In Search of the Cradle of Civilization: New Light on Ancient India [Hardcover]

Element Books Ltd. (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 1, 1995

A scholarly tour de force that will revolutionize the way we view the ancient world.

Editorial Reviews

From Library Journal

With this work, the authors, all three renowned Yoga and Vedic scholars with multiple publications to their names, set out to challenge the generally held theory that advanced culture began in Sumer in southern Mesopotamia. Relying on a reexamination of redated Vedic literature and denying that an "Aryan invasion" from the north ever took place, which allegedly would have introduced advanced culture into India at a relatively late date, they claim instead that advanced culture already existed in the Indus valley?before the flourishing of Sumer. The work is broad in scope, well documented, and extensively illustrated. Although this book is written for the lay reader, the authors hope that it will stir the scholarly world as well. Public and academic libraries will want to have this title.?Ria Koopmans-de Bruijn, C.V. Starr East Asian Lib., Columbia Univ.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Review

For decades, schoolbooks have taught that Sumer was the cradle of civilization. conventional scholarship has also held that Aryan civilization came to India by way of invasions from the north. In Search of the Cradle of Civilization: New Light on Ancient India is a ground-breaking book wherein three renowned scholars show that there was no "Aryan invasion", and that India, not Sumer, was the cradle of civilized humanity. Through exploring the rich symbols, metaphors, and myths of the Vedas, we can examine the wealth of India's spirituality and discover its relevance for today's world. -- Midwest Book Review

Product Details

• Hardcover: 341 pages
• Publisher: Quest Books; First Quest Edition edition (October 1, 1995)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0835607208
• ISBN-13: 978-0835607209
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6.3 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.6 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (54 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,290,109 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

86 of 99 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Renders all previous studies of Ancient India obsolete., April 27, 2001

By 

tepi "tepi" - See all my reviews
(TOP 1000 REVIEWER)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: In Search of the Cradle of Civilization: New Light on Ancient India (Hardcover)

George Feuerstein is an excellent writer who is always lively and has many fine books to his credit. In the present book he and his two collaborators - Sanskritist Subhash Kak and Vedic scholar David Frawley - have set out to bring us up to speed on the true nature of Ancient India and the profound importance and continuing significance of Indian thought for world civilization.

By fully taking into account the mass of evidence which has been accumulating over the past century, evidence from archaeology, satellite surveys, linguistic studies, etc., which a Eurocentric and reactionary 'educational' establishment continues to ignore, the authors have written an exciting and revolutionary book which pretty well renders obsolete all previous studies of Ancient India. In other words, it is a book which clearly demonstrates that much of what we have been taught about Ancient India (and which our highly paid academics continue to teach) is complete nonsense. But perhaps this will surprise no-one.

The book falls into two parts. In the first we learn that there was no such thing as an 'Aryan invasion' of India. It is a myth based upon a few idle conjectures of Max Muller along with a couple of scraps of misinterpreted evidence, an ideology masquerading as historical 'fact' (as is so much else today) because it fitted in so well with the Imperialist ambitions and racialism of the West.

India has always been multi-racial and multi-cultural, and the 'Aryans' were there all along. The cities of Harappa and Mohenjo Daro were abandoned, not because of any supposed 'Aryan invasion,' but for the simple reason that the vast and sustaining Sarasvati river dried up c.1900 B.C., and the people of the Indus-Sarasvati civilization had to relocate further East to the region of the Ganges.

The Indians have no memory of an 'Aryan invasion.' There is no evidence of an invasion and no sign of the cultural break that such an invasion would have caused. On the contrary, India exhibits a striking continuity of culture which qualifies it as the world's oldest living continuous civilization, and one that stretches back to at least 6000 B.C, if not much further.

As portrayed by the authors, the rich and highly advanced Indus-Sarasvati civilization - a civilization of sages, priests, philosophers, scientists, mathematicians, musicians, astronomers, artists, architects, engineeers, navigators, artisans, farmers and merchants covered an area of over 300,000 square miles (in contrast to Ancient Egypt's 15,000 square miles and Sumer's even smaller area). It held over 2500 settlements, towns, and cities, and conducted an extensive commerce with Arabia, Africa, and the Middle East. Also, where influences can be determined, they flowed, not from West to East but from East to West. In short, pace Sumerian scholar Samuel Noah Kramer, everything did not begin in Sumer. It was neither Sumer nor Egypt that was the cradle of civilization. It was India.

Chapter 9, 'Why the Aryan Invasion Never Happened: Seventeen Arguments,' summarizes and concludes Part I of the book. Part II, 'The Splendor of Ancient India: Its Cultural and Spiritual Legacy' provides a stimulating overview of the spiritual heritage of Ancient India, the birth of science, the astronomical basis of the Vedic myths, the powerful and long-continuing influence of India on the West, and the Vedas and Perennial Wisdom.

We learn that the Vedas are of staggering importance. Far from being a mere collection of myths, they represent a crystallization, in symbolic code, of the incredibly ancient wisdom of a balanced and harmonious civilization in which science and religion were not, as with us, opposed, but were mutually involved in the pursuit of truths which had the aim of bringing both man and society into harmony with the cosmos.

Sadly the Vedas, written as they are in a difficult archaic Sanskrit, are little studied even in India, and are even less understood. Given the increasing degeneracy of modern civilization, it is a blessing that a handful of determined scholars have today set about extracting the knowledge from this precious repository that could, if rightly used, help restore us to sanity.

One of the most appreciative interpreters of the Vedas today is the Roman Catholic priest and Professor of Religious Studies, Raimundo Panikkar, and readers are referred to his superb anthology of beautifully translated extracts with detailed commentaries, The Vedic Experience: Mantramanjari (an Anthology of the Vedas for Modern Man....

Here is a brief extract. It clearly shows a quality of sensibility that we have lost and something of what we must relearn from "the treasures of Asian understanding" if, in the words of British scholar, scientist, and sinologist Joseph Needham, "our civilization [is not] to go down in history as distorted and evil" (p.167):

"Now Dawn with her earliest light shines forth,

beloved of the Sky,

Fresh from her toilet, conscious of her beauty,

she emerges visible for all to see.

Dawn, Daughter of Heaven, lends us her lustre,

dispersing all shadows of malignity,

Arousing from deep slumber all that lives,

stirring to motion man and beast and bird,

This maiden infringes not the Eternal Law,

day after day coming to the place appointed" (Panikkar, pages 164-65).

Sanskrit and English belong to the same family of languages, and we naturally resonate with family. Official spokesmen of a Eurocentric West continue to promote the arrogant and wholly false belief that "we have nothing to learn from the East." A few hours spent with Feuerstein, Kak, and Frawley's timely and significant study will soon convince you of the foolishness of such a notion. Don't miss this fascinating and extremely important book.

Another book that is highly relevant to this issue is that of the Indian scholar Shrikant G. Talageri, Aryan Invasion Theory (A Reappraisal). Using the latest findings of comparative linguistics and archaeology, he has taken on the 'invasionists' or proponents of the Invasion Theory, effectively demolished their case, and established that northern India is the original home of the Indo-European family of languages.

His is an extremely well-written and well-researched book that anyone who is at all interested in India's history would find fascinating. The author later went on to write a second book, Rigveda: A Historical Analysis, which so powerfully reinforced his thesis that Harvard University wrote to him and offered him a "fully-paid scholarship" if he would agree henceforth to be "flexible" in his views (p.vi, Preface to the First Reprint) as it seems he was making a certain invasionist very uncomfortable there. Happily for us the author, as an honorable man, refused, preferring truth over pelf and prestige.

Would that the world held more such scholars as Feuerstein and Talageri!

28 of 32 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Interesting but weakly argued, January 4, 2000

By 

"bluejay54" - See all my reviews

This review is from: In Search of the Cradle of Civilization: New Light on Ancient India (Hardcover)

As a student of yoga and lover of Indian culture, I found the thesis very interesting: Harappan (Indus/Saraswati) civilization was the first human civilization, preceding even Sumer, but climatic changes forced abandonment of the oldest settlements and a move eastward to the Ganges, leading directly to classical Indian culture. All this is supposedly evidenced in the Rg Veda and supported by theory and data. However, there is little genuine "sifting through the latest archaeological, geological and linguistic evidence" [back cover blurb]. The coverage is unbalanced at best, with conclusions apparently selected to conform to prior beliefs and standards of evidence occasionally changed to do so. For example, professional historians cannot be trusted because their fear of losing tenure prevents them from challenging widely-held views [3]. Yet we later learn that the Rg Veda is in a state of "near-perfect preservation" [201] because scholarly consensus says so, or that a "growing number of geologists converge" [91] on the view that the Saraswati dried up ~1900 BCE, forcing the Harappan peoples eastward. That scholarly opinions are true when useful plays well to American anti-intellectualism, but is a two-edged sword. The book is badly uninformed about science and scientists, who "observe cause-and-effect relationships" [217] (imagine Hume and Kant rolling in their graves!). They decry the "ever popular archaeological preoccupation with pottery shards [98]" but, like it or not, the major data of archaeologists is pot shards; to fault them for it is a little like criticizing meterologists for being preoccupied with precipitation. Map 2 [52] depicts the "recently proposed [Indo-Aryan] homelands" of 10 scholars, only 2 of which are discussed or cited in their "Select Bibliography." (Select is right!) Overall, this book is balanced historically and archaeologically by Time/Life's Ancient India: Land of Mystery. Diagrams are pathetically small (~2.5" x 3"), so you must squint and squint to get the picture. Important diagrams are absent; for example, why no NASA photos of the Deccan plateau showing the dried Saraswati riverbed? The section on the astronomical code is interesting but better covered in Kramrisch's superb Presence of Siva. Part Two's review of Vedic spirituality seems out of place; the space would have been better spent developing their arguments, although Ch. 11 presents an interesting account of Vedic ritual as cosmological homology. The most important explicit point?-Plate tectonic movements dried up the Saraswati, forcing abandonment of Harrapan cities and the move eastward. This is supposedly evidenced in the Rg Veda, but there is no critical review or any attempt to date its books. The most interesting factoid?-Vivekenanda visited the aged Max Muller in England in 1896 [259]. The most important implicit point?-The Rg Veda is poorly understood and poorly translated. Think of any other Easter philosophical/religious classic-I Ching, Tao te Ching, Yoga Sutras-and a dozen good contemporary translations come easily to mind. Not so the Rg Veda. For that we have one old bad translation and one modern scholarly selection. One wishes these authors would collaborate on their strongest point in what could be their best contribution: a good contemporary translation of the Rg Veda. Overall, this book is a mostly interesting read (I finished Section Two with some effort)-but find it in your library and not a bookstore.

18 of 21 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Interesting but weakly argued, December 23, 1999

By 

"bluejay54" - See all my reviews

This review is from: In Search of the Cradle of Civilization: New Light on Ancient India (Hardcover)

As a student of yoga and lover of Indian culture, I am interested in Indian history and Vedic spirituality. The main point of this book is that Harappan (Indus/Saraswati) civilization is the first human civilization, preceding even Sumer, and led directly to classical Indian culture. There is little genuine "sifting through the latest archaeological, geological and linguistic evidence" [back cover blurb]. Instead, the authors present an unbalanced review, with conclusions apparently selected to conform to prior beliefs and the standards of evidence occasionally changed to do so. For example, although professional historians cannot be trusted because their fear of losing tenure prevents them from challenging widely-held views [3], we later we learn that the Rg Veda is in a state of "near-perfect preservation" [201] because scholarly consensus says so. Likewise, a "growing number of geologists converge" [91] on the view that the Saraswati dried up ~1900 BCE and forced the Harappan peoples eastward toward the Ganges. Believing something to be both true and not-true at the same time may be very Eastern, but cheap play upon American anti-intellectualism is a two-edged sword. The book is badly uninformed about science: scientists "observe cause-and-effect relationships" [217]-imagine Hume and Kant rolling in their graves over that one! And they decry the "ever popular archaeological preoccupation with pottery shards [98]"-well, it bored me it graduate school too, but like it or not, the major data of archaeologists is pot shards. Regarding Indo-Aryan origins, Map 2 [52] depicts the "recently proposed homelands" of 10 scholars-only 2 of which are cited in their "Select Bibliography." (Select is right!) Most diagrams are pathetically small (~2.5" x 3"), so you must squint and squint to get the picture. Important diagrams are absent; for example, why no NASA photos of the Deccan plateau showing the ancient, dried riverbed of the Saraswati? The section on the astronomical code is interesting but better covered in S. Kramrisch's superb Presence of Siva. The review of Vedic spirituality (Part Two) seems out of place and the space would have been better spent developing their arguments, although Ch. 11 presents an interesting account of Vedic ritual as cosmological homology. The most important explicit point?-Plate tectonic movements dried up the Saraswati, forcing abandonment of the oldest Harrapan cities and the move eastward to the Ganges, as evidenced in the Rg Veda. But no data or theories are sifted through (and where's that NASA photo anyway?). The most interesting factoid?-Vivekenanda visited the aged Max Muller in England in 1896 [259]. The most important implicit point?-The Rg Veda is poorly understood and poorly translated. Think of any other Easter philosophical/religious classic-I Ching, Tao te Ching, Yoga Sutras-and a dozen good contemporary translations come easily to mind. Not so the Rg Veda. For that we have one bad old translation and one modern scholarly selection. One wishes these authors would collaborate on their strongest point in what could be their best contribution, namely a good contemporary translation of the Rg Veda. The book is balanced historically and archaeologically by Time/Life's Ancient India: Land of Mystery. Overall, this book is a mostly interesting read (I finished Section Two with some effort)-but find it in your library and not a bookstore.