Faith Freedom International

[amarendra]

i'll be posting a series of excerpts from the lecture by subhas kak,louisiana state univ.baton rouge,LA 70803-509,USA, given at the "institute for oriental study" ,thane,maharashtra,india.:
to place vedik science in context its necessary to have proper uderstanding of the chronology of the vedik literature.there r astronomical references in the vedas which recall events in the 3d or 4th millenium bce and earlier.the recent discovery that sarasvati ,the pre-eminent river of the rigvedik times went dry around 1900 bce due to tectonic upheavels implies rigveda is to be dated prior to this epoch perhaps prior to 2000 bce since since the literature immedeately following the rigveda doesnt speak of any geological catastrophe.there r traditional accounts in the puranas that assign greater antiquity to the rigveda.the kaliyuga acc speaks of 31000 bce and the varahmihira tradition mentions 2400 bce.acc to henri-paul francfort of the indo-french team that surveyed the area,the sarasvati ceased to be perennial around 3d millenium bce;this supports those who argue for the older dates.also,the archaeological discoveries have established that the indian tradition can be traced back to at least 8000 bce.furthermore,there is no evidence of any break in the skeletal record during the period 4500 - 800 bce or any eastward invasion of peoples before 1900 bce.acc to kennedy "there is no evidence of any demographic disruptions in the north-western sectors of the subcontinent during and immedeately after the decline of the harrappan culture"shaffer and lictenstein speaking of the migrations caused by the drying up of the sarasvati say "this shift by the harappan and perhaps by the other indus valley cultural mosaic groups is the only archaeologically documented west-to-east movement of human populaton in sth asia before the first half of the 1st millenium bc." this together with a host of other evidence compels the view that the archaeological record and vedik literature refer to the same reality.it should be noted that the indian rock art has been traced to at least 40,000 bce ; there exists very interesting thematic continuity between this rock art and the later indus-sarasvati art . the rock art sites are distributed all over india.