Abstract
It has been two decades since Subhash Kak developed a chronological framework for Indian culture, which set a paradigm for plausible chronology of Vedic literature and the Mahābhārata. This paper builds on the work by tethering the Mahābhārata to 1900-1500 BC, and using Purāṇic tradition to set a chronological framework for Indian History since the onset of the Holocene, i.e. 11,600 years BP. This will propose a reconciliation between 1- Periodisation of the Indus-Sarasvatī Civilisation, 2- Chronology of Vedic Culture, 3- Yuga-Manvantara System and 4- Prominent Purāṇic legends and names.
Introduction
In his works Timaeus and Critias, Plato wrote of the land of Atlantis, of which he heard through his ancestor, Solon. Solon, the story goes, heard of Atlantis at a temple in Egypt. Whether the story is true or not need not detain us. What’s notable is that while the Egyptians looked to the Greeks as children, they considered themselves the descendants of an even older civilisation. The discovery of megalithic Gobekli Tepe, dated to at least 9000 BC, challenges general timelines for agriculture, wheel, pottery and other aspects of the Neolithic Revolution. In other words, we now know that civilisational history goes back deeper in time than has been generally thought. In the words of Graham Hancock, who thinks of us as a species with amnesia—“stuff just keeps on getting older.”
India offers a good example of this trajectory. Indian history first dawns with Alexander’s arrival, as if it did not exist before the European mind turned to it. Accordingly, the evidence of Vedic literature was bundled to a few centuries preceding Buddha, and of the Purāṇic was dismissed altogether. Then the mounds of Harappa and Mohenjo-Daro emerged from the buried millennia, and reluctantly Indian history was pushed to the 4th millennium BC. Now, with Mehrgarh and Bhirrana discovered, dates prior to the 9th millennium BC are visible on the horizon.
In the reconstruction of ancient Indian history, Pargiter’s work was foundational and Kak’s seminal. Kak showed that dating the Mahābhārata is an important tether in ancient Indian history, which inevitably impacts how Pargiter’s genealogical reconstruction is fixed in time. Kak’s options for the Mahābhārata—2400 BC, 1900 BC and 1500 BC—are in broad agreement with archaeological considerations (Benedetti). Earlier dates are derived from astronomical readings, but no two readings are in agreement. Unlike archaeological timestamps, astronomical ones can transmit through time. This makes them unsuited as the guiding light in tethering history. They must be supplementary, and reconciled with other data.
Temporal constraints on Ṛg Vedic (and by extension, Purāṇic) history are placed by the issue of proto-Indo-European (PIE) and Indo-European (IE) dispersals from the homeland. These are surveyed by Mallory-Adams, Bryant and in a previous paper. The framework used here is that by Tonoyan-Belyayev, where the classical Ṛg Vedic period coincides with the Mature Harappan (2600-1900 BC). This gives a second, broad tether for Indian history, beginning with the Mahābhārata at 1900-1500 BC. This agrees with Kak’s assessment—“we think it prudent to consider 2000 BC as the divide between the early Vedic and the later Vedic literature.”
Prior to this window is the zone of uncertainty, for even the Ṛg Vedic timestamp is of no help. But Kak again—“New findings are leading to a new view of ancient India, revealing substantial convergence between the archaeological record and the literary tradition.” This paper agrees with the assessment, and finds a new mapping of literary tradition from the first manvantara onwards. It proposes a new framework, where four fundamental pillars are reconciled for a new paradigm of Indian history since the Holocene (this has already been anticipated by Ravi):
- Periodisation of the Indus-Sarasvatī Civilisation (ISC)
- Periodisation of Vedic literature, PIE origins and IE dispersals
- Yuga-Manvantara Periodisation of Indian Tradition
- Purāṇic legends, stories, myth, protagonists
This is done by beginning at prehistory, in the last glacial period which lies beyond epistemological event horizons for linguistics and archaeology.
Geological Scale
Geological epochs are measured through the advance and retreat of world glaciers, or Glacial Periods. The Last Glacial Period (LGP) was 115,000-11,700 years BP. During this period there were alternating glacial advances and retreats, with 22,000 years BP being the period of Last Glacial Maximum (LGM)—when world glaciers were at their most advanced. A general de-glaciation followed the LGM, ice sheets beginning to recede 19,000 years BP. This was the Holocene glacial retreat.
12,800 years BP, the planet was pushed into a minor ice age—a return to glacial conditions—called the Younger Dryas period. It precipitated a sharp drop in global temperatures, impacts lasting for ~1,000 years. At the end of the Younger Dryas, by 9500 BC, begins the Holocene era—the great epoch of homo sapiens. Prior to the Holocene, our species occupied the lower latitudes while all of Eurasia was dominated by Neanderthals and Denisovans. After the Holocene set in we proliferated across the planet. It provides an epistemological event horizon to all of our history, technology, linguistics and civilisation—only genetics beginning to penetrate through it.
Human technological development maps along the above with a lithic scale, stemming from the Greek lithos, or stone. Prior to the Holocene we were Palaeolithic, or of archaic Stone Age. With a brief intermediary of the Mesolithic, in the Holocene we progressed to the Neolithic, or new Stone Age. The Neolithic is characterised by the appearance of agriculture, animal husbandry and pottery in the archaeological record—the antecedents of civilisation. Not all human groups followed these stages together, and different periods are noticed in different parts of the world. Similarly disparately, with a transitional Chalcolithic or Copper Age, following the Neolithic, we eventually moved to the age of metal—Bronze and Iron. In India, Iron Age appears by 2nd-1st millennia BC.
The above is a broad summarisation, and carries several implications that are covered in consequent sections. For now, it gives us the first pillar of our chronological framework—the geological.
Indus-Sarasvatī Periodisation
Palaeolithic hominids are first attested in India through the Sohavian Culture, dated from the 2nd interglacial period. By 200,000 years BP these ancestors move to the Acheulian Culture, a broad generalisation for a characteristic stone tool technology found in parts of Africa, Europe and Asia. Neanderthal remains have not been found in India, but stone tools remarkably similar to those associated with them have. The middle Palaeolithic, a period spanning from 300,000 to 30,000 years ago BP, was characterised in India by extreme cold and aridity in the northern latitudes and high altitudes, and lowered sea levels along the coastlines. Findings from Baghor, in the Son Valley, during this period attest to deep antiquity of mother goddess worship in India.
The Holocene onset sees increased rainfall, growth of plant and animal life, and rise in sea levels. This brings population displacements and increased availability of food resources. Associated with this are reduction in nomadism and seasonal sedentarism. The early Holocene, or Mesolithic, is when the earliest evidence is found of ritual human burials, and of rock paintings (in India). Mesolithic Indian sites are found in the Gangetic Plains, West Bengal’s Delta, the western coastline near Mumbai and in Kerala. From such antecedents, by around 10,000 years BP, a Neolithic revolution commences.
The earliest period at Mehrgarh, IA, began around 6600 BC. At this level, subsistence was a combination of hunting, plant cultivation and stock-breeding. Varieties of wheat and barley were cultivated, and the houses were made of mud-bricks. These bricks are in the ratio 4:2:1, the same that would be found in Harappan cities more than 2000 years later. Wheel-made pottery appears by ~4000 BC and complex, ceramic pottery soon follows. Village cultures around Mehrgarh display copper-bronze metallurgy by this time, and in the 3rd millennium BC this culture begins to merge with that emanating from the Indus-Sarasvatī.
Earliest readings from Bhirrana come at 7500 BC, when people lived in underground dwelling-pits, coated with alluvium from the Sarasvatī soil. The site shows a continuous sequence of archaeological development up to the Late Harappan in 1800 BC. Dikshit divides the pre-Harappan stages at Bhirrana into Neolithic I (7500-6000 BC), IIA (6000-4500 BC, transition to ground dwellings), IIB (4500 BC onwards, coinciding with Early Harappan) and III (3000 BC onwards, Mature Harappan). Civilisational development in the Sarasvatī Valley is attested through sites like Bhirrana, Sothi, Siswal, Kunal, Banawali, Rakhigarhi and Kalibangan.
Other parts of India continued during these periods through Mesolithic-Neolithic trajectories of their own. Lahuradewa in UP attests to an early farming culture commencing the 7th millennium BC. A radiocarbon dating here for oryza sativa, or domesticated rice, yields a date of 6409 BC, placing it among the earliest known dates for rice cultivation. Jhusi, near Prayagraj, shows evidence of Neolithic inhabitation since the 8th millennium BC, and Chalcolithic in the Gangetic Plains is attested from 3rd millennium BC onwards.
South India at this time was going through a civilizational trajectory of its own, albeit slower than the one in the north. This is partly explained by the stark differences in geography. North India is a fertile plain watered by multiple rivers running across alluvium and vast tracts of habitable land. Cutting through Maharashtra, Madhya Pradesh, Orissa and Bengal are a series of mountains and dense forests that made navigation between the north and south extremely difficult in ancient eras, equally hindering cultural exchange. Further, most of south India is a hilly plateau that yields arable land only near select deltas and the southern tip, playing a crucial role in civilizational trajectory.
A recent study which need be investigated more suggests that wetland rice cultivation was being practiced in Sri Lanka as far back at 15000 BC. We know that the Indian coastline extended further out during the last Ice Age ~12000 BC. South India’s civilizational artefacts might lie buried under the ocean, and its true history might be revealed from underwater explorations rather than surface archaeology. Tamil tradition hints at this, as will be detailed.
Archaeological testimony converges on the Harappan Civilisation, where three broad periods were divided by Keyoner into regionalisation, integration and localisation eras. All of these form the 2nd pillar of our framework.
PIE Origins, IE Dispersals and Vedic Chronology
The previous pillars are relatively non-controversial, and differences in opinion do not disturb the broad consensus overmuch. They deal with what might be consider harder sciences—geology and archaeology. But despite linguistics’, and specifically comparative linguistics’, scientific contours, the landscape here is highly contentious. While the Holocene sets an event horizon for comparative linguistics, language itself goes into prehistory. To Cavalli-Sforza, “the family tree relating human populations corresponds to another relating the languages of the world.” Against this, van Driem cautions—“linguistic ancestors are not the same set of people as genetic ancestors.”
Following genetic linkages, modern humans that introduced Asia’s proto-languages are thought to have entered the continent 38,000-25,000 years BP. But between 65,000 years BP and the 7th millennium BC, India’s genetic record was largely undisturbed. Genetics might help trace patterns following this, but true linguistic windows open in the Holocene, when speculations are made for proto forms of modern languages, including the Indo-European group. Consensus favours that PIE existed some time during the 4th millennium BC. Three broad waves of IE dispersals are acknowledged, but there is the issue of PIE ancestors.
The Nostratic hypothesis posits a mother language connecting various language families of Eurasia, and sometimes Africa. Behind it is the intuition that should be obvious from PIE—there exists a language family tree. PIE must have descended from a mother language and have had sister languages. In turn, this mother language had ancestors and siblings. The intuition takes us back to the linguistic event horizon, and posits a proto-Nostratic 13,000-11,000 years BP. Nostratic itself split near 7th-6th millennia BC, giving rise to proto forms of IE, Tibeto-Burman, Uralic, Dravidian and other languages.
Enter PIE by around the 4th millennium BC, from where Tonoyan-Belyayev summarises the waves of IE dispersal. Regardless of the homeland question, there is broad consensus around the chronology of these waves. This paper takes India to be the homeland as established by Talageri, Tonoyan-Belyayev and Kazanas. Objections to this are raised by Bryant, but primary reasons why India cannot be the homeland are resolved in a previous paper.
On issue of Ṛg Vedic chronology the question is framed such—when did Ṛg Vedic personalities live? Ex: Divodāsa, Sudās, Māndhātṛ, Bharadvāja, Viśvāmitra, Vasiṣṭha. Indian tradition remembers many people of these names, and considers Vedic knowledge apauruṣeya and anādi. This is fine, but any history of India need account for, as example, the specific Bharadvāja Bārhaspatya who was purohita to Divodāsa Bhārata, both of Maṇḍala 6 of the Ṛg Veda. Indian civilisation displays unparalleled continuity, so anything embedded in the Vedas clearly had antecedents of antiquity.
But linguistically, the Ṛg Vedic language is a timestamp in PIE chronology. It is a sister to other IE languages, and thus it existed at a (plausibly) identifiable point in time. Again—this is true even if Vedic knowledge-systems have long presence in the subcontinent. Invasionist/migrationist models of PIE place this timestamp near 1500 BC, a paradigm that is rejected for this paper. Instead, Tonoyan-Belyayev’s mapping of Ṛg Vedic chronology to Harappan periods is taken as framework, to which is appended Kak’s chronology of Vedic literature. With this, we now have the third pillar of our framework.
Yugas and Manvantaras
An easy way out is to discard Purāṇic chronologies altogether, especially since scientific evidence is available anyway. But India’s historical tradition has provable consonance with reality, so the baby need not be thrown out with the bath water. The Purāṇic division of time speaks of a moment as small as the truthi—1/168th of a second, to an epoch of reality that lasts 155 trillion years, all of this part of an eternal cycle of creation and destruction. Of historical relevance are the concepts of yuga and manvantara, literal readings of which throw irresolvable challenges.
Reality follows a cycle of four yugas, or the mahāyuga, consisting of Kṛta, Tretā, Dvāpara and Kali. There is a waxing and waning of time, such that the yugas descend with transitional periods before ascending similarly, and the cycle then begins anew. At the cosmological level this culminates in the days and nights of Brahmā, who lives for 100 of his own years. This totals to 155 trillion years, a figure that defies comprehension.
The four yugas are counted in devic years, one devic year consisting of 360 human years. Kṛta, Tretā, Dvāpara and Kali are respectively given to last 4800, 3600, 2400 and 1200 devic years. A mahāyuga thus last 12,000 devic years, or 4.32 million human years. To this is added the layer of manvantaras, or epochs of Manu. 1000 mahāyugas comprise of 14 manvantaras, and we are in the seventh. Six manvantaras, or 1.9 billion years, have elapsed. Tradition has it that the primary period of Ṛg Vedic composition/discovery was the Dvāpara Yuga.
Assume for now that the Kali Yuga, or the 7th Manvantara—the Current Age—has just begun, and take all figures as years BP. Dvāpara Yuga (and with it, Ṛg Vedic composition) began at least 800,000 BP, and the Kṛta commenced 3.8 million BP. Alternately, since six manvantaras have elapsed, the first began 1.9 billion BP. None of these figures make any sense against models of evolution, anthropology, cosmology, archaeology or history. The evidence speaks for itself—manvantaras and yugas have to be parsed a certain way if they are to make any historical sense.
The first step is to remove devic years. A mahāyuga lasts 12,000 human years, and a manvantara 857,143 years. This means that the first manvantara began more than 5 million years ago, still making no historical sense. In fact, there exists in the definitions of yuga and manvantara the reason to delink them. As epochs of Manu, or man, or historical markers, manvantaras reckon only as far as cultural memory goes. In any case, humanity arose long after reality, the latter following a cosmological mahāyuga pattern that transcends human history.
There are infinite mahāyugas, and to tether history to cosmology we need take the first manvantara to trigger a new mahāyuga cycle—our window of history. With the first manvantara, the era of Svāyambhuva Manu, began the first Kṛta Yuga of our reckoning. But as historical markers, manvantaras do not follow discrete cycles of waxing and waning. They are reset with the arbitrariness of historical trajectory, each manvantara in reality a new historical marker of culture and memory. Manvantaras and yugas thus overlap, and then there is the issue of nesting. Within each yuga is another mahāyuga cycle, such that all four yugas contain four yugas within them. This is fractal and infinite, as reality is, and is in line with general Indian thought of universal transcendence. Historically, only the nested cycle within our mahāyuga need concern us. To assign chronology to all of this, one has to begin at the Mahābhārata. This is because the tether helps establish not only temporal distance from attested history (Nandas, Mauryas), but also to Vaivasvat Manu—the seventh historical marker. In other words, if we have a date for the Mahābhārata we have a way to date all prior Indian history.
Assessing all conjectures for the Mahābhārata, Kak points to 2400, 1900 and 1500 BC as the plausible candidates for the Great War. Benedetti finds strong archaeological evidence for 1500 BC, but Kak sees 2000 BC as a kind of definitive marker between Vedic and Mahābhārata eras. If dates prior to this are to be considered, they need be reconciled to all pillars of the historical framework—geological, archaeological, linguistic/Vedic, Yuga-Manvantara and Purāṇic. Dates of 3100 BC, or 5500 BC, are not considered here because they do not satisfy the overall framework. With 1900 BC as the best fit, all other dates can be derived.
Pargiter establishes 94 generations between Vaivasvat Manu and the generation that fought in the Mahābhārata. With 25 years for each generation, this is a period of 2350 years, which can be generalised to 2500 years, i.e. Vaivasvat Manu lived in ~4400 BC. As it is compatible with the framework, it is noted here that at around 4500 BC a break is found in India’s skeletal record. This is vague evidence, but it gives a compatible marker for Vaivasvat Manu. The seventh manvantara thus maps, broadly, to the PIE window and to the pre-Harappan era, 4500 BC onwards. This leaves six prior manvantaras to reconcile.
Proto-history in Indian tradition is marked by a number of flood and geological myths. In the era of Svāyambhuva, the first Manu, the Daitya Hiraṇyākṣa digs up the earth and submerges it under water. Svāyambhuva prays to Mahāviṣṇu, who incarnates as the Varāha and defeats Hiraṇyākṣa, restoring the earth above the waters. Genealogically, within a few generations is the primordial conflict between Indra and Vṛtra. Geologically, Vṛtra is the great locking up of world-waters prior to the Holocene, exacerbated more during the Younger Dryas. His defeat at Indra’s hands releases these waters, the maho arṇaḥ, and begins history. Both these myths are memory of the situation as it would have been at Holocene onset. Rising sea-levels would have flooded all of India’s coastline, and deglaciation would have released angry, torrential rivers down the mountains. In some Purāṇic versions, the tale of Varāha is a pure geological myth and does not feature Hiraṇyākṣa at all.
Svāyambhuva Manu is thus placed at the onset of Holocene, i.e. 9500 BC. This is not to say that Indian civilisational memory and continuity begin here. A number of generations in genealogy precede his period, beginning with Brahmā—the first being. Who is Brahmā to historical tradition? He is the realization by early Indians that an inherent creative principle lay behind the world as they knew it. As humans are wont to do, they imagined this principle as a larger version of themselves, possessed of mentality and sapience as they were, but also of superhuman abilities they lacked. He was called Brahmā, and in the beginning he was alone.
This anthropic interpretation was not the result of primitive thinking. There exists a controversial psychological hypothesis called the Bicameral Mind. It argues that ancient humanity’s mind was initially split in two, in a state akin to schizophrenia, where it was not yet aware of its own thought processes. Julian Jaynes theorized that humans were bicameral as recently as 3,000 years ago, and that they thought the voices in their heads to be Gods commanding them. The theory is highly controversial and has never found mainstream support, but behind it lies an important intuition.
All mammals are sentient creatures, but only our species is sapient—self aware and capable of understanding the subjectivity of its experience. The transition from sentience to sapience, whether a singular switch or a long continuum, represents humanity becoming aware of itself. The emergence of ego and true consciousness. Brahmā is the symbolic first man who gazed into the abyss. The self born, i.e. the first to become self-aware. He is both what gazes and what gazes back. What listens and what is heard. Both It and Not It. Both Brahmā and Abraham. The two parts of the bicameral mind become whole, the first true human consciousness.
The self-born, the self-existent, he desired to create and play. From his mind he produced offspring, first the Kumāras Sanaka, Sananda, Sanat and Sanātana. Brahmā asked them to go forth and reproduce, to populate all of creation such that he would never be alone again. But these mind-born sons, themselves endowed with deep mentality, wished instead to explore the inner universe and dedicated themselves to meditation. So Brahmā produced more sons, each a thinker in his own right- Rudra, Marīcī, Atri, Aṅgira, Pulastya, Pulaha, Krātu, Bhṛgu, Vasiṣṭha, Dakṣa, Nārada and Kardama. Then came a daughter, Vāc or Speech.
This forms the earliest layer of Indian proto-history, and it sheds light on human proto-history. The tale of Brahmā and his earliest generation is a memory of the evolution of consciousness and consequently of language, or speech. In an exaggerated interpretation, Brahmā and his first progeny were the first modern human tribe with consciousness and language. They represent the turning of the human mind inwards, to existential questions on mentality and the nature of consciousness. There was a time when humanity first looked at the mirror and realized that its own reflection stared back, and later humans remembered this seminal event in their ancestors’ lives.
In other accounts Brahmā creates directly the four primary groups of beings- Devas, Asuras, Pitṛs and Mānavas. We get a different etymology of these names in such accounts. Born of Brahmā’s effulgent divinity, or the root word div, the Devas are so named. Born of his breath, or asu, do the Asuras get their name. And born of his mind, or manas, are the Mānavas. These groups are born in the cosmic waters, or ambhas, and some beings resolve to protect ambhas while others wish to devour it. Those given to protection, or rakṣā, are called Rākṣasas while those given to destruction, or kṣi, are called Yakṣas. Also born through Brahmā are Bhūtas, Piśācas, Gandharvas, birds, goats, sheep, cows, horses, donkeys, oxen, deer, camels, boards, dogs, elephants, predators, medical herbs, plants, creepers, fruits and roots. Not for nothing is Brahmā considered the creative aspect in Hindu trinity.
Interestingly, some Purāṇas give a list of domesticated animals and add humankind to the list- cows, goats, sheep, horses, mules, donkeys and humans. This contains not only the memory of a wild existence, but also the wisdom of how in settling down and relying on agriculture, humanity had domesticated its own self. We are given elaborate details of this domestication. Humans first lived among trees and relied on them for subsistence, deriving fruits, sap, clothing and housing. Then they made settlements in inaccessible mountains and caves, using the earth’s natural contours for habitation and protection. As they emerged from this existence they began to subsist on vegetation, wild grains and beans of all kind. Settlements grew larger and towns came into being. Units of measurement were then created, not only to map territories but also for trade of all kind.
Eventually the earth was tilled—cereals, seeds, rice and barley were domesticated along with humankind. In the fully fledged urban state there existed four kinds of settlements- 1- grāmas, or purely agricultural habitations where the owners of land tilled their fields; 2- ākrimis, which were grāmas where the owners of the fields and their tillers were different people; 3- vasatis, cosmopolitan settlements abundant with traders and businesspeople from all over and 4- ghoṣas, pseudo-settlements of wandering pastoralists and herdsmen. Starting from the protohistorical, the above paints a clear picture of moving from a Paleolithic existence to a Neolithic one. The historically relevant stories begin with Brahmā’s son and daughter, Svāyambhua and Śatarūpā, who we place at 9500 BC, at the onset of Holocene, or the defeat of Vṛtra, or the incarnation of Varāha.
With the first manvantara at 9500 BC and the seventh at 4500 BC, it seems simple to fit the others in the intervening period. But some factors argue for an alternate interpretation. The 2nd, 3rd, 4th and 5th manvantaras are a kind of dark age in Indian history. The Purāṇic explanation for this is that history is cyclical and repetitive. The events of one age recur in the next, and personalities of one era are reborn again to play similar roles in history. Therefore the Purāṇas repeatedly resist an elaboration of these manvantaras, claiming it would take hundreds of years to recount the events of each manvantara in complete detail. Some accounts make the 2nd-5th Manus the grandsons of Svāyambhuva, whereas others give different origins for each.
It seems that the Purāṇas have got their account mixed up, though deliberately so. They commence their count from Svāyambhuva Manu, so all records flow from him. In reality the 2nd to 5th manvantaras could date from before 9500 BC, and there’s no plausible way to show how far back in time they go. This is reflected in their ahistorical nature and the extremely sparse details available in them. When we find astronomical references in Indian texts that date to 15000 BC or even earlier, we can surmise that those were the times preceding Svāyambhuva. True history begins with him, and civilization dawns with the dynasty of his actual descendant, Uttānapāda. In Uttānapāda’s line is born Cākṣuṣa, the 6th Manu. His great-grandson, Veṇa, presides over a period of general decay and aridity. He bans the study of Vedas, bans rituals of all kinds, and prohibits the usage of soma—which he denies even Ādityas the access to. Instead he commands people to pray to him, declaring himself to be the only true source of power. His reign is marked by widespread drought and famine. The earth dries up, the trees disappear, and even the waters are not to be found. Arguably this is a memory of the 8.2 Kiloyear event of 6200 BC. But narrative blames poor Veṇa, whose people rebel under the ṛṣis and dethrone him. In his place is installed his son, Pṛthu Vainya, and here begins Indian political proto-history.
Pṛthu Vainya is remembered as the first cakravartin in Indian historical tradition. He is born with a bow in his hand, donning a chain of metal armour. He’s the first kṣatriya and he’s dressed like it. He’s also the first rājā, called so because he brings rañj or delight to his people. He’s the first to conduct the rājasūya, ritual of coronation and the aśvamedha, ritual of conquest. In his time originate Niṣadhas, the riparian fishermen of ancient India, the Tuṣāras or Tocharians of Uttarakuru, and the Pitṛs under Yama who much later migrate to modern Iran.
He chases the earth to all corners, forcing it to yield to him and thus acquire the name Prithvī, Pṛthu’s daughter. There are signs of movement from a nomadic existence to a settled one. Before Pṛthu there were no towns and cities, no cultivated plants, no breeding of cattle, and no great shopping centers. But Pṛthu leads a civilizational change, the settlement of a people and the consolidation of culture. Everyone benefits from this. With the cow as a metaphor for the earth, the Mānavas yield milk and crop. To the ṛṣis this cow is soma, and their yield is penance or the knowledge thereof. The Devas take the cow as Indra and extract ojaskāra, or energy—a clear allusion to their aspiration to cling to former glory. Pitṛs, Nāgas, Yakṣas, Rākṣasas and Gandharvas are all invited to participate, and each tribe takes something from Pṛthu’s prosperous reign.
The reformed earth contains mines, plants, farms, cities and towns. There’s gold and silver, milk and grain, soma and ritual. There are elephant cavalries and cattle ranches. The people now plough the land through all seasons, for the knowledge of irrigation has been gained. Great serpents beneath the earth that previously spewed venom and fire are tamed, for men have learnt primitive metallurgy. Placed in around 6500 BC, Pṛthu is primely positioned as the monarch who plausibly established the first urban conglomerations of India—Mehrgarh and Bhirrana. Not that these were not previously settled, but that the layers that show planning, organization and culture appear in the mid-7th millennium BC.
Archaeology gives us nothing to link Mehrgarh and Bhirrana in this era, and they developed then in isolation. Either Pṛthu began from India and expanded towards Iran, or it was in the other direction. We previously thought that agriculture was introduced to India in the 7th millennium BC by Iranian agriculturists, a scenario that would have supported Pṛthu’s expansion from the west. But we now know that agriculture developed indigenously in India at multiple locations. If Pṛthu expanded from India, why do we find Yama, Pitṛs and Pārthavas in Iran while the dynastic link immediately died out in India? This is explained when we consider what happens to the dynasty after Pṛthu.
Many generations after Pṛthu are born the Pracetas, sons of Barhiṣa in Pṛthu’s line. All dynasties suffer from the decay of time, and Pṛthu’s is no different. Disinterested in rule, the Pracetas migrate away in search of meditative knowledge. This is the departure of Pṛthu’s line from India, and it’s followed by a general decay remembered in the Purāṇas as Prithvī being left unguarded. Trees overgrow human settlements, vines and creepers take over the habitations and farmlands disappear in vast cataclysms of fire. An appeal is made to the Pracetas to return, and in this is revealed the oft-used trick of Purāṇic composers.
Not all history was available to them. They did not always know how one dynasty passed to another, how civilization arose again after a decay. So they used the concept of progenitors, or Prajāpatis who incarnated afresh in each era to seed population. Manu is the best example of this, and indeed he is the first among all Prajāpatis. Kaśyapa is another, as is Dakṣa who gave his daughters away. To the Pracetas then is reborn Dakṣa the Prajapati, and once again he gives his daughters to the primary ṛṣis—Marīcī, Atri and others.
But a significant period elapses before this. Dakṣa first begets a group of sons known as Haryāśvas, who are lured away from reproduction and towards meditation by Nārada according to Purāṇic accounts. The same fate befalls Dakṣa’s second creation, a group of sons called Śabalāśvas. Only then are the ṛṣis born anew, and thus are Ādityas found in genealogy again. In multiple Purāṇas the listener interrupts the narrator here and demands an explanation. How is Dakṣa born again? How is another Kaśyapa found in the current manvantara? To this the Purāṇas condescendingly reply- “Origin and annihilation occur continuously among living beings. Sages and other learned people are not deluded in this respect.”
What they mean is that, instead of miring themselves in the unique technicalities behind each era, they paint a broad pattern that applies to any. In around 4500 BC a descendant of the Pracetas establishes marital relations with an Āditya tribe, and through this union is born Vivasvān or Sūrya. Purandara reigns as the current Indra, and Soma or Candra falls in love with Bṛhaspati’s wife Tārā, fathering the infant Budha. Another great Deva-Asura war breaks out over this act of adultery, where the furious Bṛhaspati is supported by Ādityas and the truant Candra by Śukra and Daityas.
To Vivasvān the Sūrya is born Vaivasvat Manu, and the latter’s daughter Ilā will marry Budha. The current era of ancient Indians, the 7th manvantara, has begun. After a long journey from the nomadic to proto-rural living, through generations of bloody warfare and spurts of cultural consolidation, from eras of amoral lifestyle and warfare, emerges a new social order possibly speaking PIE, though both in its ancestry and neighbourhood still reside Austroasiatic, Tibeto-Burman and Dravidian speakers.
Against this mapping of manvantaras, to attempt a definitive mapping of yugas is to misunderstand the latter’s infinite, nested and fractal nature. Āryabhaṭa’s late date has set 3102 BC as the beginning of Kali Yuga. Taking this as is and mapping it to the period given for each yuga, we get the following dates:
- Kṛta Yuga – 13902 BC
- Tretā Yuga – 9102 BC (4,800 years after Kṛta)
- Dvāpara Yuga – 5502 BC (3,600 years after Tretā)
- Kali Yuga – 3102 BC (2,400 years after Dvāpara)
- New Kṛta – 1902 BC (1,200 years after Kali)
This compares well with the descending periods of Mārkaṇḍeya Mahāyuga that Ravi identifies in the Mahābharata:
- Kṛta Yuga – 12500 BC
- Tretā Yuga – 7700 BC
- Dvāpara Yuga – 4100 BC
- Kali Yuga – 1700 BC