Is it true ancient world was Hindu??

Question

or something very close to it..Islam n Christainity led to lowering the impact of Hinduism?My personal view is in favor of this...

Answer 1

Voltaire Francois Marie Arouet (1694-1774) France's greatest writer and philosopher wrote:

" I am convinced that everything has come down to us from the banks of the Ganges, - astronomy, astrology, metempsychosis, etc." " It is very important to note that some 2,500 years ago at the least Pythagoras went from Samos to the Ganges to learn geometry...But he would certainly not have undertaken such a strange journey had the reputation of the Brahmins' science not been long established in Europe..."

Friedrich von Schlegel (1772-1829) German philosopher, critic, and writer, declared in 1803:

"Everything without exception is of Indian origin.." "whether directly or indirectly, all nations are originally nothing but Indian colonies."

"It is there in (Aryavarta) we must seek not only for the cradle of the Brahmin religion but for the cradle of the high civilization of the Hindus, which gradually extended itself in the west to Ethiopia, to Egypt, to Phoenicia; in the East to Siam, to China and Japan; in the South to Ceylon, to Java and to Sumatra; in the North to Persia, to Chaldea, and to Colchis, whence it came to Greece and to Rome and at length to the distant abode of the Hyperboreons."

Five years later, Alexander Hamilton (1757-1804) aide-de-camp to George Washington and first secretary of the Treasury, epitomized this attitude in these words:

"When we read in the valuable production of those great Oriental scholars...those of a Jones, a Wilkings, a Colebrooke, or a Halhed - we uniformly discover in the Hindus a nation, whose polished manners are the result of a mild disposition and an extensive benevolence."

Frederick Eden Pargiter (1852-1927) in his well-known work Ancient Indian Historical Tradition says that the Aryan civilization is the civilization of the Aila or Lunar race which lived in Ilavrita in mid-Himalayas: that the Vedic culture reflects a blend of both Aryan and Dravidian and that the Aryan civilization did not come from beyond; and that it spread to Afghanistan and Persia and further west from India.

(source: Indian Culture and the Modern Age - By Dewan Bahadur K. S. Ramaswami Sastri Annamalai University. 1956 p.39).


Theodor Benfey (1809-1881), a German linguist, was of the opinion that India is the origin of ancient civilization that spread to Europe along with its language and the religious stories.

Benfey's fame rests on his Pantschantantra, Fuenf Buecher indischer Fabeln, Maerchen und Erzaehlungen. ("Pancatantra, five books of Indian fables, fairy tales and stories), 1859. In the Introduction he showed that many Oriental and Occidental fairy tales are of Indian origin. He traced their route to the West: they were firs translated into Pahlevi, then into Arabic to be later rendered into Greek, Persian, Hebrew, Latin and German.

According to Benfey, the Pancatantra is a nitishastra, a book on statesmanship for kings and ministers. He concludes the introduction by saying "my research in the field of fables, fairy stories and tales of Orient and Occident have convinced me that not few fables, but a large number of fairy tales and stories, was spread from India all over the world."

(source: German Indologists: Biographies of Scholars in Indian Studies writing in German - By Valentine Stache-Rosen p.32-33).

Historian Thomas R. Trautmann explains, its proponents hoped that "the study of Sanskrit and Indian antiquities would bring a second renaissance to the West, as the study of Greek learning had been the foundation of the first Renaissance."

The French scholar Maurice Olender agrees: "Hebrew, whose centrality had been challenged for some time, finally gave way to Sanskrit," and, for a time, Sanskrit texts "with an air of eternity about them came to supplant the Bible." Well, almost.

As Thomas R. Trautmann puts it:

" Evangelical influence drove British policy down a path that tended to minimize and denigrate the accomplishments of Indian civilization and to position itself as the negation of the (earlier) British Indomania" that was nourished by belief in Indian wisdom."

That is how the short-lived "Indomania" gave way to what the French scholar Raymond Schwab called "British Indophobia." Sadly, but mistakenly, most of Europe's Sanskrit scholars were now certain that these translations would "carry their own condemnation." The British could even less accept that they owed their language and civilization to a benighted India - that would have been dealing a blow to the very foundation of Europe's mission in India, and particularly to the British Empire now at the height of its glory. Thus, the Rig-Veda was seen as "rather Indo-European than Hindu, and representing the condition of the Aryans before their final settlement in India."

Never mind that all this was mere conjecture, that the Rig-Veda itself made it clear that the wars between Aryans and Dasyus, were battles between powers of light and darkness, that the word "Arya" was plainly used in the Veda to describe not a racial group, but a quality of being and a culture, a dedication to the truth and readiness to fight for it - all this was simply brushed aside, and whole edifice was promptly erected on these non-existent foundations.

David Frawley the American eminent teacher and practitioner of Ayurvedic medicine has said that:

"The Aryan Invasion Theory was propounded before archaeological excavations were carried out in undivided India. Modern scientific tools had shown that the mighty river Saraswati existed and was not a mythical one as had been claimed. So also the river Rishadvati. Similar was the fallacy that the people of the Harappan civilization were unaware of maritime life. In fact, there were 150 references to the ocean in the Rigveda alone, and these could not be dismissed as poetic imagery or symbolism. Dr. Frawley said archaeological excavations were throwing up new information, and one should not swear by what was in the textbooks written 30 or 40 years ago. The theory was imposed by Western scholars to show that India was always ruled by invaders. The fact was to the contrary. There was movement of people from India to outside, and even today, there was archaeological and linguistic evidence to show Indian influence in countries such as Iran and Central Asia, he added.

(source: India, the only former colony not to rewrite history

Kot Diji belonged to the Regionalization Era[27] of IVC/SSC. This phase was the final critical one that led to the formation of urban centers. This phase thrived between 3300 BCE and 2600 BCE.

Sir Walter Raleigh (1552-1618) English sea captain, writer and court favorite of Queen Elizabeth I, in his 'History of the World' strongly suggests that the Paradise of the Bible was in India, as according to Hindu hypothesis regarding the locality of the nursery for rearing mankind, 'India was the first planted and peopled countries after the flood (p. 99). This book was held in high esteem at that time. Both Cromwell and John Locke recommended his book.

(source: The Aryan Hoax: That Dupes The Indians - By Paramesh Choudhary p.226 and Hinduism in The Space Age - By E. Vedavyas p. 82-83 and 108-109).

Two years later, the German Sanskritist Hermann Jacobi based his objections on astronomical data in the Rig-Veda, which he found pointed clearly to a date between 4500 and 2500 B.C. Jacobi inferred that the Rig-Veda could not be more recent that this last date, in contradiction with the invasionist school. A later German scholar, Moritz Winternitz, agreed with the date of 2500 BC on literary grounds: "We cannot explain the development of the whole of this great (Sanskrit) literature if we assume as late a date as round about 1200 BC or 1500 BC as its starting point."

British scholar F. E. Pargiter in his Ancient Indian Historical Tradition yet his inquiry into historical data from the Puranas led him, in 1972, to conclusions opposite to the accepted theories. With a rare commonsense, he first noted that

"there is a strong presumption in favor of (Indian) tradition; if anyone contests tradition, the burden lies on him to show that it is wrong."
According to marine scientists in India, archaeological remains of this lost city have been discovered 36 metres (120 feet) underwater in the Gulf of Cambay off the western coast of India. And carbon dating says that they are 9,500 years old.

This news completely contradicts the position of most Western historians and archaeologists, who (because it did not fit their theories) have always rejected, ignored, or suppressed evidence of an older view of mankind's existence on planet Earth. Human civilization is now provably much more ancient than many have believed.

According to the BBC's Tom Housden, reporting on the Cambay find:

The vast city — which is five miles long and two miles wide — is believed to predate the oldest known remains in the subcontinent by more than 5,000 years.

The site was discovered by chance last year by oceanographers from India's National Institute of Ocean Technology, who were conducting a survey of pollution.

Using sidescan sonar, which sends a beam of sound waves down to the bottom of the ocean, they identified huge geometrical structures at a depth of 120 feet.

Debris recovered from the site — including construction material, pottery, sections of walls, beads, sculpture, and human bones and teeth — has been carbon dated and found to be nearly 9,500 years old (BBC article).

Several reports confirm this estimate. Housden added, "The whole model of the origins of civilisation will have to be remade from scratch."

Unheard-of Scope of Cambay Ruins

The BBC article tells us that the remains of this ancient city stand upon "enormous foundations." Marine archaeologists discovered them with a technology known as "sub-bottom profiling."

Author and filmmaker Graham Hancock, an authority on archaeological investigations of ancient civilizations, reportedly said that the evidence was compelling. For example, he said that the oceanographers had found two large blocks that were larger than anything that's ever been found. "Cities on this scale," Hancock told BBC Online, "are not known in the archaeological record until roughly 4,500 years ago when the first big cities begin to appear in Mesopotamia.

Theorists are postulating that the area where this city exists was submerged when the ice caps melted at the end of the last Ice Age.

"A month ago in mid-January [2002]," says Hancock on his website, "marine scientists in India announced they had sonar images of square and rectangular shapes about 130 feet down off the northwestern coast of India in the Gulf of Khambhat (Cambay). . . . [There are] sonar shapes with 90-degree angles. The Indian Minister of Science and Technology ordered that the site be dredged. What was found has surprised archaeologists around the world" (GrahamHancock.com/news.)

The Find Includes Human Remains

Linda Moulton Howe, who investigates occurrences of this type worldwide, interviewed Michael Cremo about this new discovery. Cremo is a researcher and author of the book Forbidden Archaeology. Cremo, Howe said, has visited India and attended local meetings about the Cambay site.

"Within the past few months," Cremo told her, "the engineers began some dredging operations there and they pulled up human fossil bones, fossil wood, stone tools, pieces of pottery, and many other things that indicated that it indeed was a human habitation site that they had. And they were able to do more intensive sonar work there and were able to identify more structures. They appeared to have been laid out on the bank of a river that had been flowing from the Indian subcontinent out into that area."

According to Howe:

Even if we don't know what the cultural background of the people is, if it does happen to be a city that is 9500 years old, that is older than the Sumerian civilization by several thousand years. It is older than the Egyptian, older than the Chinese. So it would radically affect our whole picture of the development of urban civilization on this planet.

Now, if it further happens that additional research is able to identify the culture of the people who lived in that city that's now underwater — if it turns out they are a Vedic people, which I think is quite probable given the location of this off the coast of India — I think that would radically change the whole picture of Indian history which has basically been written by Western archaeologists.

(source: 9,500-Year-Old City Found Underwater Off India).

Indian civilisation '9,000 years old'
http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/world/south_asia/newsid_1763000/1763950.stm
Marine scientists in India say an archaeological site off India's western coast may be up to 9,000 years old.

http://www.atributetohinduism.com/aryan_invasion_theory.htm#Evidence%20from%20Archaeology

Answer 2

There are no traces of ancient Hindu temples north of Nepal or south of Indonesia. The most eastern ancient Hindu temple is in Mỹ Sơn in Vietnam. There are no traces of ancient Hindu temples west of Afghanistan. There is no evidence that Hinduism ever spread outside southeast Asia during ancient times. There is very little similarity between Hinduism and the other religions of the ancient world.
It is true that Islam and Buddhism have replaced Hinduism in large parts of southeast Asia.
Nowadays, Hinduism has spread to many parts of the world, largely because the British and Dutch needed Indian or Indonesian workers in other parts of their empires during the 19th and early 20th century.

Answer 3

Well look at he map of the ancient world the Persian empire 500BC stretched from Egypt to the Indus River. Saying there was no link then is like saying that people from New york don't influence people from California its just obvious. You find Mandalas in Bud dist monasteries and In Hopi sweat lodges Just because there is no record that has not of yet been found does not mean that there is no ancient link from south America all the way to the vikings. No man is an Island and the ancients were not stupid there brains were as large as ours they just didn't bother to right every thing down. We all have the same hardware and all have the same Roots.Since we all are of the same family the old stories. if we could trace them back would all lead to the same campfire.

Answer 4

Current archeaological and literary evidence suggests that Hinduism was formed somewhere between 1500-1300 BCE, based on the composition of the Rig Veda.

Unlike the Greeks and the Egyptians, the ancient Indian scholars as well as kings had very little sense of history and therefore they left no true historical accounts of their times.

Answer 5

Hinduism has roots back to 3000 BC and originates from the Indus River region. This is around the same time as the existence of Judaism in the "fertile crescent" area of the modern day Middle East. This was before Christianity and long before Islam.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hinduism#Origins_of_Hinduism

Answer 6

The ancient world as a whole was not hindu OR WICCAN. There was no one organized religion, but most societies were animists or just plain polytheistic.

Answer 7

I don't know, but I like that concept since many of my beliefs are akin to Hinduism. I am studying it now to get a better idea of the concepts.

Answer 8

The ancient world where?

Answer 9

In immediately's 'Secular' India, unhappy to declare, that's real! isn't it unusual? mutually as our neighbour chosen to call itself a "Muslim state", we --perfect around the corner--called ourselves 'Secular'! That very minute, our issues began! Sitting in our very own united states of america, those minority Indian "secular" forces ridicule, misguide, and rebuke maximum human beings Hindus. in spite of the incontrovertible fact that it is the very nature of the Hindus, which cause them to tolerant to a huge quantity! No offence meant to every physique or team of persons. that's in user-friendly terms my fact. of direction, there's a shrink, whilst they're going to erupt.

Answer 10

Not Sumerian,was the First culture , 5000 year ago.

Answer 11

Ancient world WHERE? Your question is hideously vague.