Western scholars have long believed that civilization in India appeared around 500 BC, just a couple of centuries before the conquests of Alexander the Great. However, the closer the researchers got to know India, the more serious their doubts about their own conclusions became. And in the 20s of the XX century, Indian archaeologists D. R. Sakhni and R. D. The Bakerjees discovered in the Indus Valley the oldest civilization that existed at the same time as Ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia and occupied an area larger than both of its great and illustrious contemporaries put together.
Proto-Indian civilization
As the excavations of archaeologists from Great Britain, Pakistan and other countries later showed, they inhabited proto-Indian cities, such as Harappa or Mohenjo-Daro, representatives of the Mediterranean branch of the Caucasian race, with facial features and body structure similar to typical Europeans, but dark-skinned. European and American scientists delineate the lifetime of the proto-Indian civilization as a time frame from 3200 to 1500 BC. Their Indian colleagues have a slightly different opinion, considering this time 5300-2800 BC.
Straight, carefully planned city streets, well-developed plumbing and sewerage systems, including water storage dams. - the main features of civilization. A variety of metal products, many types of pottery, huge structures - all this could not have appeared. suddenly. Apparently there was a missing link between the ancient hunter-gatherer tribes and the Harappa. Many Stone Age sites have been found in India, but none of these cultures bears even a remote resemblance to the proto-Indian civilization. Perhaps, historians have suggested, the missing link between them is buried under water as a result of the rise in ocean levels caused by the melting of mainland glaciers? After all, it is well known that in the last ice age, about 18 thousand years ago, the sea level was at least 130 meters below the present.
Finds in the Bay of Cambay
Based on these considerations, on behalf of the Government of India, the National Institute of Ocean Technology (NIOT) conducted several surveys of the country's seashore using the latest sonars. And in the Gulf of Cambay in 1999-2000, ancient river beds stretching far into the ocean were discovered, serving as a continuation of the modern ones. But the real sensation was the discovery of the ruins of ancient cities in this bay - they were hiding at depths of 20-40 meters under a thick layer of silt.
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The most common remains of houses are found there, measuring about 15x5 meters. located on a strict geometric grid. Traces of massive structures, extremely similar to the Great Baths and the granaries of Harappa and Mohenjo-Daro, were also found, as well as a structure similar to the Harappan citadel.
The mud dug out from the bottom of the bay contained many interesting artifacts: various parts of pottery, micro-stone tools, beads made of semi-precious stones, parts of statues and bricks, and human remains. Samples of sediments from paleochannels, as scientists call the ancient channels, made it possible to establish that the rivers flowed here between 19000 and 3000 BC. One of the cities found at the bottom of the bay, Indian archaeologists tend to identify with the mythical city of Dvaraka, where, according to the Mahabharata, the god Krishna lived. Scientists confidently say that cities stood here already in 9500 BC. and that there is evidence pointing to the presence of humans in this region as early as 30 thousand years ago.
Tradition says
Meanwhile, for India there has always been a traditional opinion that the culture of the country actually dates back to a much earlier time than it is now commonly believed, and Ancient India was much larger than modern India in size. It stretched almost from Australia to Madagascar, possibly in the form of an archipelago. It is very likely that some of the Indian perceptions of their own history have real roots. Sometimes this leads independent researchers to the idea of the existence of a kind of Asian Atlantis.
As the American David Samuel Lewis, one of the regular contributors to the popular Atlantis Rising magazine, writes, the modern concepts of the Western scientific school come into conflict with the Indian tradition. But it was not always so. In the second half of the 19th century, when scientific theories about the origin of man began to form in Europe, geologists and archaeologists accepted the idea of the biblical flood, the disappeared continents and land in the Indian Ocean. An example is the hypothesis of the existence of the Great Southern Continent - it was put forward by the British naturalist Alfred Russell Wallace. South Asian myths were quite consistent with the discoveries of geologists - those who talked about the existence of a populated continent there. where the Indian Ocean, the Arabian Sea and the Bay of Bengal are now. These myths are still alive in South India, Sri Lanka and on the Andaman Sea islands.
“In the last century,” says an ancient Sri Lankan text, “the citadel of Ravana, 25 palaces and 400 thousand streets were swallowed up by the sea”. Submerged land masses, according to one ancient description, were located between Tuticorin on the southwestern coast of India and Manaar in Sri Lanka. The size of this land, which went under water, was not equal to what the geologists of the 19th century spoke about, but if it really existed, then this is precisely part of the Indian subcontinent. In one of the Tamil epics of South India, the Silappadhikarema, a vast area called Kumara Nad is often mentioned. also known as Kumari-Kandam. It stretched far beyond the modern coast of India. Ancient South Indian commentators spoke at length about the prehistoric Tamil Sangham, a spiritual academy located on this ancient land. They also wrote aboutthat in the middle of the continent two rivers disappeared under water - Kumari and Pakhroli, about a country dotted with mountain ridges, about animals, about vegetation. This kingdom of Pandia, according to legend, existed from the 30,000th to 16,500 BC.
Attested by ancient maps
Evidence of the existence in antiquity of a vast land area in the Indian Ocean can be found on old geographical maps. Soviet atlantologist Alexander Kondratov noted that on the famous map of the Turkish admiral Piri Reis, compiled in 1508, the island of Sri Lanka is shown at the southeastern tip of Hindustan. And to the southeast of it is depicted the huge Taprobana island, several times larger than Sri Lanka. Also on the world map, created in the 15th century by the Venetian monk Fra Mauro, near India you can see the island of Sailam - that is, Ceylon, present-day Sri Lanka. - and to the east of it is the huge island of Taprobana.
The Italian traveler Marco Polo did not pass the island by his attention either, he reported: a thousand miles southwest of the Andaman Islands lies “the island of Ceylon, truly the largest in the world. There are 2,400 miles around, and in the old days it was even more, 3,600 miles; so it appears on the map of the local sailors. The north wind is blowing, and most of the island is therefore sunk, and it has become less than in the old days. " But the length of Sri Lanka from north to south is less than 450 kilometers, and from west to east - and at all only 224. Other medieval geographers, both Arab and European, exaggerate the size of Sri Lanka. In the writings of ancient authors, we also find descriptions of the island of Taprobana, very different from what the island of Sri Lanka actually is today. And Taproban. according to historians, it is mentioned in these works "surprisingly early".
For example, Pomponius Mela, one of the greatest geographers of antiquity, writes: “As for Taproban, this land can be considered an island, but one can, following Hipparchus, assume that this is the beginning of another world. Such an assumption is quite admissible: Taprobana is inhabited, and there is no information that anyone has circled this land on a ship. According to Pliny, the shadows in Taproban are cast not to the north, but to the south. the sun rises from the left and sets from the right: this means that the island was in the Southern Hemisphere, while Sri Lanka lies between the sixth and eighth degrees of north latitude!
All this evidence allows us to assume that in the area of the Indian subcontinent and further to the south, underwater archaeologists can still expect new amazing finds.
Magazine "Secrets of the XX century" № 20. Andrey Chinaev