Underworld: The Mysterious Origins of Civilization
Page 18
The specific comparison being made here is to the mastless boats with high prows and sterns, which Aldred separately likens to Tigris river craft, and while the similarities cannot be taken as conclusive evidence of contact amongst all three regions in prehistory they are at least suggestive. Thor Heyerdahl showed long ago with his Tigris and Ra expeditions that reed-boats are capable of trans-oceanic journeys.44 Besides many representations and terracotta models of masted sea-going boats have been found in Indus-Sarasvati sites – and at Lothal itself trade goods and inscribed seals from the Persian Gulf have been excavated.45
The indications are that the bulk of this trade was carried on ships of the Indus-Sarasvati civilization – a civilization that was known to its neighbours in the Persian Gulf as Meluha.46 Inscriptions from ancient Babylon and Akkad speak proudly of the number of great boats from Meluha that have moored in their harbours. Five such references have been found in the cuneiform records of the time before Hammurabi (1792 BC).47 One concerns Sargon of Akkad (2334–2279 BC) and tells us: ‘the ships from Meluha … he made tie up alongside the quay of Akkad’.48
Interestingly, a terracotta seal from Mohenjodaro shows a large high-prowed ship with a spacious on-deck cabin. Fore and aft of the cabin perch two birds which archaeologists believe are ‘land-finding birds [diskakas]’.49 As the reader will undoubtedly be aware, many ancient traditions of the global flood, not least the biblical story of Noah, make prominent mention of the role played in the navigation of the survival ship by birds just such as these.50
The city of Krishna
After leaving Lothal in the late afternoon we spent another night on the road at Jamnagar, the regional capital, and completed our journey to Dwarka the next morning. This final two-hour leg was across the barren, sun-baked flatlands of Gujerat’s Kathiawar peninsula, uninhabited and for the most part overgrown with thorn trees and scrub vegetation. Through the open windows of the van we began to sense first the humidity, then the salty tang, of the approaching Arabian Sea. Next, a glimpse of distant water came into view and, rising above it through the heat haze, a shimmering pyramidal mound, topped by the spectacular Dwarkadish temple, sacred to Lord Krishna, soaring skywards on its 72 granite columns.51 At the apex of the mirage fluttered a colourful flag decorated with astronomical symbols, while around its base the medieval labyrinth of Dwarka’s streets and houses clustered tightly packed, as though seeking protection.
We asked Vinhod to bring us closer and we eventually pulled up in a crowded market area directly in front of the temple. From this vantage point I could make out weird figures like the gargoyles of a Gothic cathedral carved into the corners of the roof and walls – here an elephant, there a swan, there a winged sphinx with a woman’s face … It was easy to imagine the temple as an avatar’s palace magically brought into being in the midst of the sea, charged with the mantric energy of pilgrims’ prayers and surrounded by a force-field of divine grace.
In Book X of the Bhagvata Purana we read how Krishna used ‘his supernatural yogic powers’,52 in a crisis of battle, to transfer all his people to Dwarka where he could protect them from the enemy in ‘a fortress inaccessible to human beings’ [literally ‘bipeds’]:
the Lord caused a fortress constructed in the western sea. In the fortress he got built a city twelve yojanas (96 miles) in area and wonderful in every respect.
The building of the city exhibited the expertise in architecture and the skill in masonry of Tvastr, the architect of the gods. The roads, quadrangles, streets and residential areas were constructed in conformity to the prescribed tenets of the science of architecture pertaining to city building.
In that city, gardens planted with celestial trees and creepers and wonderful parks were laid out. It was built with sky-scraping, gold-towered buildings and balconies of crystals. It had barns built of silver and brass which were adorned with gold pitchers. The houses therein were of gold and big emeralds.53
But that was the first Dwarka, the original Dwarka – India’s lost Atlantis swallowed up by the sea long ago at the beginning of the Kali Age. This Dwarka of today, whatever it was, and this Krishna temple, were much more recent-built to commemorate the inundated city perhaps, but not to be confused with it.
Santha and I checked into a mosquito-infested hotel with the bonus of several dozen hornets drowsing irritably in the curtains of our room and then took a stroll through the town in the late afternoon. It was dusty, of course, dirty, of course. There were people, everywhere, of both sexes and all age-groups – selling to one another, buying from one another. Nobody seemed to be miserable or angry or in a grouchy mood. A whole menagerie of animals roamed the streets, grunting and squawking, barking and mewing, bleating and mooing. There were cows everywhere – a normal sight in Hindu India but here the sacred animals seemed to be more than usually serene and unhurried. I suppose it helps that just about everybody in Gujerat, and definitely everybody in Dwarka, is a strict vegetarian – so strict that not only are animals safe from them but also eggs, onions and garlic as well.
Through the maze of narrow lanes and cobbled alleyways lined with tiny, garish one-roomed shops and makeshift stalls we worked our way down to the bank of the Gomati river where it runs along the edge of the town and enters the Arabian Sea. Here, a large group of giggling children fed breadcrumbs to small fish, and orange-robed sadhus, their faces smeared with ash, sat with their backs to an ancient brick wall, reciting verses from the Rig Veda. The air was filled with frankincense and ganja and the sound of chanting, and the December sun, setting out over the sea to the south-west, had infused the vast horizon with an otherworldly glow.
Continuing the remaining few hundred metres along the embankment in the gathering dusk we came to the small circular temple of Samudranarayana – the temple of Samudra, God of the Ocean – perched directly above the point where the Gomati flows into the sea. A breeze was picking up, stirring the waves into white caps, and I walked to the edge of the jetty and looked out.
I had read the reports of the marine archaeologists and I knew that a city of gigantic proportions lay underwater less than a kilometre in front of me. I reminded myself that a conjectural date of approximately 1700–1500 BC had been assigned to the site by S. R. Rao and that he believed it to be one of the late works of the Indus-Sarasvati civilization – much too late to have had anything to do with any hypothetical lost civilization of the last Ice Age.
But there were areas of doubt. Although it seemed astonishing, and was perhaps just the result of incomplete research on my part, I had not been able to find evidence in the scientific literature that any Indus-Sarasvati artefacts-though reasonably plentiful in the countryside round about – had ever been recovered from the submerged ruins of Dwarka (or, for that matter, evidence that any datable objects of any kind had ever been found there). All that the archaeologists had discovered underwater were the looming remains of huge stone walls built of undatable megalithic blocks often interlocked with one another by means of L-shaped dovetails. Since there were thick silt deposits around the site, it was possible that many further structures remained as yet unexcavated beneath those that had already been mapped. Moreover, no thorough survey had been done further out from the shore in water that was deeper than 20 metres.
All in all it seemed to me that the chronology that the archaeologists had proposed here might be right or might be wrong, but was far from settled. And what complicated the picture even more was the opaque history of relative sea-level rise in this part of India which had included several intense episodes of tectonic activity to do with mountain-building in the Himalayas during the past 20,000 years. It had therefore proved difficult to establish the date of Dwarka’s submergence from geological clues alone.
The sun was now half-sunk in the ocean and the light was fading fast as the waves piled up against the jetty.
It would be another four years before I learned to dive and four more after that before I could return to Dwarka to explore the underwater city.
Sages who searched with their heart’s thought discovered the existent’s kinship in the non-existent … Who verily knows and who can here declare it, whence it was born and whence comes this creation? The Gods are later than this world’s production. Who knows then whence it first came into being? He, the first origin of this creation, whether he formed it all or did not form it, whose eye controls the world in highest heaven, he verily knows it, or perhaps he knows not …
Rig Veda (Book 10, Hymn 129, Verses 4–7, Griffith translation)
‘Scientific progress in historical, genetic, linguistic and archaeological research has proved during the past decade that the Hebrew Torah – which is the fundamental scripture of Judaism and which also serves Christians as the Old Testament of the Bible – is not the work of the Jewish people, and in fact that there is no reason to believe today that there ever was a Jewish race that spoke the Hebrew language and was possessed of a coherent or well-defined set of Jewish or Hebraic cultural features.’
Suppose that this statement is supported by powerful evidence and, moreover, that it comes from a distinguished academic source – a Professor at the University of Pennsylvania for example – regarded as a world authority on Jewish culture. Having just read the statement, and knowing the authority of its source are you: Shocked? Surprised (that you have not seen any headlines on this)? Sceptical? Disbelieving? Disoriented (if the Jews didn’t write the Old Testament, then who did)? Angry? All of the above? None of the above? Or do you know enough about the Torah and about Jewish culture to have realized at once that the statement is a complete fabrication? No such scientific evidence has ever been produced and the identification of the Torah with the Jewish people and the Hebrew language remains unassailable today. This is so because the sacred book is comprehensively rooted and grounded in a known cultural background of great antiquity and fits perfectly into its historical and archaeological context.
The same cannot be said of the Rig Veda, the fundamental scripture of Hinduism. The abandonment by scholars of the theory that India was invaded around 1500 BC by a people calling themselves the Aryas, and the recognition that there never was any such thing as an Aryan race that spoke Indo-European languages, have had the unfortunate side-effect of orphaning the Rig – because it was hitherto believed that these very same Aryas had been its authors. We’ve also seen how it has been claimed by Renfrew and others – probably correctly-that Indo-European languages have been present in north India for at least 8000 years. Logically, therefore, the fact that the Rig Veda is expressed in Sanskrit-an Indo-European language – can no longer be used to substantiate a chronology for the Rig Veda that brings the culture that is supposed to have composed it into India (via the non-existent Aryan ‘invasion’) as late as 1500 BC.
In other words, the ship of the Vedas presently has no one at the helm. These sublime hymns, these cleverly coded riddles from antiquity, which form the core scripture of a thousand million Hindus in the twenty-first century, now stand in the astonishing position of having no known authors, no known cultural background and no known historical or archaeological context into which they fit. Moreover, although their moorings to an ‘Aryan’ race in 1500 BC have been severed, most orthodox historians and archaeologists living outside the Indian subcontinent seem content to leave the Vedas drifting and unassigned – the scriptures of no known people composed at no known time.
In such a situation where history has little to offer and a huge blunder to retract, it becomes reasonable to inquire: what do the Vedas have to say on the subject of their own origins?
Some points of terminology, some basic information
In ancient Sanskrit the word veda means ‘knowledge’, ‘gnosis’, ‘insight’ (deriving from the root vid, meaning ‘to see, to know’),1 and the word rig [rc or rik) means ‘verses’ or ‘hymns’.2 So Rig Veda means ‘Verses’ or ‘Hymns’ of ‘Knowledge’. We’ve seen that there are three other Vedas. These are, respectively, the Sama Veda – the Veda of song or chanted hymn (a reordering for liturgical purposes of certain verses of the Rig with new verses added);3 the Yajur Veda – an annotated text of the instructions and sacrificial formulae required at Vedic rituals;4 and the Atharva Veda, which Gregory Possehl describes as the ‘least understood of the Vedas … a book of magic, spells and incantations in verse’5 and Griffith as ‘the Veda of Prayers, Charms and Spells’.6
As well as these, many Indian scholars also list the following massive and venerable bodies of text within the Vedic corpus:7 the Brahmanas (very ancient prose commentaries on the Vedas),8 the Arankyas (a later development of the Brahmanas, given over to ‘secret explanations of the allegorical meaning of the Vedas’)9 and the Upanishads (philosophical speculations arising out of the Vedas).10
The Upanishads are often referred to in Sanskrit as the Vedanta, meaning ‘conclusion of the Veda’, since they are thought to represent the final stage in the tradition of the Vedas.11 However, there are other important later texts of Hinduism which unerringly continue the same essential teaching and cosmology rooted and grounded in the Vedas, and which will therefore also be cited in this inquiry from time to time. These include the Mahabaratha (which is about eight times as long as Homer’s Odyssey and Iliad put together!),12 the Ramayana, and the Puranas. The Mahabaratha and the Ramayana are both epics consisting of a mass of legendary and instructive material worked around a central heroic narrative.13 Embedded within the vast text of the Mahabaratha is the famous Bhagvad Gita, (‘Song of the Lord’), described as ‘the single most important text of Hinduism’.14 The Ramayana, which tells of the deeds of the hero Rama, an incarnation of Krishna, is traditionally ascribed to the semi-legendary poet Valmiki.15 Last but not least, the Puranas (Sanskrit for ‘Ancient Lore’) are collections of myth, legend and genealogy.16
A generally agreed chronology for all these texts (with arguments usually about periods of hundreds rather than thousands of years) is in use amongst scholars. We saw earlier that the Rig Veda tends to be dated anywhere in a broad range from 1500 BC (the supposed date of the non-existent Aryan invasion of India) down to 800 BC. Dr John E. Mitchiner, a great authority on the ancient Sanskrit texts, prefers a narrower range of 1400–1100 BC for the Rig, with the Sama and Yajur Vedas dated 1200-1000 BC, the Atharva Veda 1300–900 BC, the Brahmanas 900–600 BC, the Aranyakas 700–500 BC, the Upanishads 600–400 BC, the Mahabaratha 350 BC – AD350, the Ramayana 250BC - AD200, and the Puranas AD200-1500.17
While this is convenient as a summary of what is still, amazingly, the accepted scholarly chronology, I feel it is essential to bear in mind that these dates are a house of cards founded on the redundant hypothesis of an Aryan invasion of India in the second millennium BC. Whether starting in 1500 BC, 1400 BC or 1200 BC, the timelines that have been suggested for the compilation and codification of the Rig Veda all rest on this now thoroughly falsified and bankrupt idea. And since the chronology that scholars have ‘established’ for the Rig is the foundation of the entire literary history of India, it follows that if the previously accepted dates for it are proved by further research to be badly in error then the dates for much of what comes after it are also likely to be wrong. In this connection, Mitchiner himself concedes that ‘the dating of Sanskrit texts is a notoriously difficult problem’18 – one that is further complicated by many texts ‘which may be relatively late in their overall or final composition yet contain passages of considerable antiquity alongside much later additions’.19
Amidst this tangled maze of texts, all of which once lived as memorized recitations within an oral tradition before they were written down, only one story is offered – the same story repeated again and again with minor variations and additions – as an explanation and account of the origins of the Vedas. This is the story of Manu, the father of mankind – India’s Noah – and of a mysterious brotherhood of ascetics called the ‘Seven Sages’, said in many of the recensions to have accompanied Manu in the Ark when the great fl
ood overtook the world.
The father of mankind
Manu (whose name has the same root as the English word man) was the first and greatest patriarch and legislator of the Vedic peoples and is unambiguously described throughout the ancient texts as the preserver and father of mankind and of all living things.20 Ralph Griffith, the translator of the Vedas, describes him as ‘the representative man and father of the human race and the first institutor of religious ceremonies’.21 And in the Rig Veda the people who called themselves the ‘Aryas’ – an epithet meaning literally the ‘noble’, or ‘pure’, or ‘good’ or ‘enlightened’ folk (a puzzle that we shall return to in another chapter) – are also referred to as ‘Manu’s progeny’,22 while Manu is known as ‘Father Manu’23 and even the gods are named as ‘Manu’s Holy Ones’.24 At the same time the Rig does not take the trouble, anywhere, to tell us exactly what it was that Manu supposedly did to earn these honorifics; only that the events took place ‘long ago’.25
Manu’s literary predicament much resembles that of Osiris in ancient Egypt. Nowhere in the entire corpus of ancient Egyptian scripture, from the Pyramid Texts to the last versions of the Book of the Dead, is the full story of Osiris ever told. We get fragments of it, bits and pieces here and there, records of his titles and honorifics, many axioms (‘the truth is great and mighty and it has never been broken since the time of Osiris’, etc. but never a connected, continuous narrative which states clearly what it was that Osiris did to deserve all this honour and prominence. Only in a later, non-Egyptian, text – Plutarch’s Isis and Osiris – does the whole story come out. Plutarch states that his sources were Egyptian priests and the details that he provides are so convincingly identical to the much more fragmentary details contained in the much earlier ancient Egyptian material that each, in a way, provides corroboration for the other. Scholars therefore believe that Plutarch got the story just about right and that it was never spelled out in detail in the earlier scriptures because it was simply too well known for this to be necessary.26