“At the heart of the controversy are the mysteries surrounding the birth of civilisation. Did we, as the academic establishment insists, emerge from the Stone Age about 5,000 years ago and only then begin the slow and painful ascent to our present ‘lofty’ heights? Or was there, in remote antiquity, a fountainhead of civilisation that rose to levels of sophistication equal if not superior to our own, and yet which vanished so completely that hardly a trace of it remains?”
So asks Douglas Kenyon in ‘Pushing back the portals of civilisation’ in ‘Forbidden History’ (edited by Kenyon).
“Titillating fragments of anomalous evidence suggest a pervasive if not advanced seafaring or even airborne culture having once existed in ancient India – for example, the identical nature of the Indus Valley script to that found at Easter Island on the other side of the Pacific Ocean. Initial reports suggest, it should be noted, that the script found recently on the Gulf of Cambay resembles the Indus Valley script. According to certain south Indian researchers, the indecipherable scripts are written in a proto-Tamil language, which would link the culture of distant Easter Island and its famous megalithic statues with ancient southern India, Kumari Kandam – an idea echoed in the lore of Easter Islanders about a lost continent to the West from which their people originated.”
“Southern India, a land whose cultural roots are said by some to stretch into an even more profound antiquity than do those of the north, suffered a similar fate. Speakers of a proto-Dravidian language, the forerunner of a family of languages spoken in the south – and some say of Sanscrit itself – entered from the northwest, the Western scholars insist. … invasion theories were necessitated by Western beliefs, at first about the Garden of Eden theory of origins and then, with the arrival of the Darwinians, beliefs about the widely held out-of-Africa theory.
But the Aryan invasion theory has been debunked. … satellite imagery now shows that the ancient Harappan civilisation of the Indus Valley, and Mohenjo-Daro, probably declined and disappeared due to climatic changes, the drying of the mythical Saraswati River, rather than to the descent of imaginary invaders. … If Sanscrit predates the world’s other languages, and if ancient civilisations existed where there are now seas, how can history be explained in modern Western terms?”
“… ancient India dates to the times out of which the Ramayana, the Mahabharata, and the ancient traditions of Tamil Nadu in the south grew. The Tamil Nadu was a land whose culture is said by some to predate that of the north, having once existed as part of Kumari Kandam and dating to a staggering 30,000 BCE. A deluge inundated Kumari Kandam, obscure texts of the Siddhanta tradition of Tamil Nadu reportedly say.”
These paragraphs are extracts from ‘The Enigma of India’s origins’ by David Lewis from ‘Forbidden History’ edited by Douglas Kenyon.
The antiquity of human civilisation, as suggested by these extracts, may now be credible. How developed, how proficient – technologically, astronomically, culturally – were the pre-Deluge civilisations?
RAJA ARASA RATNAM 