Pre-Harappan Cities "Flood"ed

[Cruddy]

Originally posted by Berzerker
...The local fishermen have known about the ruins for eons since they keep snagging their nets on the stones. They did a side-sonar scan of the Cambay cities and you can clearly see the outlines of large structures. They've also recovered plenty of artifacts from the Cambay site and were able to date some to ~7,500 BC.

Duh... maybe the fishermen have been dumping ballast in the same spot for 9,500 years? That would account for the sonar scans...

(Don't get me wrong, I believe in undiscovered coastal civs... just playing devils advocate).

[Sikander]

Originally posted by Tingkai
Interesting topic. Can anyone suggest books about it (Harappan and Pre-Harappan civilisations)?

I've got one at home, but can't remember the title right now. It was written by a couple of Westerners who happen to be Hindu. It isn't a scientific book and it has to be taken with a large grain of salt, but it was interesting and I felt it worthwhile. A friend of mine knows and interviewed one of the authors (my friend is Hindu and used to work for a company that sells recordings of philosophers and religious people) and the author is pretty well-educated and honest, but he definitely comes with a point of view. I'll see if I can scrounge it up, I read it about 10 years ago.

[Gatekeeper]

Originally posted by Boshko
Real scientists went back and looked at sites of supposed flooded cities (specifically Malta) and found that all the "evidence" that the pseudo-scientists claimed proved that there was cities there was the sort of natural phenomenons that could be found all over the world.

I suppose this would be a bad time to mention Graham Hancock ...

Seriously, I know that some presumed drowned city sites have been refuted — wasn't there supposed to be one somewhere near a Japanese possession? It seemingly had the telltale marks of humanity — right angles, curiously uniform holes, even an alleged sculpture — but, in the end, was refuted, I believe, by one of its own earlier backers.

Yet there are other sites that haven't been so easily dismissed. What of the latest one allegedly found off the coast of Cuba? I haven't heard much more about that since earlier last year. Supposedly they've confirmed the remnants of settlements on the bottom of the Black Sea (small ones, mind you ... not huge ancient cities by any means).

On a related subject, has anyone put forward a plausible theory as to how the ancients were able to build their stone structures so airtight? Is half of it just the stone settling over the centuries, compressing together to the point that you can't slide a piece of paper between them? To me, that makes the most sense, but I'm not a structural engineer.

Gatekeeper

[Berzerker]

Cruddy -

Duh... maybe the fishermen have been dumping ballast in the same spot for 9,500 years? That would account for the sonar scans...

You're mixing sites, the fishermen and their nets were down at Sri Lanka. The sonar scans were done up at Cambay and the "ruins" were 120 ft down, much too far for nets. At a site near Sri Lanka they dove down to look at the structures and they were covered with snagged nets and the structures weren't a result of ballast, they were layered like how one builds a wall by piling up stones.

Gatekeeper, this documentary was done by Hancock and his internet site has images from Cambay. Bad time to mention that?

Ramo -

But language perturbations are hierarchial. So linguists can trace where languages split, and they seem to be pretty sure that Sanskrit wasn't a native language.

I may have made a mistake, I'm not sure the documentary claimed Sanskrit was the langauge used 8,000 years ago but that there was evidence the language of the Vedas had been evolving which could include (outside) Aryan contributions. They may have been saying that while the Vedas may have been written ~1500 BC in Sanskrit, there is evidence the Vedas relied on older oral traditions and was a history of India maintained via native languages. I'm still not sure about that though, the point they were making was that the knowlegde in the Vedas was older than 1500 BC. The Yogic master and flood survivor Manu appears in the Vedas as well as cylinder seals found among Indus ruins dating much further back. And the Vedas describe geographical features long extinct by 1500 BC, the Saraswati River for example.

Look at, say, the Arab conquest of Egypt. The original Egyptian language completely disappeared. And the original North Indian languages didn't disappear per se, they were likely related to Dravidian languages which continue to be used to this day.

That assumes there was an Aryan conquest similar to the Arab conquest. The evidence for this Aryan conquest has proven to be very iffy and that same evidence was used to claim the Vedas were the product of Aryans.

My understanding is that the Black Sea flooding was extraordinarily large in scope relative to local incidents.

If it's your civilisation being flooded, that is what will be reflected in your history, not someone elses. The flooding of the Sunda Shelf was even larger than the Black Sea event, but peoples along the Indian coastline would have witnessed their own floods. LIke I said, Native Americans have their own flood myths, they didn't need peoples from the Black Sea to tell them about the Flood. And the Vedic flood survivor, Manu, appears in cylinder seals from long before any influx of Aryans.

Sikander -

We have a fair deal of evidence that puts those claims into the extraordinarily dubious category. Sanskrit did not live secretly in India for thousands of years before recorded history. No linguist who is taken seriously by his peers posits this. The evidence that the Aryans destroyed the Indus civilization at least has the fact that many people in India speak a language derived from Aryan in its favor. To hold the "early Sanskrit theory" one would have to destroy every canon of linguistics one at a time, as well as debunk a good deal of historical and archeological data.

Who said Sanskrit was held secret in India? The argument that the Aryans conquered the Indus civilisation and authored the Vedas came primarily from the foremost British archaeologist, Wheeler was his name. And even some of his students who worked with him at those sites disagree with his interpretations. He claimed there was evidence of an Aryan massacre but this evidence was never proved and recent findings have shown there was no massacre. His entire thesis was that Aryans invaded, conquered and supplanted the Indus people.

Oh I think that the memory of this river is certainly true, it shows up in aerial photos and such. I'm not as sure on the time line, but it definitely was an important river to this civilization. IIRC it changed course upstream, which to people downstream seems like it simply stopped. IMO the general ideas put forward over the years are pretty much true. In broad strokes

According to the geologists on the show, it stopped flowing. Of course, the glacial deposits of ice up in the Himalayas melting during the early stages of the current inter-glacial can explain how a massive river can cease flowing in that manner, but the point being made in the show was that this river's delta is mentioned in the Vedas long after the delta disappeared, therefore the Vedas could not have originated with Aryans in 1500 BC.

At some point some of this civilization was conquered and partially subsumed by Aryan invaders from Iran. What eventually evolved was a hybrid culture that held the usual pantheon one expects from an Indo-European culture (and one which the Aryans were shown to possess before they arrived in India) as well as aspects of a unique religious culture that included among many things the practice of Yoga.

Evidence for an Aryan conquest includes the caste system in India, which seems like just the sort of thing that the whites would have going in South Africa had they been left unmolested for a few centuries.

There needs to be better evidence for this conquest. I was raised believing the Aryans conquered the Indus without knowing how flimsy the evidence really was. This guy Wheeler found some skeletons and saw a massive war of conquest. Others have since seen these skeletons of people who didn't die in battle occupying varying strata.

[Dr Strangelove]

How did they trace oral legends to a time thousands of years before the invention of writing in that area?

Has anyone actually retrieved artifacts from the sunken cities?

[Berzerker]

They have recovered artifacts from the site, but they can trace an oral legend by identifying events in the written traditions that pre-date writing. For example, the Saraswati River flowed, according to the geologists interviewed in the documentary, 6,000 years ago and beyond. But in the Vedas this river's delta is described as being 22 km across. This description pre-dates both the accepted date for the Vedas - 1500 BC - and the invention of writing in Sumer. Flood legends from around the world pre-date written records of this flood and were most likely a result of the massive flooding that we know occured following the end of the ice age.

[Tingkai]

Originally posted by Sikander


I've got one at home, but can't remember the title right now. It was written by a couple of Westerners who happen to be Hindu. It isn't a scientific book and it has to be taken with a large grain of salt, but it was interesting and I felt it worthwhile. A friend of mine knows and interviewed one of the authors (my friend is Hindu and used to work for a company that sells recordings of philosophers and religious people) and the author is pretty well-educated and honest, but he definitely comes with a point of view. I'll see if I can scrounge it up, I read it about 10 years ago.

Cool. That's would be great, thanks. I don't know anything about the history of India so any book would be a start.