Horse, chariot, bronze and s'ankha

[Guest guest]

These three issues: horse, chariot and bronze are the thread by

which IE linguistic postulates of language chronologies in relation

to Vedic are trying to survive. (All are non-linguistic issues!

Naturally.)

 

Horse. It is often said that there is no horse depicted on Sarasvati

epigraphs or glyphs and hence, there was no horse in the

civilization. Little attention is paid to the fact that only certain

animals are depicted on the heiroglyphs: e.g. zebu, bull, heifer,

croodile (or lizard), antelopes (three kinds, ram, goat, ox-

antelope). Why are only these animals depicted? I have tried to

present lexical evidence from 'Proto-indic' (to use the IE jargon)

or Prakrit (traditional jargon) that all these animal words relate

to minerals, metals and furnaces -- the repertoire of vis'vakarma

artisan guilds. The horse word, say, sadam, does not have a homonym

to describe a component of such a repertoire and hence the horse is

not depicted.

 

Chariot. There is a 'ratha' shown on a Daimabad artefact with a bull

as the animal drawing the chariot ridden by a naked standing

rathaka_ra and two birds perched on the yoke. There are also bronze

artefacts with individual animals (no horse). See

http://www.hp.uab.edu/image_archive/udc/'Ratha' is a metaphor in

many r.ca-s. The ratha race is won by as'vins using the donkeys. It

is likely that not more than 100 ratha existed in the vast

civilization. It served as a metaphor for the poets. There is no

proof that 'ara' meant only spokes; the word could also have meant a

part of a multi-part solid wheel. R.gveda even refers to a wheel

with three axles! So much for the reality of the European invading,

trickling-in chariot.

 

Bronze. The word dissected for meaning ad nauseum is: aya(s). There

is a word in Kannada which is called aduru. This is explained as

unsmelted metal (i.e. native metal), say, something like meteoric

iron. There is no reason to assume that ayas meant 'bronze'. It

could simply have meant some hard metal, may be alloy. Who knows?

 

Yes, Kelkar, the IE myths are based on slender foundations. But, the

more serious issue is the attempt to try to hide River Sarasvati

into a rivulet in Afghanistan. There is a saying in Tamil: mur..u

pu_canikka_ye sottile maraippatu 'hiding an entire pumpkin in a

plate of food'. Just see the map of sapta-sindhu shown in an 1881

French encyclopaedia by Marius Fontane

(http://www.hindunet.org/saraswati homepage). This ain't no hindutva

or saffronisation map. Right from the days of the first Director

General of Geological Survey of India (RD Oldhma), the search has

been on and is now complete with multi-disciplinary scientific

evidences. See KS Valdiya, 2000, Sarasvati: the river that

disappeared, Hyderabad, Universities Press.

 

Now, there is another artefact: s'ankha, turbinella pyrum. A burial

of a woman in Mehergarh dated to 6500 BCE shows a s'ankha bangle.

S'ankha kr.s'a_na (interpreted correctly s'ankha bowman) is attested

in both R.gveda and Atharvaveda. I say, based on this evidence

alone, R.gveda is dated to not less than 8500 years Before Present.

I can give the references including pictures on how the Kolkata

bowman cuts the s'ankha to make the wide bangle without which no

Bengali or Oriya marriage is complete. cf. Ph.D dissertation by

Schoeffer and Kenoyer, 2001, Ancient Cities of the Indus Valley

Civilization (based on a guide to the Indus exhibition held in New

York). To saw a s'ankha to make a bangle, a metallic saw would have

been needed.

 

Kalyanaraman