Underworld: The Mysterious Origins of Civilization
Page 39
Interestingly, large numbers of ‘phallic’ sculptures have been recovered in archaeological excavations in the Maldives – for example amid the ruins of a vast temple complex in North Nilandhoo Atoll.19 I was able to study a collection of such objects from different parts of the archipelago and in my opinion, despite some idiosyncrasies, they are nothing more nor less than Sivalinga.
That Siva’s characteristic emblem should be found here in these remote islands on the edge of the southern hemisphere is in a way not surprising – since he was ever Daksinamurti, ‘the God of the South’.20 But Siva is an ancient and widely revered god whom the Vedas associate with the high peaks of the Himalayas far to the north and whose image as the ascetic Lord of Yoga and as Pasupati, Master of Beasts, goes back nearly 5000 years in the Indus valley cities of Harappa and Mohenjodaro.
Moreover, as we saw in chapter 11, so many lingam-like objects have been found in much older pre-Harappan sites that T. R. Sesha Iyenagar can exclaim: ‘the worship of Siva in the form of a linga existed in the Stone Age’.21 In this regard, therefore, the Kumari Kandam tradition once again proves itself to be in accord with the archaeological facts when it proclaims Siva’s membership of the First Sangam, supposedly founded in the antediluvian city of Tenmadurai 11,600 years ago – a date deep in the Stone Age.
The riddle of the hawittas
Let’s set to one side for a moment the intimations of vast antiquity for the religion and religious ideas that became Hinduism and Buddhism (for Buddhism is merely a ‘protestant’ offshoot of Hinduism and both trace their origins and authority back to the Vedas).
Let’s accept the range of dates around the middle of the first millennium AD proposed by archaeologists for the construction of the pyramidal hawittas of the Maldives (or, strictly speaking, for the construction of the few that have thus far been excavated).
And let’s accept the same date range for the religious sculptures, artefacts, etc. that have been found round about them. There seems no good reason not to do so; on the contrary, it looks as though the archaeologists have done their jobs well and that these dates are likely to be accurate within a reasonable margin of two or three hundred years either way.
But then the question arises, where did the distinctive religious art and architecture of the Maldives come from? Yes, its sculptures and its pyramids -or stupas – are similar to those of the Buddhists of Sri Lanka, but there are differences … And yes, they are similar to those of the Hindus of south India, but again there are differences. So where and when did these differences and unique characteristics incubate and take shape? There is no archaeological trace of any evolution of architectural and symbolic ideas behind the oldest structures in the Maldives. The hawittas just suddenly appear – we must assume around 1500 years ago from the carbon-dating – in an already fully designed, fully worked-out form and with all the required building skills already in place.
Were they the work of immigrants importing a pre-existing architectural canon from elsewhere? Perhaps – but if so, then where? No other trace of the distinct Maldives style has been found in India or Sri Lanka. Or is it possible that the ever-encroaching seas have simply swept away and covered up the earlier stages of the Maldives story – just as they will sweep away and cover up the little that is left of the archipelago before the end of this century?
Bill Allison’s antediluvian tour
I dived a couple of times in the blue waters of the Maldives with Bill Allison, a tough, crew-cut, steely-eyed, flat-bellied 54-year-old Canadian who is conducting a long-term scientific survey of the islands’ coral reefs. I’ve already noted that our rushed filming schedule and the vast area that would have to be covered ruled out any structured or useful exploratory diving during our short stay – for the same reasons that there is no point in looking for a needle in a haystack. So the producers’ objective for these two dives was simply to film what they call ‘pretties’ – beautiful fish, beautiful coral, lush tropical waters with infinite visibility, sun effects, surge effects, etc., and generic shots of me finning around in situ. The ‘motive’ for our dives here in storytelling terms (as if anyone needs a motive to dive in the Maldives!) would be provided by Bill Allison – the coral reef expert – showing me – the eager historical detective -notches and caves at various depths that had been cut in the coral formations by waves during the lowered sea-levels of thousands of years ago.
After we had completed our dives we sat talking on the deck of the boat in the afternoon sun, moored in the open sea just on the outside edge of North Male Atoll. I asked Bill: ‘How come the Maldives are here? We see coral under us, but what’s the story of how it got there?’
Bill: Well, it seems that as India drifted over towards Asia [continental drift hundreds of millions of years ago] the Maldives or what became the Maldives were left as a string of volcanoes behind it, and as these volcanoes sank into the earth’s crust, coral grew on them and just kept growing. Right now there’s over maybe 2000 metres of coral.
GH: 2000 metres of coral on top of the original volcanoes?
Bill: That’s right.
GH: Wow … [pauses for thought) – Now if we … if we go back to the period that I’m interested in, which is the period from the Last Glacial Maximum, through until about the beginning of historical times, about 5000 years ago or so – so say from 17,000 years ago down to 5000 years ago – what would we be seeing around us here, if we could be here 17,000 years ago?
Bill: Well, we’d be right now where we are with respect to these islands, looking up about 130 metres to see those trees … Like the cliffs of Dover or something. It’d be a plateau with notches cut where the channels are, so the cliffs might be 130 metres high –
GH: Wow.
Bill: - and the channels –
GH: So that would be towering above us?
Bill: That’s right. And the channels might be, oh, 80 metres, 90 metres high.
GH: Wow. And then once we’re inside that area there (pointing towards atoll) presumably it would all be land?
Bill: Yeah.
GH: Or would there be some water too?
Bill: Well, it’d be depressed and it just depends. This is very porous material. Coral doesn’t grow as a solid mass, just a lot of crevices and so on, so any water falling would drain rapidly. There might be temporary lakes, there’d be streams. They would probably develop into underground rivers and they’d probably empty into the sea through the ground or maybe through the channels.
GH: Would there have been rivers above ground?
Bill: Rivers? Probably. But probably not big rivers and probably disappearing into the ground pretty quickly, and we can imagine waterfalls cascading out of this plateau we’re looking at, into the sea.
GH: So … so the land would be rearing above us. Does that mean we would or wouldn’t be on the sea where we are now?
Bill: Well, we might be … we might be on part of the shelf, or on the island too, depending how far out from shore we are. [Looks around and over side of boat.)
GH: But in general, from island to island, what would the situation have been? Would they have been islands?
Bill: (figuring out location of boat in relation to reef) Oh, right, OK. We’re on the outside of the atoll now so we’d still be on the sea … We’d be looking at this big plateau and the islands, what we now think of as sea bottom between the islands, would all be dry – unless it was raining and there were lakes forming – and there’d be vegetative jungle. It’d look a lot like the cockpit country in Jamaica in the present time.
GH: Right. So it would be –
Bill: That’s how I imagine it.
GH: So it would be kind of lush, jungly country?
Bill: Yeah. On limestone, what’s called karst topography, very rugged, with sink holes.
GH: And then what happens? That’s 17,000 years ago. We’re outside the atoll. We look inside. We see a huge amount of land – jungle – between what are now scattered individual islands. Then we know that after
the Last Glacial Maximum, sea-level begins to rise. So if you could just talk me through what happens after that. And I understand it’s a complicated problem, because at the same time the sea is rising, the volcanoes are very, very slowly sinking and the coral is growing.
Bill: Well, as the sea-level rose, we’d see all that vegetation and land inundated. A lot of the soil would become sediment suspended in the water. It would probably inhibit coral growth for a while, so some of the reefs would grow and others would not grow, and that probably accounts for some of the variation we see. We see reefs that are maybe at 50 metres … their tops are at 50 metres, yet now there’s no obvious reason why they didn’t grow, we can only assume that for some reason they drowned, whereas other reefs kept up and they’re the ones we see on the surface today.
GH: I know from the studies that we’ve done that there were still substantial amounts of land exposed here down to 10,000, even as late as 8000 years ago. There was more land above water than there is now. Would there be any reason why these islands should be uninhabited at that time? Would they have been the kind of place where people could have lived?
Bill: I would have thought that they’d be relatively easy to find given how far they were out of the water, and presumably how far west the shelf around India might have extended, so given how much we’re finding out about how our ancestors used to get around, I wouldn’t be at all surprised if they’d made it here.
GH: Because it seems that this sea-level rise – I don’t know if your studies underwater have given any indication of this, but what we’ve found out so far is that the sea-level rise seems not to have been gradual, but to have occurred in episodes and peaks when there were sudden flooding events and then a plateau and then another flooding event. Do you see signs of that underwater here?
Bill: Well, in fact probably not only was it intermittent, but there were also declines at certain times, and provided that the sea-level stood still for a long enough time – and I don’t really know how long that was but probably centuries to a millennium – then you would get notches cut in the reef slope for example, and in some places the substantial notches that dissolved in water became grottoes or caves, like those we swam through this afternoon – and some of those collapsed, and you can see these collapsed structures here and there.
Bill Allison’s tantalizing glimpse
I had what I thought was a final question for Bill – the obvious one: ‘In all your years of diving around the Maldives,’ I asked, ‘have you ever seen anything underwater that looks man-made – and I don’t mean something modern that’s been dropped down there, but something old?’
There was a pause, then he replied rather hesitantly: ‘Well, I did once when I was down where I shouldn’t have been, and … I wouldn’t trust what I saw.’
GH: How deep were you?
Bill: I was about 40 metres doing some work, and it was down below me and I can only estimate that it might have been at 70 metres, and it looked a lot like a stairway.
GH: Wow.
Bill: But given the distance between it and me, and the fact you can’t resolve anything very clearly at that distance, and because your mind plays a few tricks on you at that depth … Well, I wouldn’t want to bet the farm on it.
GH: But it looked like a regular cut stairway?
Bill: Yeah. And it was narrow, that’s what made me think about it – that it wasn’t an undefined width. It was clearly defined.
GH: With sort of side edges?
Bill: And had a step-like structure, yeah, as far as I could tell from that distance.
GH: So what was your feeling when you saw that? Hallucination?
Bill: No. I thought, ‘That’s interesting – I’d like to get back and have a closer look some time.’ But I’d prefer to do it on Trimix and with proper surface support.
GH: How far is the site from here?
Bill: It’s in the Vadhoo Channel – about an hour by boat, but I’m not at all sure that I could find it again.
GH: And is it close to islands? I guess everywhere around here is.
Bill: Yeah, it’s right on the edge of an atoll rim. So if sea-level was 130 metres lower, or anything less down to about 70 metres, then to access the water or the land, you’d need something like that.
GH: You’d need something like a jetty or a wharf, something with steps, yeah.
Bill: But I mean I really …
GH: You can’t guarantee it?
Bill: I’d give it a probability of about 20 per cent or less.
Even if Bill had rated the probability of relocating his steps at 2 per cent or less, I think I would still have wanted to go and see if we could find them.
But if we could find them – itself probably requiring several days of searching – I would have to do a lengthy, complicated and highly technical course in diving with Trimix (special mixed gases instead of compressed air) before I could safely descend to work at 70 metres (about 220 feet). So the most we would be able to do – and then only if the visibility was very good – would be to hover at 40 metres and look down at the steps as Bill had done before.
However, none of this was an option, because our filming schedule required us to fly to India the next day. Steps or no steps, we were going to have to pack up and leave …
The secret of the Redin
There are ancient oral traditions, still repeated by the elders of some of the more remote islands, which provide an explanation for the Maldives’ atmosphere of lost prehistoric grandeur and for its strange ruins. These traditions speak of a mysterious people called the Redin, said to have built the hawittas, who were described to me by Naseema Mohamed, a scholar at the Maldives National Institute for Linguistic and Historical Research, as:
Very tall. They were fair-skinned, and they had brown hair, blue eyes sometimes. And they were very, very good at sailing. So this story has been around in Maldives for many, many years, and there are certain places where they say the Redin camped here, and certain places which they say here the Redin were buried. But we don’t really know how old or how long ago it happened.22
During his series of research visits to the Maldives, Thor Heyerdahl collected and compiled Redin legends from all parts of the archipelago. He concludes that in the memory of the islanders the Redin were ‘a former people with more than ordinary human capacities’:23
The Redin came long before any other Maldivians. Between them and the present population other people had also come, but none were as potent as the Redin, and there were many of them. They not only used sail but also oars, and therefore moved with great speed at sea …24
Likewise, Peter Marshall reports a Maldivian tradition about the phenomenal maritime abilities of the Redin which tells of how on one occasion they cooked their food in the north of the archipelago then sailed so fast to the far south that they were able to eat the meal there still warm.25
Such notions of humans with supernatural or even god-like powers flying swiftly across the sea in their boats with sails and oars is strangely reminiscent of the imagery of the Rig Veda cited in chapter 7 concerning the Asvins – who are several times praised for having conducted a daring rescue in the deeps of the Indian Ocean:
Yea Asvins, as a dead man leaves his riches, Tugra left Bhujyu in the cloud of waters … Ye brought him back in animated vessels … Bhujyu ye bore … to the sea’s farther shore, the strand of ocean … Ye wrought that hero exploit in the ocean which giveth no support, or hold, or station, what time ye carried Bhyjyu to his dwelling borne in a ship with hundred oars, O Asvins.26
O Asvins … Ye made for Tugra’s son [Bhujyu], amid the water floods, that animated ship with wings [sails?] to fly withal, whereon … ye brought him forth. And fled with easy flight from out the mighty surge. Four ships, most welcome in the midst of ocean, urged by the Asvins, saved the son of Tugra, him who was cast down headlong in the waters …27
A connection with the Gulf of Cambay?
Any connection with the Vedic Asvins is purely specu
lative. Nevertheless, Thor Heyerdahl makes a case that there is real history behind the Redin myth, that it is older than the date now confirmed by radiocarbon for the construction of the hawittas - which tradition nevertheless attributes to the Redin – and that the people it refers to probably originated in north-west India, the primary setting of the Rig Veda. After visiting Gujerat and the great marine dockyard of the Indus-Sarasvati civilization at Lothal -where cowrie shells from the Maldives (Cyprea Moneta) have been excavated amongst the ruins and are to be seen in the site museum28 – he comments:
Possible prehistoric maritime connection between the Maldives and northern India.
I was convinced that at least the Hindu element in the Maldives had come from the north-western corner of India. And probably the Hindus were not even the first to have made the journey straight south from the Gulf of Cambay to the Maldives. Perhaps earlier sailors in the days of Mesopotamian and Indus Valley seafaring had been led by the sun to the Equatorial Channel, and survived in legend as the Redin.29
But if this could be so, then it is also possible that the real people upon whom the Redin myth is based could have arrived in the Maldives even earlier than that. Of particular interest is the fact that the Gulf of Cambay was not a gulf until it was suddenly inundated by the last of the three great episodes of post-glacial floods some time around 7700 years ago (see chapter 11). Prior to that, the further back you go in time the further the coast extends to the south of the Gulf, with another episode of tremendous land-loss registered at around 15,000 years ago.