The highly initiated Sages of India were understood to be ascetics who shunned material pleasures and material things. They are said to have worn simple clothes made out of natural products such as bark-cloth and to have smeared their bodies with ashes. They did not cut their hair but allowed it to grow long and matted. They were strict vegetarians who gathered fruits and roots to live on, praised abstention from meat91 and spent the greater part of their time in the snow-covered mountain fastnesses of the Himalayas. There it was said that they withdrew to perform the tapas – or yogic austerities – by means of which they were able to strengthen their spiritual power.92
But the ancient texts also tell us that the Sages did intervene and involve themselves extensively in mundane affairs – in particular as king-makers and as advisers to kings who influenced and shaped state policy.93 Their role in this respect again parallels the role of the Heliopolitan priesthood of ancient Egypt, the king-makers of the Pyramid Age.94 In both cases the purpose of secular involvement was the same: to guide, shape, form, and maintain indefinitely a society in perfect balance with itself and with the universe – a society constructed in accordance with what the ancient Egyptians called maat (earthly and cosmic harmony, truth, balance, the ‘right way’) and what the Hindus still call dharma, a concept that has exactly the same meanings.95
Thus we discover that the Seven Sages would from time to time take over as the rulers of kingdoms during an interregnum or in the prolonged absence of the legitimate ruler.96 They would instruct rulers on the duties of kings.97 They would also ‘obtain sons for kings’ (if necessary by impregnating the king’s wives themselves!) thus ensuring the longevity of royal dynasties98 – since it was felt (in both ancient India and in ancient Egypt) that the presence of a king or pharaoh was an essential aspect of cosmic balance. When through some mishap there was no king, then it was the task of the Seven Sages to seek out and appoint a new one. In this regard the Mahabaratha tells how, after the destruction of the kingly caste, ‘the earth – being without kings – started to sink in distress, whereupon Kasyapa supported the earth and found new kings for her’.99
Amongst many other roles related to rulers and the secular order it is interesting to note that the Seven Sages also frequently cursed kings if they abused their powers (and it was a very dangerous thing – often fatal – to be cursed by a Sage). ‘In such contexts,’ observes Mitchiner:
The Rsi comes to be seen not merely as an upholder or teacher of dharma who strives to maintain righteousness and proper conduct among men, but as the very embodiment of dharma itself, manifesting dharma in his words and deeds, and purging with his curse the adharmic actions of others.100
A spiritual basis to history?
In conclusion, the more I learned about ‘the Seven Sages’ on my journey through the ancient texts and commentaries, the more they began to sound to me like a religious cult armed with powerful spiritual ideas, fired by yogic asceticism and the quest for gnosis, manipulating the development of ‘kingdoms’ in India from retreats in the Himalayas. And maybe not only kingdoms in India, but elsewhere in the archaic world as well?
We’ve seen that the Sanskrit texts speak of two groups of Seven Sages, one for south India, one for north India – regions that are widely separated geographically. But beyond India it’s worth reminding ourselves again that it was Seven Sages – also associated with the dissemination of a system of knowledge – who served as the advisers to kings in ancient Sumer. Is it not a coincidence too far to discover that Seven Sages fulfilled exactly the same function in Egypt? According to the remarkable Edfu Building Texts, which I examined at length in an earlier book,101 these Seven Sages and other gods came originally from an island, ‘the Homeland of the Primeval Ones’, said to have been destroyed suddenly in a great flood during which the majority of its ‘divine inhabitants’ were drowned.102 Arriving in Egypt, those few who survived became ‘the Builder Gods, who fashioned in the primaeval time, the Lords of Light … the Ghosts, the Ancestors … who raised the seed for gods and men …’103
Most historians and archaeologists today more or less automatically project the ‘materialist’ basis and structure of modern society (whether in its ‘capitalist’ or ‘socialist’ form) back on to societies of the remote past. This belief – that civilization is simply a function of economic forces – has in turn dictated research and excavation strategies in the field and profoundly influenced the way that scholars look at ancient texts such as the Vedas. In recent years, however, a thought-provoking counterview has begun to emerge. ‘Our political and economic interpretations of history’, argues the Sanskritist David Frawley, ‘cannot be true if enlightenment or spiritual realization is the real goal of humanity.’104
Frawley draws attention to the ancient science of yoga in India – how ancient it may really be is one of the subjects we will consider in the later chapters-and points out:
The modern view of the development of human civilization is far removed from the evolution of man according to the system of Yoga. The modern idea of civilization developing gradually through the growth of technology and scientific thinking contradicts the yogic point of view which rather sees culture as having been originally formulated and passed down by sages … If the essence of civilization is technology then the modern view may be right, but if it is the culture of spirit, it is quite wrong. By my interpretation civilization was founded by yogis, seers and sages.105
Is it conceivable that the Indus-Sarasvati civilization of ancient India could have sprung up exactly in the way that the Vedic traditions tell us? Could it have been the outcome of a programme or even a ‘policy’ instituted by religious ascetics to protect a precious system of knowledge – knowledge from before the flood that was said to have reached India in the Ark of Manu, preserved in the memories of the Seven Sages?
7 / Lost India
When Varuna and I embark together and urge our boat into the midst of the ocean, we, when we ride o’er the ridges of the waters, will swing within that swing and there be happy.
Rig Veda (8, 88, 3]
The Vedic flood story, which is also the story of Father Manu and the Seven Sages, contains seemingly absurd elements: a gigantic fish towing the survival ship; no women on board, so Manu must create a wife and progeny by magical means; and a flood so huge and so high that the ship is carried to the Himalayas. There it is ultimately moored to the peak of the ‘northern mountain’, also referred to as ‘the mountain of snow’, in a legendary spot known in the Mahabaratha as Naubandhana (‘the Binding of the Ship’) and in the Atharva Veda as Navaprabhramsana, ‘the Place of the Ship’s Descent’ (or ‘the Place of the Sinking of the Ship’).
Although it is true that the Himalayas are young mountains in geological terms – mountains that were indeed once under the sea and that are still rising as India pushes up against the mass of Asia – I know that I am on absolutely safe ground to state that no oceanic flood in the entire evolutionary history of mankind has ever reached into or even anywhere near these 9000 metre high snow-covered ranges. It is, in other words, a geophysical impossibility for Manu’s Ark to have been marooned in the Himalayas as the sacred texts of India claim.
Yet it is also true that large areas of the Indian subcontinent did experience severe oceanic flooding at the end of the Ice Age – particularly between 15,000 years ago and 8000 years ago. The floods of that epoch were global phenomena, as we saw in chapter 3. In the Arabian Sea and the Bay of Bengal, however, they were fuelled and amplified locally by the spectacular meltdown of the Himalayan ice-cap, which was much deeper and more extensive in the Ice Age than it is today.
So, although I remained puzzled by the references to a ship in the Himalayas, I was not yet prepared to join the scholars in their opinion that all of this was complete fantasy with no historical value. It was time to get more detail on exactly what did happen to India in the crucial epoch of post-glacial flooding from 15,000 to 8000 years ago.
Two anomalous sites … and coun
ting
In chapter 1 I reported a baffling discovery that was made in the early 1990s by marine archaeologists working in the Bay of Bengal along the Tranquebar-Poompuhur coast of southern India near Nagapattinam. Although they did not at the time have sufficient funding to undertake more than a cursory examination, they were able to identify, and recommend for future investigation, a large, man-made ‘U-shaped structure’ flanked by a ‘semi-circular structure’ and an ‘oval-shaped’ mound. What is baffling about these submerged ruins, on which ‘a few courses of masonry’ can be made out under thick encrustations of marine growth, is the fact that they were found 5 kilometres off the present shoreline and at a depth of 23 metres.1
I had discussed the Poompuhur structure with S. R. Rao some months previously (see again chapter 1) and had for a long time regarded them as being of great potential significance. Nevertheless, local sea-levels in many parts of the world can (and do) rise and fall for all sorts of reasons independent of global sea-level rise – so, while tempting, I knew that it would be a mistake to jump to conclusions about the age of the Poompuhur ruins just because they are deeply submerged. This was why I put the problem to Dr Glenn Milne of Durham University, one of the world’s leading experts in the cutting-edge science of ‘inundation mapping’ – which uses a powerful computer program to calculate the complex variables and to produce accurate models of ancient shorelines at chosen dates in chosen locales.
Milne ran the programme for the coordinates of the Poompuhur site and e-mailed the result on 12 October 2000:
areas currently at 23 m depth would have been submerged about 11,000 years before the present. This suggests that the structures you mention are 11 thousand years old or older!2
The possibility that the traces of a forgotten episode of global prehistory might indeed lie underwater off the shores of the Indian subcontinent suddenly looked a good deal more plausible. Previously I had focused on only one anomalous submerged site – in the north-west off the coast of Gujerat at Dwarka – and it was of uncertain date. But now I had confirmation of a second strong candidate located at the opposite end of India – in the south-east off the coast of Tamil Nadu – with a provisional dating to the end of the last Ice Age.
The next step was to ask Milne and his colleagues in the Department of Geology at Durham to prepare detailed inundation maps of the whole coastline of greater India as far to the south as the Maldive islands – which straddle the equator – as far to the north and west as Pakistan’s Makran coast half-way to the Persian Gulf, and as far to the north and east as the Ganges delta at the top of the Bay of Bengal.
Milne e-mailed the results of this new inquiry in mid-December 2000.
India 21,300 years ago
He had prepared four high-resolution maps. The earliest of these (see page 152) shows the subcontinent as it would have looked 21,300 years ago – around the time of the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM) when the world ocean had sunk to its lowest level.
In that epoch India’s coastal plains were everywhere more extensive than they are today, in some areas they were much more extensive, and in two areas in particular – around Gujerat in the north-west and around Tamil Nadu in the south-east – they were so much more extensive as to make ancient India virtually unrecognizable. Is it by chance that it is in these two areas exactly-where marine encroachment during the Ice Age meltdown was more dramatic than anywhere else in the subcontinent – that anomalous underwater ruins have been found?
At the LGM a strip of territory at least 100 kilometres wide that is now entirely submerged was exposed along almost the whole of the west coast of India – a linear distance of 2000 kilometres from the far south, beyond present Cape Comorin, to as far north as the Indus delta. However, at about latitude 15 degrees north this strip began to widen rapidly. Off modern Goa it was 120 kilometres wide, four degrees further north it was close to 500 kilometres wide and at 21 degrees north the Gulf of Cambay was a pleasant valley and the site on which the city of Surat now stands would have been as much as 700 kilometres from the sea.
But as I studied Milne’s inundation map in December 2000 I was most struck by what it revealed about Gujerat’s distinctive Kathiarwar peninsula. Today surrounded on three sides by the sea (with the Gulf of Cambay to the south, the Gulf of Kutch to the north and the Arabian Sea to the west), it was completely landlocked 21,300 years ago. Even Dwarka with its mysterious submerged ruins – now poised on the extreme north-western ‘horn’ of the peninsula – would then have been about 100 kilometres from the sea.
All in all, I realized that what western India had lost to the global floods that followed the Last Glacial Maximum amounted to a vast coastal domain, nearly the same size and roughly the same shape as modern California and Baja California put together, with an area of close to half a million square kilometres.
The second part of the map that was almost unrecognizable was in the south-east, where the underwater structures had been found off Poompuhur.
Milne’s calculations demonstrated that the Poompuhur site would have been almost 100 metres above sea-level at the Last Glacial Maximum, and would have stood towards the northern edge of a great peninsula roughly the same size and shape as the modern Koreas. Enclosing the Palk Strait, which was then a valley, and grafting a much-enlarged Sri Lanka firmly to the mainland, this lost Ice Age realm extended from a little below Dondra Head, at about 6 degrees north, as far as modern Pondicherry at around 12 degrees north. Mahabalipuram, with its neglected legends of the Seven Pagodas and the flooded city of Bali, lies at 12.37 degrees north and would have been at least 50 kilometres from the sea at the Last Glacial Maximum. Meanwhile, to the west of the Sri Lankan peninsula, forming the other side of the Gulf of Mannar – a large enclosed bay at the LGM – a snout of land extended into the Indian Ocean more than 150 kilometres beyond modern Cape Comorin. Finally, off-shore to the south-west, the ‘necklace’ of tiny atolls that make up the Maldives in the twenty-first century appeared as an imposing archipelago on Milne’s map. Greatly enlarged and increased in number because of the lowered sea-level, they included thousands of square kilometres of continuous landmasses at the Last Glacial Maximum that have long since completely vanished.
So here again what the inundation map revealed was a substantial, integrated area – an entire sub-region of India – that had been above water 21,300 years ago and that is submerged today.
16,400 years ago
Milne’s second map did not look very different from the first, although it showed India almost 5000 years later – at 16,400 years ago.
To my eye the south-eastern portion was to all extents and purposes identical in both maps. In the south the snout-shaped peninsula below Cape Comorin was slightly reduced in width, but still about the same length, and some of the larger Maldives had begun to break up.
In the south-western sector of the mainland (northwards from the Cape) the 100 kilometre wide strip of coastline up as far as latitude 15 degrees north was thinner – generally between 20 and 50 kilometres thinner – than it had been at the LGM. But beyond 15 degrees north, where the strip began to widen, the loss of land had been much less severe, indeed negligible. The Gulfs of Cambay and Kutch were still filled in, the Kathiarwar peninsula was still landlocked, and Dwarka was still about 100 kilometres from the sea.
In the light of what I’d learned so far about the chronology of the post-glacial cataclysms, the general lack of dramatic change during this period made perfect sense: 16,400 years ago the meltdown of the last Ice Age had only just begun and the first of the three global superfloods identified by Professor John Shaw and discussed in chapter 3 was still more than a thousand years away.
The reader will remember the approximate chronology of those floods, which were actually prolonged episodes of flooding in all cases – 15,000–14,000 years ago; 12,000–11,000 years ago; and 8000–7000 years ago.
10,600 years ago
Glenn Milne’s third map showed India as it had looked 10,600 years ago, after the fir
st two of the three episodes of flooding had done their work. In the far south the ‘snout’ that had protruded beneath Cape Comorin was now almost completely inundated, leaving only a lonely island anchored in the Indian Ocean about 80 kilometres off-shore.
To the south-west the Maldives archipelago was much reduced, although the residual islands were larger than their modern counterparts.
In the south-east, I was surprised to see Sri Lanka still attached to India albeit by a diminished land-bridge – as late as 10,600 years ago. On the mainland the coast of Tamil Nadu had in general been reduced almost to today’s levels. Five kilometres off-shore the Poompuhur structures had been inundated. At Mahabalipuram the coastal plain still extended 2 or 3 kilometres further into the Bay of Bengal 10,600 years ago than it does today – far enough, in theory, for the legendary city of Bali to have been built there as late as that date.
On the south-west side of the Indian mainland the strip of coast running from Cape Comorin at 8 degrees north up as far as 15 degrees north now extended less than 5 kilometres beyond today’s level. At about 17 degrees north it began to widen as before, but much more gradually. A very large part of the landmass directly below the Gulf of Cambay was now flooded by the sea and it was possible to make out the emergence of the modern shape of the Kathiarwar peninsula. Nevertheless the Gulf of Cambay was still entirely above water 10,600 years ago, so too was the Gulf of Kutch, and the present coastline of the peninsula was still surrounded by a healthy margin of dry land. Dwarka was at least 40 kilometres from the sea. Off-shore of Dwarka to the south-west there was an island about 50 kilometres in length – a remnant of the formerly much extended coastline in these parts. A second much larger island – 400 kilometres long and almost 100 kilometres wide – lay a little further to the south and extended down to well beyond modern Bombay.