theory which depends on the date of horse domestication.
According to this version of history, the Indus civilization fell to the invaders. In The Wonder that was India, A L Basham gives a dramatic account of this fall. According to him, the barbarians who were already ranging the provinces finally made their move. The citizens of the Mohenjo-daro were no match for the invaders who had superior weapons. Basham also notes that the invaders trimphed because they had the terror striking beasts of the steppes.
These terror striking beasts are horses which till last week was considered to be first domesticated in the steppes of Central Asia. They were probably first domesticated by the Botai people of Kazakstan. In fact there is no dispute over the fact that horses were alien to India and were domesticated by nomads in the Pontic-Caspian region.
According to one of the Indo-European homeland hypothesis known as the Kurgan theory, these mounted warriors from this region, after domesticating the horse used this advantage to impose their culture on their neighbors in Old Europe. These “Aryans” then displaced the “Dravidians” in a kind of fairy tale.
What happens to this theory if the horse was not domesticated near the Caspian sea, but somewhere in the middle of Saudi Arabia as per the new evidence? Did the horsemen wait for few millennia to time their adventure with the decline of the Harappan civilization? If the Aryans indeed came from the Caspian sea area, what prompted them to make a move around that period?
References:
Edwin Bryant, The Quest for the Origins of Vedic Culture: The Indo-Aryan Migration Debate (Oxford University Press, USA, 2004).
(via Wikipedia)
The oldest known script in the Indian subcontinent is the undeciphered Harappan script. The oldest deciphered script is Brahmi, dating to around 4th century BCE. In South India, the oldest deciphered script is Tamil-Brahmi which is dated to two centuries after Brahmi. Inscriptions in rock shelters and caves near Madurai provide proof for this.
In an excavation at Kodumanal, near Erode more than 20 pot-sherds with Tamil-Brahmi inscriptions were found. On the basis of this archaeological work, some scholars suggested an older date for Tamil-Brahmi which would put it in the same period as Brahmi. Now there is new evidence from Palani which suggests 400 BCE as the date for Tamil-Brahmi. This adds a new data point to the debate on if Tamil-Brahmi is pre or post-Asokan.
When K. Rajan, Professor, Department of History, Pondicherry University, excavated this megalithic grave, little did he realise that the paddy found in the four-legged jar would be instrumental in reviving the debate on the origin of the Tamil-Brahmi script. Accelerator mass spectrometry (AMS) dating of the paddy done by Beta Analysis Inc., Miami, U.S.A, assigned the paddy to 490 BCE. “Since all the goods kept in the grave including the paddy and the ring-stands with the Tamil-Brahmi script are single-time deposits, the date given to the paddy is applicable to the Tamil-Brahmi script also,” said Dr. Rajan. So the date of evolution of Tamil-Brahmi could be pushed 200 years before Asoka, he argued.[Palani excavation triggers fresh debate via @amargov]
Read the article for it explains the controversies regarding this dating.
References:
Upinder Singh, A History of Ancient and Early Medieval India: From the Stone Age to the 12th Century, 1st ed. (Prentice Hall, 2009).
Trepanation is a surgical technique in which a hole is drilled into the human skull to treat intracranial diseases. It was quite popular during the 16th and 17th centuries in Europe. Count Philip of Nassau had 27 successive trepanations done in the 17th century. In England, it was a common form of treatment among miners who suffered cranial trauma.
Trepanation has a much older history; it was done during the Bronze Age in Peru and Jericho as well. During those times, it was done to repair skull fracture resulting blows, to remove splinters and blood clots. It was also done on dead people, to obtain skull bones to create necklaces.
At Ikiztepe, a small settlement near the Black Sea occupied from 3200 to 1700 B.C., archaeologist Önder Bilgi of Istanbul University has uncovered five skulls with clean, rectangular incisions that are evidence for trepanation, or basic cranial surgery. The procedure may have been performed to treat hemorrhages, brain cancer, head trauma, or mental illness. Last August Bilgi also unearthed a pair of razor-sharp volcanic glass blades that he believes were used to make the careful cuts.
There is ample evidence that Bronze Age sawbones knew what they doing. Last summer, biological anthropologist Handan üstündag of Anadolu University in Turkey excavated the 4,000-year-old trepanned skull of a man at Kultepe Höyük in central Turkey. üstündag says the surgeon cut a neat 1- by 2-inch incision, and there are clear signs of recovery in the regrowth of bone tissue at the edges. Judging from the frequency of healed bone in such skulls, anthropologist Yilmaz Erdal of Hacettepe University in Turkey recently proposed that about half of all Bronze Age trepanation patients- and 60 percent of those in Turkey- survived the procedure.[Bronze Age Brain Surgeons]
Trepanation was practiced in Harappa (Lothal, Kalibangan) and the megalithic site of Maski too.
Trepanation is known from the Bronze Age Harappan (ca. 4300 BP) people of the Indus Valley Civilisation. Sarkar (1972) attributed a squarish hole on the right temporal skull of a child of 9-10 years skull found at Lothal, a Harappan site. Roy Chowdhury (1973) also believed that evidence of trepanation was present in Harappan skull No. H 796/B and H 802/B, from Cemetery R37 and possibly in a Kalibangan skull (another Harappan site) in Western India. A megalithic skull (M30) from Maski (Karnataka) in South India also showed evidence of trepanation (Sarkar, 1972): it has two circular holes of 22 mm and 15 mm respectively on the either side of the sagittal suture of the vertex.[Evidence of Surgery in Ancient India:Trepanation at Burzahom (Kashmir) over 4000 years ago]
While the skull of the child found in Lothal is considered the earliest evidence of this type of surgery, a ~4300 year old skull found in Burzahom (10 km north-east of Srinagar) in Kashmir Valley is definite proof of trepanation. In this particular case, the victim had suffered a blow from a strong wooden stick. She survived the blow as well as the trepanation process.
(Thanks Michel Danino, for the links)
References:
The Chicago medical recorder, Volume 35 By Chicago Medical Society
God-apes and fossil men: paleoanthropology of South Asia By Kenneth A. R. Kennedy
First evidence of brain surgery in Bronze Age Harappa, Current Science, Vol 100, No 11, 10 June 2011
(via Wikipedia) National Geographic has an article (HT Vipul) on Göbekli Tepe in Southern Turkey where people constructed a huge temple complex much before the invention of agriculture. This site is now prompting historians to rethink the theories on the origins of complex societies. How were foragers, who usually follow the resources like the Nanook, able to stay at one place and move 16 ton stones without wheels or animals? Why did they even bother constructing such a massive structure? Did pilgrimage pre-date the Neolithic revolution?
Discovering that hunter-gatherers had constructed Göbekli Tepe was like finding that someone had built a 747 in a basement with an X-Acto knife. “I, my colleagues, we all thought, What? How?” Schmidt said. Paradoxically, Göbekli Tepe appeared to be both a harbinger of the civilized world that was to come and the last, greatest emblem of a nomadic past that was already disappearing. The accomplishment was astonishing, but it was hard to understand how it had been done or what it meant. “In 10 or 15 years,” Schmidt predicts, “Göbekli Tepe will be more famous than Stonehenge. And for good reason.”[Göbekli Tepe]
There is a new explanation for the origin of agriculture
If these archaeologists were correct, these protovillages provided a new explanation of how complex society began. Childe thought that agriculture came first, that it was the innovation that allowed humans to seize the opportunity of a rich new environment to extend their dominion over the natural world. The Natufian sites in the Levant suggested instead that settlement came first and that farming arose later, as a product of crisis. Confronted with a drying, cooling environment and growing populations, humans in the remaining fecund areas thought, as Bar-Yosef puts it, “If we move, these other folks will exploit our resources. The best way for us to survive is to settle down and exploit our own area.” Agriculture followed.[Göbekli Tepe]
and it is connected to religion
Schmidt speculates that foragers living within a hundred-mile radius of Göbekli Tepe created the temple as a holy place to gather and meet, perhaps bringing gifts and tributes to its priests and craftspeople. Some kind of social organization would have been necessary not only to build it but also to deal with the crowds it attracted. One imagines chanting and drumming, the animals on the great pillars seeming to move in flickering torchlight. Surely there were feasts; Schmidt has uncovered stone basins that could have been used for beer. The temple was a spiritual locus, but it may also have been the Neolithic version of Disneyland.
Over time, Schmidt believes, the need to acquire sufficient food for those who worked and gathered for ceremonies at Göbekli Tepe may have led to the intensive cultivation of wild cereals and the creation of some of the first domestic strains. Indeed, scientists now believe that one center of agriculture arose in southern Turkey—well within trekking distance of Göbekli Tepe—at exactly the time the temple was at its height. Today the closest known wild ancestors of modern einkorn wheat are found on the slopes of Karaca Dağ, a mountain just 60 miles northeast of Göbekli Tepe. In other words, the turn to agriculture celebrated by V. Gordon Childe may have been the result of a need that runs deep in the human psyche, a hunger that still moves people today to travel the globe in search of awe-inspiring sights.[Göbekli Tepe]
(via IMDB)
In Southern France, the Ardèche River flows through a spectacular landscape. Surrounding the river are white limestone cliffs, covered with vegetation, rising up over hundreds of feet. Over the river runs the Vallon-Pont-d’Arc, a natural arc like the one at Arches National Park. The cliffs on either side of the river are perfect places for hiking and that is what Jean-Marie Chauvet and his two friends, Éliette Brunel and Christian Hillaire were doing in December, 1994 when they chanced on a narrow entrance within the cliffs.
When you enter through this obscure shaft which was hidden for twenty millenia, you reach a dark cave with high ceiling where there is not much to see. If you have seen any Ramsay Brothers or Ram Gopal Varma movie, this is the point where you scream and run as fast as possible. Fortunately Chauvet and his friends explored the caves and as they went through the network of chambers they saw not just animal bones or stalactites, but undulating cave walls painted with spectacular animal images. And they were 30,000 years old.
Some of us may enter Mt. Athos, but we will never enter the Chauvet Cave. The cave is closed to public. But then if the French culture minister is a big fan of your movies you may get the once in a life time opportunity to film inside the cave. This is how the Bavarian film maker Werner Herzog (Aguirre) got permission to make this 3D documentary. But even then there were too many restrictions. The crew had to minimal (3 people). They had to use only hand held cold lights and always stay on the narrow walkway. They would be allowed inside only for a few hours every day. Despite such restrictions, the result is a spectacular film.
Since the cave was naturally sealed by a landslide for more than 20,000 years, it is like walking into a time capsule. The walls are filled with drawings of horses, bisons, lions, bears and mammoths. In one depiction, there are a bunch of animals running and to give the impression of running, the artist chose to depict the animal with multiple legs, similar to how you do in modern cartoons. You can call them the precursor to animation. Drawn during the period when Neanderthal man roamed alongside humans and Europe was covered with glaciers, the images are lifelike. They seem to be telling various stories: of fighting and mating and of hunting and movement.
The sequencing takes us in through that cliff-face door, away from sunlit faces and landscapes and down the torchlit shaft leading to the cave’s long chambers. These stretch back some eight hundred feet. The cave’s miracles of geology—the extravagance of its glittering stalagmites and calcite curtains—surpass those of the Pont d’Arc outside. But the chambers also have undulating walls, and it was on these that the ancient artists chiefly worked. We are given a foretaste of their images: we exit; we return to this item, to that; we leave again. “It is a relief to go outside,” Herzog explains: inside the caves we get to feeling “as if we were disturbing,” as if our distant ancestors’ eyes were still upon us. But finally we surrender to the flow of their art, immersed at length in the interplay of torchlight, rippling cave flanks, scorings, charcoalings and red ochre.[Cave of Forgotten Dreams]
But there are no human depictions.
One thing, though: There’s a partial depiction of a female, the lower part of a female body, somewhat embraced by a bison. It’s very strange that this motif reappears 30,000 years later in some etchings of Picasso—the Minotaur and the female.But why no human beings? You see depictions of human beings 20,000 years later, 18,000 years later, at the beginning of Neolithic times. By the end of Paleolithic—during the Magdalenian epoch of Paleolithic culture—that’s where you start seeing human depictions.[Werner Herzog Finds at Least Three Dimensions in the “Cave of Forgotten Dreams]
The documentary also reveals the amount of care taken by the French to protect the caves. This has not been developed into a tourist site because the visitors’ breath could bring mold on the paintings like what happened in Lascaux. Even the scientists stay on the narrow metal path so as not to plant their foot prints next to the 20,000 year print of an extinct cave bear. For tourists, they are planning a replica site nearby. (via Wikipedia)
The other impressive thing is the research that has been done in these caves. Every inch has been laser scanned and specialists have looked at every artifact. Near the opening there is a wall with hundreds of hand prints and they belonged to a man who had crooked fingers. Deep in the caves, researchers found another painting which was done by a man who too had crooked fingers. The Chavuet painters used torches and some of them rubbed those flames against the cave walls leaving 28,000 year old charcoal fragments. A surreal moment is when Herzog tells us about two sets of foot prints: one belongs to a bear and the other to a child. Did the bear eat the child, or were they friends or were the foot prints made thousands of years apart? Again, we don’t know.
What makes this a non-boring documentary is Herzog’s commentary. His imagination is quite wild. Standing in the silence, looking at the art, he says one can hear one’s own heartbeat and the sound track switches appropriately. The cave paintings remind him of Fred Astaire’s dancing with the shadows and we get a visual from Swing Time. Then he gets the most wonderful characters to explain the past: a circus employee turned archaeologist, a scientist who walks in reindeer skin, a perfume maker who sniffs for smells in caves. These are very unique Herzog touches.
This is probably the only documentary I have seen in a theater and it was worth it.
Furthur Reading:
(Carte de la sarasvati védique from Wikipedia)
(Science, Vol 332 had an article titled In Indus Times, the River Didn’t Run Through It by Andrew Lawler. In the article, three independent studies were cited to argue that Ghaggar-Hakra was a seasonal stream during the Mature Harappan phase (2500 – 1900 B.C.E) and not the mighty river mentioned in the Vedas. The studies also show that the river may have dried up around 10,000 years back. I asked Michel Danino, the author of The Lost River:On the Trail of the Saraswati, for his comments on these studies – Ed)
A few thoughts on the recent challenge posed by a few geological studies mentioned on this group (mainly Sanjeev Gupta et al.; H. Maemoku et al.). Some links to them (1,2, 3,4)
Those studies conclude that “the data suggests there was no big river here” (near Kalibangan in northern Rajasthan, on the bank of the Ghaggar) or that “the Ghaggar was not the mighty Saraswati during mature Harappan period because sand dunes on either side of the Ghaggar had been formed before that”. This is contrary to the view adopted by most archaeologists that the Ghaggar and its tributaries flowed during Harappan times, watering the hundreds of sites that have been found in this region. (Since the mid-nineteenth century, the Ghaggar was additionally identified with the Sarasvati river of the Rig-Veda.)
In reality, the issues are not so simple. First there is nothing really new in the claim that we don’t have a “mighty Sarasvati” during the Mature phase. In my recent book Lost River: On the Trail of the Sarasvati, I listed various evidences showing that the Ghaggar was dwindling during the Mature phase. In summary:
The Pakistani archaeologist M Rafique Mughal’s observation of a break in the settlement pattern between the Early and Mature phases (around 2600 BCE) just west of the international border for some 100 kilometres. His conclusion was that the Ghaggar had stopped flowing into Cholistan before the Mature phase; this means it was much weakened by that time.
In the same region, the German scientists M.A. Geyh and D. Ploethner detected a huge and shallow body of fresh groundwater. A tritium-based isotope study pointed to “a range of the actual water age from 12900 to 4700 years BP”, i.e. till about 2700 BCE, which matches Mughal’s conclusion.
A 2008 U.S.-Pakistan study directed by Peter Clift tested the Ghaggar-Hakra’s floodplain in Pakistan’s Punjab and concluded, “Provisional age data now show that between 2000 and 3000 BCE, flow along a presently driedup course known as the Ghaggur-Hakkra River ceased, probably driven by the weakening monsoon and possibly also because of headwater capture into the adjacent Yamuna and Sutlej Rivers.” This is again consistent with the above.
What is new and challenging in the recent geological studies is a suggestion that the Ghaggar went dry many millennia earlier. Actually that statement is found in A. Lawler’s article in Science, not in S. Gupta et al.’s abstract — and we don’t have the full papers as far as I know. Maemoku et al.’s conclusion that “the Ghaggar was not the mighty Saraswati during mature Harappan period because sand dunes on either side of the Ghaggar had been formed before that” can be readily dismissed because the age of the sand dunes is irrelevant to the question of water flow at various later dates.
Apart from the above views of Mughal, Geyh and Ploethner, and Clift, there are several major objections to a completely dry Ghaggar during Mature times. For instance:
There were undoubtedly numerous streams flowing down from the Shivaliks, and most recent climatic studies agree that the climate was wetter during the Mature phase, though on the way to aridity: all these streams (Sarsuti, Markanda, Dangri, Ghaggar, Patialewali, Wah and the three Naiwals being the chief ones) carried more water than they do at present. Moreover, nowadays, whatever water flows seasonally in those streams is largely diverted to irrigation through canals; in Harappan times, the diversion would have been much less. As a result, all this surplus water must have accumulated somewhere — where, if not in the Ghaggar? In fact, during last year’s abundant summer monsoon, the Ghaggar was full to the brim well into India’s Punjab, and we have records to show that it flowed all the way to Anupgarh decades earlier. Because of higher precipitation and lesser diversion, its flow in Harappan times could have been larger as well as for longer periods of the year.
Why are sites such as Banawali or Kalibangan built on the edge of well-defined paleochannels if those channels had no flowing water?
In particular, there are two crucial messages from Kalibangan’s urban layout: 1) the absence of large reservoirs (such as those at Dholavira) and a relatively small number of wells, both of which together point to a perennial source of water nearby; 2) the recessed entrance to the upper town precisely facing the Ghaggar below. The architectural message is unmistakable: the Kalibangan citizens had access to a flowing Ghaggar, both for water supply and for communication.
An earlier study by JK Tripathi et al.concluded that “The Palaeo-Ghaggar must have been a mighty river”. Though I regard that study as substandard (I explained why in my book), I mention is to show that experts can and do disagree.
Another case of disagreement can be found among the recently mentioned abstracts, see p. 23 of the pdf file: P. Clift et al., “Evolving Holocene Drainage Geometries and Environmental Conditions in the Indus River Basin”. I quote from the abstract:
“This trend became more intense after 4.5 ka [i.e. 2500 BCE ] when the last evidence for an active river was found in the region close to the archeological sites. … We suggest that in the Early-Mid Holocene the area of heaviest Harappan Settlement was one of significant fluvial confluence. The Sutlej and an independent Beas River flowed much closer to the Thar Desert than they do now. Moreover, we propose that the Yamuna, which now flows east into the Ganges, must have contributed to the sediment flux in the recent geological past, although the precise age of capture is, so far, not yet well determined. The end of the Mature Harappan Phase of settlement around 1900 BCE appears to shortly postdate the end of major river flow in the region, as the Sutlej migrated north, capturing the Beas. This change in the course of the Sutlej, together with the probable loss of the Yamuna resulted in the much smaller Ghaggar-Hakra being unable by itself to maintain significant flow into the desert, especially in the context of a weakening summer monsoon. The effect of this reorganization may have been as catastrophic to agriculture as the proposed abrupt weakening of the summer monsoon rains.”
This scenario is the same as that proposed by numerous experts earlier. It implies a flowing Ghaggar, partly fed by waters from the Sutlej and the Yamuna. Why hasn’t Lawler mentioned this alternative view in his Science article? And why do Sanjeev Gupta et al. fail to notice recent contributions from the Sutlej into the Ghaggar system, which are well attested by an Islamic chronicle of the 15th century and by the 1908 Imperial Gazetteer (which mentions the Sutlej finally leaving the Ghaggar in 1796)? I think the answer lies in the treacherous nature of the sediments in the Ghaggar region, which are notoriously difficult to interpret (even earlier, there were major disagreements among experts, e.g. Raikes and Courty).
These new geological efforts are welcome but I think we need to give them a few years to expand their scope and stabilize their findings. We also need to hear detailed discussions from geologists who have worked on the Sarasvati problem for a long time, such as KS Valdiya, VMK Puri, BC Verma etc.
Finally, nothing less than a multidisciplinary approach will provide a convincing answer to the question of water sources for the hundreds of Harappan sites in Haryana, Indian Punjab and northern Rajasthan: not just geology, but climatology, isotope studies of palaeo-waters, and of course archaeology (especially more refined studies of the evolution of settlement patterns). We are still far from such a multidisciplinary convergence.
(Image via Tallapragada)
It is well known that the Upanishads are the fountainhead of Indian philosophy: every orthodox and heterodox system is rooted in the Upanishads. Karma, absolutism, theory of momentariness of worldly things, cause of birth and death cycles all come from the Upanishads so do concepts like Atman, Brahman, and Maya. But what about the pre-Upanishadic era? Can we find any evidence of philosophical thought in the Brahmanas or Mantras? Or are they, as popular history books write, a collection of “ritual hymns and liturgical directives?”
Most books concentrate on the sacrificial angle, less on philosophy, and proceed with the statement that the Upanishads were a reaction to this Athirathram type rituals. Even some books on philosophy declare that there is not much of it in this period. But in fact there is a gradual evolution of thought from the Mantras to the Aranyakas.
While analyzing this evolution, it is common to use Western terminologies like monotheism, polytheism, monism, and anthropomorphic polytheism. But when you read Indian philosophy, you have to discard those terms. When scholars say the philosophy was monotheistic, there is enough evidence to indicate otherwise. If you argue that the Vedic texts were polytheistic, then you are discarding the portions which talk about the Supreme Soul and Guardian of the cosmos. A simpler way is to understand Indian philosophy as the work of spiritual people who wrote about their mystic experience in prose and poetry.
***
Most ancient religions originated with people wondering about the power of nature and creating rituals to appease those powers. Eventually those powers were anthropomorphized and worshipped. Like in Egyptian, Roman and Greek civilizations, you see similar evolution in Vedic religion as well. So philosophically did the pre-Upanishidic era have only such naive cause-and-effect model of the world and nothing more complicated?
As you move beyond this cause-and-effect model, you will see that Vedic gods were not just gods of natural forces, but they also maintained moral order. Even though the sacrifice was important — the purusha sukta attributes creation to sacrifice — moral values were important as well. Thus Varuna is not just the god of sky and water, but also the one who fixed the inviolable laws of the physical universe. Vedic gods upheld moral law and were hostile to those who violated them, thus forcing people to choose righteousness.
Another change in the period is a move towards abstract concepts or symbolism. Thus we see the clay pot and the sacrificial post being worshipped as well as Agni, the offspring of water, being represented by a lotus leaf. Gods are collectively referred to as Visva devas. Visva karman was originally meant to represent Sun and Indra, but in turn becomes a god by himself: a logical abstraction becomes a god. Along with this, there is a change in the spirit of sacrifice – it becomes a way to compel the gods to provide what the person offering the sacrifice wants.
In some verses, Varuna is praised as the supreme one and in others Indra. But soon, these efforts of hoisting one god over the other is abandoned and there is an attempt at merging/unifying disconnected gods. As various divine beings — Sun, Fire, Dawn — overlap and merge and it becomes difficult to figure out which deity is being praised in certain verses. The divinity that is common among gods is given prominence: a declaration is made that Agni, Yama, and Mātariśvan are all one, which comes from the realization that there is an ultimate cause behind all diversity.
The climax of this search results in the ‘Song of Creation’. There are no anthropomorphic gods or mythological stories. The creation gets as abstract as it can with an impersonal creation and the declaration of ‘Tad Ekam’ (That One). Next: The Upanishads (But not immediately) References:
M. Hiriyanna, Outlines of Indian Philosophy (Motilal Banarsidass Pub, 2000)
Chandradhar Sharma,A Critical Survey of Indian Philosophy (Motilal, 2000)
