Antiquity of Vedic Civilization of India

How old are the Vedas, the ancient Hindu scriptures? Vedas were translated into European languages in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and it was held by the historians of the time that they could not be more ancient than the classical European civilisation. In recent times, historians have widely re-examined and analyzed the historical data to ascertain the antiquity of the Vedas. The inference that has emerged is that the history and cultural heritage of India is largely an indigenous development of the people that have inhabited the region for over ten thousand years. These modern historians contend that the old historians considered only the contributions of ancient Greece and those of Sumeria and Egypt on which the Greeks founded their culture and, with their arbitrary Aryan invasion theory, ignored the ancient civilization of India.

Indian history was written in the last century during the British rule. The large urban ruins on the banks of Indus river at Harappa and Mohenjodaro formed the basis of the Indus valley civilization. The archaeologists dated the ruins to third millennium BC; the ruins showed systematic town‑planning, underground drainage, excellently engraved seals, a monumental script, a refined system of weights and measures and beautiful statues.

Excavated ruins of Mohenjo-daro, with the Great Bath in the front; Source: Wikipedia

Seals of Indus Valley; Image via Wikipedia

Later, more sites started being unearthed along the so-called mythical Saraswati river that runs parallel to and east of the Indus. Saraswati river, which has but dried now, flowed north to south between the present Indian states of Punjab and Uttar Pradesh towards Gujarat. Noting the similarity of the structures found amongst the ruins along the banks of the dried Saraswati to those referred to earlier, the researchers named the civilization as the Indus-Harappan Civilization or, more appropriately, the Indus-Saraswati civilization – as more sites were found along the Saraswati than along the Indus or the Ravi (Harappan) rivers. Radiocarbon dates indicate that its roots go back to the 5th millennium BC, while its peak period lay between 2600 and 2000 BC, after which began its decline.