Minimalist wrote:It sure as hell befell the Harappans. Where Ishtar? We need our India specialist.
Yes, the Harappans left the Indus valley region as the river system, fed by the Saraswati, dried up. This drying up, although already begun, is thought to have been exacerbated by a worldwide drought that happened around this time:
"On the basis of extensive explorations carried out in Northern Mesopotamia, a joint French-American team led by H. Weiss of Yale University has determined that most of the old world civilization were severely affected by a prolonged drought that began about 2200 B.C. and persisted for about 300 years. The most drastically hit region seems to have been the Akkadian civilization neighbouring India. The drought may have been triggered by massive volcanic eruptions. According to the findings of this historic study concluded only recently:
"'At approximately 2,200 B.C., occupations of Tell Leilan and Tell Brak (in Northern Mesopotamia) were suddenly abandoned...a marked increase in aridity and wind circulation, subsequent to a volcanic eruption, induced considerable degradation in land use conditions.... this abrupt climatic change caused abandonement of Tell Leilan, regional desertion, and collapse of the Akkadian empire based in southern Mesopotamia. Synchronous collapse in adjacent regions suggests the impact of abrupt climatic change was excessive.'"
http://www.archaeologyonline.net/artifa ... -myth.html
In fact it was the satellite discovery of the dried up bed of the Saraswati river in the desert that put the final nail in the coffin of the Aryan invasion theory and the dating of the Vedas.
If you remember, the Club posits that there was an invasion of 'Aryans' from the north into India around 1,500 BC, and that it was these taller, fairer skinned 'Indo-Europeans' who also wrote the Vedas at around the same time.
At the centre of the Vedas is the river Saraswati. It is not just a river but also a goddess in which the 'Vedics' took their daily spiritually purifiying ablutions which were a key part of Vedic rituals. For this reason, the Saraswati features in all the books of the Vedas and in most of them, it is in full flow.
But the latest satellite data combined with field archaeological studies have shown that the Saraswati had stopped being a full flowing river long before 3,000 BCE.
As Paul-Henri Francfort of CNRS, Paris recently observed,
"...we now know, thanks to the field work of the Indo-French expedition, that when the protohistoric people [Harrapans] settled in this area, no large river had flowed there for a long time."
So it begged the question, why would these Aryans invade a country and then make a river that had dried up more than 1,000 years before the centre of their spiritual literature and practises?
It's also worth mentioning this:
The Vedas is solely about 'India' (and possibly bits of Afghanistan, which used to be under 'Indian' rule at that time.) I've put India in inverted commas because it wasn't known as that until after Alexander invaded (around 300 BC). Before that, it was called Bharata-varsa, or the kingdom of King Bharatha, the head of the Bharatha clan of the Purus, the people that actually did actually create the Vedas.
On top of that, the Vedic hymns actually refer back to a 'Golden Age', the age of the great Angirasa rishis, their ancestors who created the Vedic religion. And so the great epics they speak of in the hymns, like the Battle of Sudas and the 10 Kings, all take place in geographical locations within 'India' or Bharatha-varsa a long time before the hymns were actually composed.
So if the 'Aryans' did invade India around 1,500 BC (and write the Vedas then, as that is the date The Club has decided upon for it) why would invaders from the north confine their spiritual literature to stories about ancient 'Indians' in 'India', and to a river that had dried up 1,000 years before they got there?
It doesn't make any sense. But as we all know, common sense is uncommon in orthodox archaeological circles.