Marbaniang, Domenic

The earliest traces of some form of religion in the Indian sub-continent were discovered at the excavated sites of the Harappan Civilization (also known as the Indus-Valley Civilization) that is dated to have flourished between c3000-1700BC. Modern scholarship seems to be more in favor of the theory that the Harappan Civilization was closer to Dravidian than to Aryan. This is concluded on the basis of meticulous study especially of the Indus script on seals and on figures discovered at the sites. Fig.1 Unicorn Seal Asko Parpola of Helsinki University, who specializes in the Indus script, has tried to argue a relationship between the Indus and Tamil languages.[1] In his lecture, “A Dravidian Solution to the Indus Script Problem,” delivered at the World Classical Tamil Conference, Coimbatore, in June 2010, Parpola suggested that the underlying language of the Indus script was Proto-Dravidian and tried to identify in it astrological symbols and also religious deities that were supposedly ...

In his book, India: A History, John Keay unravels recent historical discoveries regarding the Aryans of India. The previously held theories of Aryans as being invaders and destroyers of the original and primal cultures has been challenged by twentieth century scholarship. Keay does leave room for the assumption that the arya migrated into India and agrees that the "names of their gods predate arrival in India, many (e.g. Indra, Agni, Varuna) being almost synonymous with their counterparts in Persian, Greek, and Latin mythology." The linguistic resemblances certainly cannot be overlooked: Agni (Fire god) looks similar to the Greek Ignus (from which derives the word ignition), Varuna (God of heaven) corresponds to Ouranos (Greek for "heaven"), and Mithra means "friend" in both Sanskrit and Persian. Factually, recognition of linguistic resemblance did play an important role in the development of the "Indo-Aryan" theory. In 1788, Sir William Jones h...