“… There are peoples who, like fish emerging from the bottomless ocean depths and not leaving even a short trace on unsteady foam on the blue sea ripples, suddenly emerge from the black prehistoric depths on the surface of civilized history, carrying with them a rich and distinctive culture, a well-established literary tradition, subtle poetic taste, amazing sophistication in the choice of feelings, objects and situations, then turned under the pen of the poet into themes, images and plots of his classics. The Tamils should be included among such peoples. Try to imagine the ancient Greeks without the Cretan-Mycenaean culture, the ancient Romans without the Etruscans and the Celtic Italians, who finally left the Vedas of the Aryans who settled in Northern India, without the Aryans who left the Avesta who settled the Iranian plateau. Is this not what the Tamil historian will seeby the beginning of our era almost completely lost the memory of their distant past and did not preserve the traces of their primitiveness until the period of written sources? - this is how the Tamil critic Kirushnan writes about the past of his people.
The earliest monuments of Tamil literature appeared at the beginning of our era, however, they were fully understood by authors, readers and listeners as the fruit of literary creativity. But nowhere among the Tamils is it possible to find traces of the inevitable pre-literary stage that precedes the literary one: Tamil poetry in history appears immediately and fully armed with sophisticated technical means. Obviously, the ancient roots of the Tamil tradition are simply unknown to us.
Various countries and even parts of the world were called the birthplace of the Tamils. And the Tamils themselves, or rather their historians, believed that "Tamalaham, or the Tamil homeland, in the distant past was in the southern region of the large island of Navalam, which was one of the first lands to appear near the equator."
Other Indian legends speak of the country of Ruga and the country of Daitya, also sunk in the waves of the ocean …
Geologists have a hypothesis that once there was a huge land bridge that connected India with Africa. The steep and long ledge of the Ghat Mountains, separating India from the ocean, already in itself suggests that there was a sinking of the land once here - and, moreover, on a grandiose scale.
The existence of such a bridge is also indicated by indirect data. Thus, the Negroids of Africa and Oceania are separated by the vastness of the Indian Ocean. And the entire huge land mass between Africa and Oceania - the Asian continent - is inhabited by representatives of two other large races - the Caucasian and Mongoloid. Perhaps, the bridge, which has now disappeared, contributed to their resettlement?..
Many ancient geographers, including the famous Ptolemy, considered the Indian Ocean a huge lake surrounded on all sides by land. Ancient maps depicted this land. But later it turned out that this land was not there … Maybe because it sank?
According to medieval Tamil commentators in ancient times, there were three sangas (sanga - "assembly, community"). In the first centuries of our era, the late Sanga flourished, with the work of which we are introduced to two large collections of Tamil poetry: "Eight Anthologies" and "Ten Lyric Poems". The second sanga was founded by the great hermit Agatgyan, who came to the Tamil country several thousand years ago and settled on the southernmost tip of the Indian subcontinent. This Sanga disintegrated, for, in the words of one of the medieval Tamil commentators, "the country was swallowed up by the sea."
Promotional video:
The most ancient third sanga also sank in the ocean, the founder of which was the "Lord of Yoga", the "Creator of existence", the supreme deity of the peoples of South India, the god Shiva. This sanga was located "in the city of Madurai, swallowed by the sea", in a kingdom "with a length of 700 kavadam", that is, about 7000 kilometers, which also "destroyed and swallowed the sea." The story of the sunken homeland of the Tamils was born in ancient times.
“The legend is not only not invented by commentators of the 13th-14th centuries, but has been in Tamil literature for about 2 thousand years,” writes the Leningrad researcher Nikolai Gurov. - There are, however, real reasons to attribute the origin of this legend to an even more ancient period. If we go beyond the verbal creativity of the Tamils and turn to the mythology and folklore of other South Indian peoples, we can see that the Tamil legend about the Sangas and the sunken kingdom is genetically related to a group of legends and legends, which in general can be called “legends of the ancestral home”. The most likely explanation is that all these legends go back to a certain single archetype, which we can conditionally call the "South Indian legend about the ancestral home." This archetype appears to have ariseneven during the existence of the southern Dravidian linguistic and cultural community, that is, somewhere in the middle of the 2nd millennium BC. e. ".
Thus, the story of the "Atlantis of the Indian Ocean" is more than a thousand years older than the "Dialogues" of Plato, from which it became known for the first time about the island-continent in the Atlantic Ocean.
Today this legendary country is called Lemuria. There is a whole story behind the name.
The ancient Romans called "Lemurs" the souls of people who did not find refuge in the afterlife. When Europeans encountered in India, Southeast Asia, Madagascar and other islands of the Indian Ocean with amazing creatures leading a nocturnal lifestyle, having glowing eyes, voices that resemble howling or crying, and an appearance in which features of a person, a cat are bizarrely mixed and a bear cub, they called them lemurs.
In the mid-nineties of the 18th century, the French naturalist-evolutionist Etienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire conducted a systematics and classification of lemurs in Africa, tropical Asia and the islands of the Indian Ocean. And then the same scientist expressed the idea that lemurs to the islands, first of all Madagascar, the real kingdom of these amazing creatures, came from Asia or Africa through the "bridge" of land, which was once in the Indian Ocean. In the middle of the last century, the famous English zoologist Philip Sclater, developing the idea of Saint-Hilaire, gave the name to this hypothetical "bridge" - or even a larger piece of land - Lemuria.
