“Ever since Napoleon’s days, we in the West have been dazzled by the splendour of pharaonic Egypt – with its impressive pyramids, the mysterious Sphinx, and the magnificent and the magnificent treasures of Tutankhamen. We have also been impressed with the intellectual achievements of the learned elite of Sumer, which according to our schoolteachers, was responsible for the invention of writing, the potter’s wheel, wheeled carts, cylinder seals, cosmology, formal law, and bicameral political congress.
Most of the ‘first time ever’ claims for the Sumerians have in recent years been exposed as exaggerations or absurd. There is mounting evidence that neither Sumer nor Egypt quite deserve the pride of place among the ancient civilisations. Rather, the cradle of civilisation appears to lie beyond the fertile valleys of the Nile, Tigris and Euphrates Rivers.
We invite the reader to join us in a journey of discovery, which in its implications, seems far more thrilling to us than the discoveries of Troy, the Elamite civilisation of Iran, the ‘lost’ civilisation of Dilmun on the island of Bahrain in the Arabian/Persian Gulf or, most recently, the discovery of what may have been the kingdom of Sheba in the extreme south of the Arabian peninsula.
As we will show, India is the giant that looms behind these early urban cultures.”
… “In his book Looking for Dilmun, Geoffrey Bibby rightly remarked that the Indus Valley civilisation is the Cinderalla of the ancient world.”
The above are extracts from the Preface to ’In search of the cradle of civilisation’ by Georg Feuerstein, Subash Kak, and David Frawley. The authors also said “India has emerged as the oldest continuous civilisation on Earth” and “Sanscrit is the oldest of any of the Indo-European languages.”
Further, “… the Indian population has lived in the peninsula for at least 50,000 years. The analysis of the genetic evidence suggests that the splitting of the Indic and European peoples took place as long as 9,000 years ago.”
Map 1 in the Preface shows that “all the early civilisations arose close to the Tropic of Cancer.” This reminds me of the claim (which I read some time ago) that a sustained blast of cosmic radiation about 40,000 years ago along the Tropic of Cancer caused two momentous changes in humanity.
The skin colour of humans living in a wide corridor centred on this Tropic was whitened; Europeans became coppery white, while East Asians became ivory white, with peoples in between presenting an intermediate colour.
Second, more significantly, cave art began to develop amongst those affected by the cosmic radiation about 40,000 years ago as well.
It apparently takes about 2,000 generations for any significant genetic impacts of radiation from cosmic cataclysms to become established.
Food for thought?
RAJA ARASA RATNAM 