There is also a link between Zoroastrianism and the ancient Vedic religion. They probably were the same before a schism led by Zoroaster.
Defeated Persians walk back. It is a long journey and by the time they reach home their numbers are low and moral is broken, one of those tribes would split further to become the modern day Zoroastrianism. World's first monotheistic religion.
Technically, Zoroastrianism is at direct conflict with Hinduism and yet both religions have thrived side by side in India and average Hindu has very positive opinion of Parasi people (Zoroastrianism). Examine the language of both religions. In Sanskrit Asura means evil people (demon), in Persian Asura becomes Ahura which means Lord.
I have always felt that Parasi and Hindu communities are exceptional example of how religious groups with opposite viewpoints can live next to each other and peacefully.
I think the primary reason for this is that neither religion has a concept of converting someone to their religion. Same is true for Judaism, and probably for most ancient religions. As no one was actively trying to convert the other person, wars were fought over territory and resources, and not over who had better gods. It is only when proselytizing became a requirement did we start seeing religious wars.
Thank you for sharing that. That was exactly my point, when neither group is interested in converting the other and are comfortable in their own traditions, the interaction is very civil and beneficial to all parties.
Hinduism had a rich tradition of Shastrartha (Sanskrit शास्त्रार्थ) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shastrartha where scholars debated the meaning and their interpretation of scriptures. Which meant that the religious books were always open to interpretation and never taken literally, which is unlike what we see in several modern religions where the text is applied literally and interpretations are considered sacrilegious.
In fact, it may have echoed forward directly for centuries. The daasharajna yuddha, as it is called in Sanskrit, may have both inspired the epic Mahabharata composed centuries later, and which is also centered on a great war.
Even more, the tribes and kingdoms that participated in Mahabharata war may have been descendants of Sudas from the battle of 10 kings. They are certainly cultural descendants, as they carried forward the story of the 10 Kings' Battle in the Vedas.
We also know with near certainty that those tribes mentioned in the Mahabharata inhabited the area spanning modern Afghanistan through the Gangetic plain [1], which is just east of the border region between the Vedic/Indian and Persian/Zoroastrian worlds.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panchala#/media/File:Late_Vedi...
They refused to accept any civilizational could be older than 4000 years because of the great flood.
So often they tried to fit the evidence into their narrative. As we know today very many civilizations can be dated to much further in time.
Fwiw I’m Hindu.
Character assassination based on your subjective psychoanalysis is not a polite thing to do on a public forum.
'The Horse, The Wheel, and Language' - those are slim evidences made to fit a narrative.
The narrative clearly starts with negating the out of India theory instead to favour a Central Asia/European roots.
But really what kind of evidence do we have for the existence of a sophisticated culture in Germany that predates Harappa.
I don't know why Indian nationalists take a root at pontic Caspian steppes as an attack against antiquity of our culture. It doesn't take anything away from us. They were not Europeans or something. They didn't attack and invade the indigenous mostly mixed with them. Before them there were migrations from zagros mountains etc..
> Central Asia/European roots.
They are not the same.
> But really what kind of evidence do we have for the existence of a sophisticated culture in Germany that predates Harappa.
You clearly have not read the book. It's not Germany, it's Pontic Caspian steppes, approximately in modern day Ukraine if I recall correctly.
Fly in the ointment, there hasn't been any land at the North pole for quite some time. Why the choice ? perhaps to help themselves to some notion of exceptionalism, uniqueness, so on and so forth.
I get it, everyone wants to feel a little special, it gets dangerous when that becomes a sizeable political force. More so, if they feel they have not been given their rightful due and/or humiliated. Wish there was a moral analogue of "now now dont be hurt, yes baby you are so very special, have a candy bar" in the international arena.
I am ethnically Hindu but an athiest (which, by the way, does not disqualify me from being a Hindu)
As I have said earlier the racial contours of USA/West in general have vested interest in polluting research in this field.
It's the Indian nationalists who were multiple times caught faking evidence to assert indigenous Aryans theory.
There is a strong reason to believe it is biased.
Let them produce physical evidence of cultural artifacts that predates and connects those found all accross the Indian subcontinent.
We can then discuss out of India vs Aryan invassion theory.
Everything including genetic evidence supports that.
You seem to be highly convinced by nationalistic pseudoscience. Open your mind and apply some logic.
Indian sources and Puranas themselves point to a much older timeline.
> nationalistic pseudoscience
That applies more to the kind of theories and other race sciences spewed by the colonists that ultimately lead to the holocaust in Germany.
Please update yourself with the latest findings and learn to be suspicious of the material from the colonial times.
Please update yourself from well credited academia and not suspicious newspaper articles or pop culture.
Academics also agree nazi stuff was pseudoscience. You are attacking a straw man.
The linguistic and genetic evidence points at a migration, you can't read r/chodi and believe it's true, while simultaneously hating Nazis.
Indian nationalists are considered annoying for a reason. You people take offense at people saying Indians didn't invent aeroplanes 10K years ago. Go read some science.
With all your colonial hate, your "indigenous" ""science"" is limited to claiming smoke from havanas purifies air, and sanskrit is best computer language.
You stand against everything your founder, Vinayak Savarkar, fought for.
It is incredible that Wikipedia too just quotes this single individual on hundreds of pages somehow giving him and his claims credibility. His claims have been refuted by many using plethora of evidence but his citation cartel will simply dismiss it by attacking the authors instead of their research.
One thousand years doesn't take anything away from it though.
Horse,
Early British researchers claimed Harrapans (aroun 3500 BC) did not know horses and since Vedas rely so much on horses, clearly Vedas were much later inventions. This theory was repeated so many times that a lot of people assume this to be true. It gets quoted again and again. In reality this is as false as Trump's claim of re-election victory. The oldest domesticated horse bones in India were found in Rajasthan around 4500 BCE. However the white researchers have not bothered at all to revise any of their theories despite new evidence. There are over 15 different instances of domesticated horse bones ranging from 2500 BCE to 3000 BCE have been found. Please read Srikant Talegari's paper on the topic.
Linguistic evidence:
This is actually pretty lame evidence to begin with and can very easily be repudiated. Early white christian researchers believed that Aryans invaded India killing native people (to justify why British rule of India) and they claimed these Aryans came from Russia 3000 BCE. How did they arrive at this conclusion ? Linguistics shows that all 12 branches of Indo-European languages were together sometime around 3000 BCE. It was not clear when, but the "south russia" claim is completely random and unsubstantiated. During these times Avesta, the holy book of Zorostrasians was the only non Hindu text that would talk about Vedic culture but it was orally transmitted and hence had not physical artifacts. Much much later, Mittani treaty was discovered in Syria which was around 1500 BCE old which clearly indentified itself as Indo-Iranian. So many western scholars took this as contemporary of Rigveda without analyzing both books in details.
Rigveda which has 10 books is generally classified as core and non-core. It is unanimous opinion that core is much older than non-core. It turns out Mittani shares a lot of words and linguistic traits with the non-core where as nearly none with the old core. Mittani's own languages is a "residue" of old vedic languages which they picked up centuries earlier. Hence some of the researchers think that Rigveda predates Mittani by significant amount of time.
Note: I am not emotionally involved in any of the dates, other that pure academic curiosity I think it is irrelevant if it s 3900 years old or 5000 years old. The only point I am trying to make is that Rigveda dating is not a "settled" matter as some claim and we will see more interesting research in future.
Reas Srikant's paper here: https://www.amazon.com/Rigveda-Historical-Analysis-Shrikant-...
I am not entirely sure how genetic claims could even play role in dating rigveda.
Also peer review is not just “approval by white people”. There’s plenty of non-white scientists (eg: me)
I am not very familiar with Genetic theories to be honest and only work I have read on this topic is from Manu Joseph's not very scientific summary of research on this topic but it is barely conclusive in any direction.
> There’s plenty of non-white scientists
That is besides the point, they will let in those who tow their lines and keep out those who disagree claiming them to be either "they haven't published anything in journals reviewed by us". Afterall british controlled India not through white soldiers but brown soliders handpicked from Indians.
It basically is a citation cartel to begin with very little concern for actual research or truth. Also this is not specific to Indology either. In this day and age it matters very little though as better quality research by such as likes of Talegari or Elst or Danino et al. stands on its own even after decades.
In the essay I refer to elsewhere in this thread [1], Zaehner writes:
"What do we know of these so-called "demon worshippers"? The Persian for demon is div (Middle Persian dev , Old Persian daiva, Avestan daeva). All these words correspond to the Sanskrit deva and are etymologically connected with the Latin deus. Originally, they must have been gods.
In the Avesta there are two words for supernatural beings, ahura and daeva , and these correspond etymologically exactly to the Sanskrit asura and deva. In the Rig-Veda, the earliest literary monument of the whole Indo-European group of races, both terms mean divine beings, the asuras being more remote from man, the devas closer to him. In the course of time, however, the asuras, who always had an uncanny element in them, became purely maleficent powers, whereas the devas remained gods similar to the gods of Greece and Rome and other Indo-European peoples.
In Iran, however, exactly the opposite happened. Owing to the reform of the Prophet Zoroaster, no ahura was any longer allowed to exist in his own right, and Ahura Mazdah, the "Wise Lord", was raised to the position of the one true God, maker of heaven and earth and all that in them is. The daevas, on the other hand, were regarded by the Iranian Prophet as being maleficent powers, the henchmen of Angra Mainyu or Ahriman, whose real origins remain obscure. The Zoroastrian reform, however -- which put an exalted monotheism in the place of the more ancient polytheism which the Iranians had formerly shared with their Aryan cousins who had moved on into India -- this Zoroastrian reform was far too radical and politically too weak to eliminate the worship of the daevas altogether. In what was later to become Zoroastrian orthodoxy, a place was made for many of the old ahuras like Mithra and Anahita, but not for the old daevas, whose cult was in all probability associated with bloody sacrifice; and it is this cult, in my opinion, which reappears in Mithras' sacrifice of the Bull in the Mithraism of the Roman Empire.
It seems plain, however, that the cult of the daevas co-existed with orthodox Zoroastrianism until the reign of Xerxes, when it seems to have been suppressed, at least officially. It maintained an underground existence, however, in all probability up to Muslim times as the constant attacks on it in the Pahlavi books show..."
Latin also contains a cognate of "deus" that retains more features of the PIE form, namely Jupiter.
I don’t know thr actual history at all here, but the logic here seems dangerous; the repeated attacks on the “witchcraft” that was intimately described and attacked in European Christian documents aren’t evidence that it continued to exist (or ever existed in the form described) throughout the period those documents were written.
"The relationship between the Æsir and Vanir parallel the Asuras and Devas in another way; like the Æsir, the Asuras were associated in Vedic myth with human phenomena (contracts, the arts, fate), while the Vanir, like the Devas, are associated with the natural world (such as Njord and Freyr, associated with fertility)." [0]
Very interesting.
[0] https://religion.wikia.org/wiki/Aesir-Asura_correspondence
Are you sure? I was under the impression this is a mistaken translation. Rakshasa would be the more demonic one and not asura.
(This is far from the only case where a generic word ends up being used to refer to something specific that has that category. Everyone in Hindu mythological stories has a bajillion alternative names that are generic-sounding but only apply to them, based around some aspect of their personality or actions.)
A Rakshas is just someone blinded by the need to accumulate wealth and power, they may be kind but often take the wrong path.
Poonawalla, Gheewalla, Daruwalla, Canteenwalla, Something-wala. Or even more straight: Driver, Carpenter, Broker, Sethna etc all real surnames.
There are probably elements in both coming from even more ancient Indo-European religions. I wonder if you could also find similarities with German and Greek deities as well and try to reconstruct a proto-Indo European religion.
I am asking because Aphrodite can be traced back to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astarte and then to Ishtar / https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inanna