PART THREE
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EXPLORING THE GREATER ANTIQUITY OF CIVILIZATION
10 The Enigma of India’s Origins
The Dating of New Discoveries in the Gulf of Cambay Upsets the Orthodox Scenario for the Dawn of Civilization
David Lewis
With three quarters of the planet covered by water, it’s been said we know more about the surface of Venus than about that which lies beneath the sea. Yet this may be changing. The discovery of what may be a lost city off the coast of western Cuba startled the archeological world in the spring of 2001. Reports from Havana spoke of massive stone blocks stacked at a depth of 2,100 feet in perpendicular and circular formations, some resembling pyramids. Researchers in a miniature submarine described the area as an urban development, with structures that may once have been roads and bridges.
Because a prediluvian “lost city” does not fit into the accepted paradigm of prehistory, the halls of orthodoxy remain silent on the matter—at least for now. And while those halls still stand, other recent discoveries have begun to seriously erode their foundations. Finding the ruins of an ancient, submerged civilization raises more questions than it answers and causes more problems than it solves. How did the land and its structures sink? What could have prompted such a large-scale cataclysm? When did civilization on Earth actually begin? What do we really know about the ancient past and human origins? And how does the establishment of science, so fixed in its doctrines, grapple with the potential demise of its most cherished presumptions?
If the lost city of the Caribbean wasn’t enough, about the same time an equally startling discovery occurred twenty-five miles off the coast of Gujurat, India. The discovery took place in that part of the Arabian Sea known as the Gulf of Cambay. India’s National Institute of Ocean Technology (NIOT) turned up some amazing sonar images from the gulf’s depths while scanning for pollution levels. Using equipment that penetrates the sea floor, marine experts discovered a pattern of distinct, man-made formations across a five-mile stretch of seabed.
According to reports published worldwide, NIOT’s sonar-imaging technology detected what appeared to be the stone pillars and collapsed walls of at least two cities. The site was described as part of an ancient river valley civilization not unlike the River Saraswati of the Rig Veda, thought to be mythical but—according to recent independent findings by Indian scientists—has been proved to have flowed to Gujurat. Divers at the Gulf of Cambay site later retrieved from depths of 120 feet two thousand man-made artifacts, including pottery, jewelry, sculpture, human bones, and evidence of writing, according to The Times of London.
Inscribed pottery from the Gulf of Cambay.
Artifact from the Gulf of Cambay. Small asymmetrical cylindrical object with hollowed middle.
(PHOTOGRAPH BY SANTHA FAIIA)
Artifact from the Gulf of Cambay. Possible carving of a deer or other animal appears symmetrically on both sides of object.
(PHOTOGRAPH BY SANTHA FAIIA)
Group of four objects from the Gulf of Cambay.
(PHOTOGRAPH BY SANTHA FAIIA)
Artifact from the Gulf of Cambay. Stone slab suggested by NIOT to be engraved with archaic script or other deliberate marking or ymbols.
(PHOTOGRAPH BY SANTHA FAIIA)
“Underwater structures that have been found along the Gulf of Cambay, Gujarat, indicate an ancient township that could date back anywhere before or during the Harappan civilization,” Science and Technology Minister Murli Manohar Joshi told the world at a press conference in May 2001.
Joshi’s initial guess was that the five-mile-long site was four thousand to six thousand years old and had been submerged by an extremely powerful earthquake. But in January 2002, carbon dating revealed that an artifact from the site was astonishingly ancient, between 8,500 and 9,500 years old (the oldest known civilization in the world by thousands of years). This was a time when, according to orthodox archeological standards, India should have been peopled with primitive hunter-gatherers and a few settlements, not the inhabitants of a lost civilization.
The author and underwater researcher Graham Hancock described buildings at the site as being hundreds of feet in length, with drains running along the streets. “If the case is made [for the age of the underwater cities], then it means that the foundations are out of the bottom of archeology,” Hancock said.
The scope and sophistication of the site dismantles the specific belief that civilization began five thousand years ago in Sumeria, according to Hancock, even as the alternative scholarship movement, of which he is a central figure, in general challenges orthodox views about human origins. In the orthodox (Darwinist) view, life, and then human beings, emerged extremely slowly from highly improbable accidental causes over a period of time necessitated by laws of probability.
The theoretical four-billion-year age of the planet was determined not by scientific or geologic evidence, according to the science writer Richard Milton (author of Facts of Life: Shattering the Myth of Darwinism), but by estimating how long it should have taken for accidental life to have occurred, given the extreme improbability of life having occurred at all through random, material causes.
Civilization followed, according to the scenario, after the theoretical “out-of-Africa” migration (about 100,000 years ago), fairly recently in prehistory. Evidence of extremely ancient civilizations, or of severe cataclysmic disruptions (those resembling mythical events that may have shaped the ancient world), throws a wrench into the conventional machinery. Discoveries that reveal civilizations having existed several thousand years earlier than previously thought are greeted with disbelief, consternation, silence. Evidence, then, of modern man having lived, say, 250,000 years ago in South America is considered preposterous and heretical, although the evidence for it exists.
Other views, modern and ancient, portray life as having emerged by more mysterious means, not by a series of astronomically improbable accidents, not through a biblical creationist scenario, but by virtue of some other unknown agency. This other, unknown agency, an all-pervasive life force more in keeping with The Tao of Physics than Origin of Species, is such as that evidenced in Eastern healing disciplines and codified impressionistically in the world’s mythologies.
In this latter view, the idea that prehistoric civilizations existed needs not be rejected due to a presumption that life evolved from material causes alone over an arbitrary time line necessitated by improbability. Tradition in India has always held, in fact, that Indian culture predates all understanding, being virtually timeless, stretching into the mists of antiquity from whence sprang the gods and myth—the non-space/non-time reality of modern theoretical physics.
As we shall see, certain mythical traditions maintain that the landmass of ancient India greatly exceeded its present size, and even that it stretched from Australia to Madagascar, perhaps as an archipelago. As with the archeological discovery of Troy, once thought to be a myth, it must be recognized that at least some of India’s supposedly mythical traditions are rooted in historical fact. This leads to the idea of an “Asian Atlantis,” which may seem fantastic, but early geologists believed such a continent existed. The notion may again be gaining credence after the discoveries in the Gulf of Cambay and given NIOT’s intention to investigate other submerged archeological sites off Mahabalipuram and Poompuhar in Tamil Nadu.
Current conceptions of Western scholars conflict with traditional Indian beliefs about such things, but that wasn’t always the case. In the mid to late nineteenth century, when scientific ideas about human origins had begun to take shape in Europe, early geologists and archeologists accepted the idea of a biblical flood, lost continents (for which they found much evidence), and a landmass in the Indian Ocean—the great Southern Continent of the British naturalist Alfred Russell Wallace.
Even today, mainstream science believes such landmasses as Gondwanaland and Pangaea existed, although they are relegated to the extremely ancient epochs of 180 to 200 million years
ago, in keeping with beliefs about the age of the planet necessitated by an admittedly improbable evolutionary process. And consider the South Asian traditions that mimic the findings of the early geologists, those who say an inhabited continent existed across what are now the Indian Ocean, the Arabian Sea, and the Bay of Bengal. These traditions live to this day in the lore of southern India, Sri Lanka, and the islands of the Andaman Sea.
“In a former age,” an ancient Sri Lankan text states, “the citadel of Rawana (Lord of Lanka), 25 palaces and 400,000 streets were swallowed by the sea.”
The submerged landmass, according to one ancient account, rested between Tuticoreen on the southwest Indian coast and Manaar in Sri Lanka. This submerged landmass was not a landmass of the size envisioned by the early geologists, but—if it actually existed—a submerged portion of the Indian subcontinent just the same.
Another cultural tradition, cited in Allan and Delair’s Cataclysm! Compelling Evidence of a Cosmic Catastrophe in 9500 B.C., that of the Selungs of the Mergui Archipelago off southern Burma, also speaks of a sunken landmass: “. . . formerly [the] country was of continental dimensions, but the daughter of an evil spirit threw many rocks into the sea . . . the waters rose and swallowed up the land. . . . Everything alive perished, except what was able to save itself on one island that remained above the waters.”
One of the Tamil epics of southern India, the Silappadhikaram, frequently mentions a vast tract of land called Kumara Nadu, also known as Kumari Kandam, stretching far beyond India’s present-day coasts. Ancient south Indian commentators wrote in detail of a prehistoric “Tamil Sangham,” a spiritual academy situated in that ancient land. They wrote also of the submersion of two rivers, the Kumari and the Pahroli, in the middle of the continent, and of a country dotted with mountain ranges, animals, vegetation, and forty-nine provinces. This Pandya kingdom, according to tradition, reigned from 30,000 B.C.E. to 16,500 B.C.E. At least one branch of modern-day south Indian mystics claims a direct lineage from those extraordinarily ancient times, when their spiritual progenitors were said to have achieved extremely long lives through yogic techniques.
And India’s epic poem the Mahabharata, dated by non-Westernized Indian scholars to five thousand years before Christ, contains references to its hero, Rama, gazing from India’s present-day west coast into a vast landmass now occupied by the Arabian Sea, an account supported by the recent underwater discoveries. Less celebrated Indian texts even mention advanced technology, in the form of aircraft used to transport the society’s elite and wage war.
The writings describe these aircraft in detail and at great length, puzzling scholars and historians. The great Indian epics, what’s more, vividly describe militaristic devastation that can be equated only with nuclear war. Was there, at one time, not just an ancient civilization in India, but an advanced ancient civilization?
Flying machines . . . lost continents . . . are these mythical tales of mythical lands or do these ancient references provide us with a historical record long forgotten and then dismissed by Western science as fantasy?
To answer that question, we must look at the history of scholarship as it pertains to India. Since the nineteenth century, Western scholars have dismissed the historical significance of the cultural traditions of ancient peoples, those of southern Asia included. With a decidedly ethnocentric bias, the experts reinterpreted history as it was taught in the East. Having found, for example, that root words of India’s ancient Sanskrit turn up almost universally in the world’s major languages, Western scholars devised an ethnocentric scheme to explain the phenomenon—one that modern Indian intellectuals have come to accept.
A previous European people must have once existed, the scholars imagined—an Indo-European race upon which the world, including India, drew for its linguistic roots and genetic stock. The scholars also expropriated the Aryans of ancient India to flesh out this scenario. This Aryan race, they told us, derived from Europe and then invaded the Indus Valley in the north of India—making Sanskrit and Vedic culture relatively young and a product, rather than a progenitor, of Western civilization.
The “Aryan invasion” theory has since fallen into disrepute. James Schaffer, of Case Western University, a noted archeologist specializing in ancient India, had this to say on the matter. “The archeological record and ancient oral and literate traditions of south Asia are now converging.”
In other words, India’s mythology is being proved historically accurate. Schaffer then wrote. “A few scholars have proposed that there is nothing in the ‘literature’ firmly placing the Indo-Aryans outside of south Asia, and now the archeological record is confirming this. . . . We reject most strongly the simplistic historical interpretations [of Western scholars], which date back to the eighteenth century. . . . These still prevailing interpretations are significantly diminished by European ethnocentrism, colonialism, racism . . .”
Southern India, a land whose cultural roots are said by some to stretch into an even more profound antiquity than do those of the north, suffered a similar fate. Speakers of a proto-Dravidian language, the forerunner of a family of languages spoken in the south—and some say of Sanskrit itself—entered India from the northwest, the Western scholars insist. Both invasion theories were necessitated by Western beliefs, at first about the Garden of Eden theory of origins and then, with the arrival of the Darwinists, beliefs about the widely held out-of-Africa theory.
But the Aryan invasion theory has been debunked. No skeletal evidence shows any difference between the supposed invaders and the indigenous peoples of India. And satellite imagery now shows that the ancient Harrapan civilization of the Indus Valley, and Mohenjo-Daro, probably declined and disappeared due to climatic changes, the drying up of the mythical Saraswati River, rather than to the descent of imaginary invaders. The demise of the Aryan invasion theory, though, and the recently discovered underwater ruins open a Pandora’s box for orthodox scholars regarding the past—not just India’s past, but that of the human race. If Sanskrit predates the world’s other languages, and if ancient civilizations existed where there are now seas, how can prehistory be explained in modern Western terms?
And how much of the actual history of India is still obscured by ethnocentricism, colonialism, or scientific materialism? The demise of the Aryan invasion theory may represent only the tip of the iceberg of misconceptions about the age and nature of ancient India, her culture, her people, and her accomplishments.
It has long been claimed that Mother India was born in a time before all myth began, when rishis, men of great wisdom and phenomenal spiritual attainment, walked on Earth. This ancient India dates to the times out of which the epic poems the Ramayana, the Mahabharata, and the ancient traditions of Tamil Nadu in the south grew. The Tamil Nadu was a land whose culture is said by some to predate that of the north, having once existed as part of Kumari Kandam and dating to a staggering 30,000 B.C.E.
A great deluge inundated Kumari Kandam, obscure texts of the Siddhanta tradition of Tamil Nadu reportedly say. This is a notion echoed in the writings of Colonel James Churchward and W. S. Cervé, both of whom claim knowledge of texts, Indian and Tibetan, respectively, that speak of a long-lost continent situated in the East.
While continental drift theory presumes the extremely slow and uniform movement of landmasses over many hundreds of millions of years, a great deal of evidence exists that Earth’s surface changed rapidly and violently in recent prehistory. A great sudden extinction of mammals and plants took place on the planet around the end of the last ice age, perhaps as recently as 12,000 years ago. Hundreds of mammal and plant species disappeared from the face of the earth, many of the carcasses having been driven by flooding into deep caverns and charred piles the world over. Modern science has been unable to adequately explain this event, and unwilling to consider what seems obvious, based on the evidence.
D. S. Allan and J. B. Delair, in Cataclysm! Compelling Evidence of a Cosmic Catastrophe in 9500 B.C., amass a formidable quanti
ty of known evidence corroborating the flood/conflagration legends stored in the world’s mythological record. If we suspend belief in the textbook accounts of prehistory, Allan and Delair fill the void in a convincing way, replacing gradualist doctrines that involve extremely slow glacial movements (which are supposed to have accounted for the great extinction) with what seems to have been, upon a review of the evidence, a worldwide, phenomenal disaster that submerged landmasses and ruptured Earth’s crust.
Much of the evidence centers on southern Asia. Records gathered by the Swedish survey ship Albatross in 1947 reveal a vast plateau of hardened lava for at least several hundred miles southeast of Sri Lanka. The lava, evidence of a severe rupture in Earth’s crust, fills most of the now submerged valleys that once existed there. The immense eruption that gave off the lava may have coincided with the downfall of Wallace’s Southern Continent (aka Kumari Kandam), for which much zoological and botanical evidence exists that would give such a landmass a recent date, according to Allan and Delair, not the 180 million years that orthodoxy ascribes to such a continent. The lost cities of the Gulf of Cambay may have suffered a similar fate, at the same time or as a result of unstable tectonic conditions resulting from the initial disturbance—an asteroid, perhaps, or a displacement of Earth’s crust—that caused the recent extinction and destruction of the ancient cities.
Forbidden History: Prehistoric Technologies, Extraterrestrial Intervention, and the Suppressed Origins of Civilization Page 11