March of the Aryans

March of the Aryans

Author: Bhagwan S Gidwani

Publisher: Penguin UK

Published: 2012-07-17

Total Pages: 654

ISBN-13: 8184756844

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In a remarkable feat of imagination and research, bhagwan S. Gidwani takes us back to the dawn of civilization (8000 BCE) to vividly recreate the world of the Aryans. He tells us why the Aryans left India - their native land - for foreign shores and shows us their triumphant return to their homeland. Here are characters like the gentle god Sindhu Putra, spreading his message of love; the hermit Bharat, who inspired the dream of unity, equality, human rights and dignity for all; the physician - sage Dhanawantar and his wife Dhanawantari; peace-loving Kashi after whom the holy city of Varanasi is named; and Nila who gave his name to the rive Nile. Vast and absorbing, with a cast of thousands, March of the Aryans is a gripping tale of kings and poets, seers and gods, battles and romance, and the rise and fall of civilisations, from the bestselling author of The Sword of Tipu Sultan.


The Quest for the Origins of Vedic Culture

The Quest for the Origins of Vedic Culture

Author: Edwin Bryant

Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA

Published: 2001

Total Pages: 400

ISBN-13: 0195169476

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This work studies how Indian scholars have rejected the idea of an external origin of the Indo-Aryans, by questioning the logic assumptions and methods upon which the theory is based.


The Roots of Hinduism

The Roots of Hinduism

Author: Asko Parpola

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2015-07-15

Total Pages: 385

ISBN-13: 0190226935

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Hinduism has two major roots. The more familiar is the religion brought to South Asia in the second millennium BCE by speakers of Aryan or Indo-Iranian languages, a branch of the Indo-European language family. Another, more enigmatic, root is the Indus civilization of the third millennium BCE, which left behind exquisitely carved seals and thousands of short inscriptions in a long-forgotten pictographic script. Discovered in the valley of the Indus River in the early 1920s, the Indus civilization had a population estimated at one million people, in more than 1000 settlements, several of which were cities of some 50,000 inhabitants. With an area of nearly a million square kilometers, the Indus civilization was more extensive than the contemporaneous urban cultures of Mesopotamia and Egypt. Yet, after almost a century of excavation and research the Indus civilization remains little understood. How might we decipher the Indus inscriptions? What language did the Indus people speak? What deities did they worship? Asko Parpola has spent fifty years researching the roots of Hinduism to answer these fundamental questions, which have been debated with increasing animosity since the rise of Hindu nationalist politics in the 1980s. In this pioneering book, he traces the archaeological route of the Indo-Iranian languages from the Aryan homeland north of the Black Sea to Central, West, and South Asia. His new ideas on the formation of the Vedic literature and rites and the great Hindu epics hinge on the profound impact that the invention of the horse-drawn chariot had on Indo-Aryan religion. Parpola's comprehensive assessment of the Indus language and religion is based on all available textual, linguistic and archaeological evidence, including West Asian sources and the Indus script. The results affirm cultural and religious continuity to the present day and, among many other things, shed new light on the prehistory of the key Hindu goddess Durga and her Tantric cult.


Return Of The Aryans

Return Of The Aryans

Author: Bhagwan Gidwani

Publisher: Penguin UK

Published: 2000-10-14

Total Pages: 1469

ISBN-13: 9351184579

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A sweeping saga of ancient india Return of the Aryans tells the epic story of the Aryans – a gripping tale of kings and poets, seers and gods, battles and romance and the rise and fall of civilizations. In a remarkable feat of the imagination, Bhagwan S. Gidwani takes us back to the dawn of mankind (8000 BC) to recreate the world of the Aryans. He tells us why the Aryans left India, their native land, for foreign shores and shows us their triumphal return to their homeland... Vast and absorbing, the novel tells the stories of characters like the gentle god, Sindhu Putra, spreading his message of love; the physician sage Dhanawantar and his wife Dhanawantari; peaceloving Kashi after whom the holy city of Varanasi is named; and Nila who gave her name to the river Nile... Richly textured and with a cast of thousands, the epic adventure of the Aryans come gloriously alive in the hands of the bestselling author of The Sword of Tipu Sultan.


The Rigveda

The Rigveda

Author: Shrikant G. Talageri

Publisher: Aditya Prakashan, Publishers & Booksellers

Published: 2000

Total Pages: 558

ISBN-13:

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In the present volume,the author has confirmed emphatically that India was also the original homeland not only of the Indo-Aryans but also of the Indo-Iranians and the Indo-Europeans.


Aryan Idols

Aryan Idols

Author: Stefan Arvidsson

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2006-09-15

Total Pages: 367

ISBN-13: 0226028607

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Critically examining the discourse of Indo-European scholarship over the past two hundred years, Aryan Idols demonstrates how the interconnected concepts of “Indo-European” and “Aryan” as ethnic categories have been shaped by, and used for, various ideologies. Stefan Arvidsson traces the evolution of the Aryan idea through the nineteenth century—from its roots in Bible-based classifications and William Jones’s discovery of commonalities among Sanskrit, Latin, and Greek to its use by scholars in fields such as archaeology, anthropology, folklore, comparative religion, and history. Along the way, Arvidsson maps out the changing ways in which Aryans were imagined and relates such shifts to social, historical, and political processes. Considering the developments of the twentieth century, Arvidsson focuses on the adoption of Indo-European scholarship (or pseudoscholarship) by the Nazis and by Fascist Catholics. A wide-ranging discussion of the intellectual history of the past two centuries, Aryan Idols links the pervasive idea of the Indo-European people to major scientific, philosophical, and political developments of the times, while raising important questions about the nature of scholarship as well.


Selective Remembrances

Selective Remembrances

Author: Philip L. Kohl

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2008-11-15

Total Pages: 435

ISBN-13: 0226450643

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When political geography changes, how do reorganized or newly formed states justify their rule and create a sense of shared history for their people? Often, the essays in Selective Remembrances reveal, they turn to archaeology, employing the field and its findings to develop nationalistic feelings and forge legitimate distinctive national identities. Examining such relatively new or reconfigured nation-states as Iran, Iraq, Turkey, Israel, Russia, Ukraine, India, and Thailand, Selective Remembrances shows how states invoke the remote past to extol the glories of specific peoples or prove claims to ancestral homelands. Religion has long played a key role in such efforts, and the contributors take care to demonstrate the tendency of many people, including archaeologists themselves, to view the world through a religious lens—which can be exploited by new regimes to suppress objective study of the past and justify contemporary political actions. The wide geographic and intellectual range of the essays in Selective Remembrances will make it a seminal text for archaeologists and historians.