Hinduism and The Indus Valley Civilization
The Indus Valley |
The Proto Shiva |
The Proto Shiva |
Signs of ancient remains first appeared in the Indus Valley during the 1800s when Europeans began to move through the area in numbers. In fact, bricks from this ancient civilization were unknowingly used by the British when they built the first railroads in the 1860s, but it was not until the 1920s when John Marshall, director of the Archaeological Survey of India, started an excavation at Harappa that it became apparent just how ancient and extensive this lost civilization was. Along with finds from other archaeologists, who were excavating at Mohenjo Daro, Marshall believed that they had found evidence for a new civilization that was older than any they had known before. It was originally thought that the civilization was early Aryan and the script was a form of the Brahmi script and therefore proto-Sanskrit. The Aryan theory, however, soon became rejected because the Indus culture showed no signs of the chariot, the horse, iron, ritual fire use, or other haul marks of Aryan culture described in the Vedas. Consequently, speculations grew that the script was some form of Sumerian, Egyptian, Hittite, or even old Slavic. In recent years, with the desire to show that Aryan culture was indigenous to the Indian sub-continent and not the result of migration, the theory that the Indus Valley Civilization was Aryan has again been raised by different groups trying to establish this view.
The second theory, which is currently popular, is the proto-Dravidian theory that developed during the late 1960s and 1970s by Russian and Finnish teams of researchers. They tried to show that the symbols can be derived from the Dravidian language group. Generally this language group is found in south India, but there are pockets of it scattered throughout India, particularly in northern Pakistan, which gave credence to this theory. If, indeed, the Indus culture is Dravidian in some form, it pushes the dating for the Dravidian side of Hindu culture back considerably. However, major challenges have been presented against the script being Dravidian and therefore the proto-Dravidian theory is far from confirmed.
Indus Valley Seals |
The Indus Bull |
The third theory, which has been brought forth in recent years by a team of American researchers, challenges both the Aryan and Dravidian origins of the Indus symbols, and argues that the symbols are not evidence of written language and therefore there is no justifiable connection to either Dravidian or Aryan cultures. They argue that the Indus Valley Civilization was non literate and completely separate from both the Dravidian or Aryan worlds. All three theories, of course, have their proponents and opponents with interesting arguments, but the conclusion is unfortunately that we still do not know what the origins of the Indus Valley civilization were or what its connection to ancient Hinduism was.
source: sanskrit.org