Bharatiya Pragna - Dr. Th Chowdary

Book-Review
Indus or Sindhu-Sarasvati
Civilization, but also in taking the beginnings of
the history of Indian Civilization as we know it
(as distinct from its prehistory, which is what the
Harappan civilization amounts to in current historical
discourse) back by several thousands of
years:
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While the beginnings of the history of
the Egyptian and the Mesopotamian Civilizations
are known to lie at least as far back as the fourth
millennium BCE on the basis of detailed decipherable
and deciphered records (inscriptions,
scrolls, etc.), the beginnings of Indian Civilization
as we know it could not really be traced far
earlier than the mid-second millennium BCE, and
even this only on the basis of back-tracking the
75
stages of Vedic history (whether logically or illogically
done) from the oldest known decipherable
and deciphered records found in India: the
Ashokan inscriptions of the latter half of the first
millennium BCE. The earlier records, of the
Harappan Civilization, are not yet convincingly
deciphered ; and the interpretation of the signs
on the Harappan seals (from the question of the
identity of the language represented in those seals
down to the question of whether or not, indeed,
any language is represented at all in them) has
been a matter of motivated debate: the academic
scholars presume the language of the Harappan
Civilization to be non-Indo-European, since the
current academically accepted theory requires
that the Indo-European “Indo-Aryans” could not
have “entered” India far earlier than the latter
half of the second millennium BCE.
However, ironically, decipherable and
deciphered records are found in West Asia (Iraq,
Syria, and even Palestine and Egypt), dating to
the mid-second millennium BCE, which record
the presence of “Indo-Aryan” speakers in West
Asia at around the same time as they are supposed
to have been entering into India. The presence
of these “Indo-Aryans”, the Mittani “Indo-
Aryans”, in West Asia has hitherto been interpreted
as evidence of an “Indo-Aryan” group
which broke away from the main body of “Indo-
Aryans” somewhere in Central Asia, and moved
westwards to appear in West Asia at around the
same time as the main body of “Indo-Aryans”
appeared in northwestern India.
But the analysis of the Rigvedic, Avestan
and Mittani data in this book completely over-
November & December 2008 Bharatiya Pragna