Dating the Vedas / Devamrita Swami's book "Searching for Vedic India"

[Mal7]

I have just started reading Devamrita Swami's book Searching for Vedic India, Los Angeles: The Bhaktivedanta Book Trust, 2002.
The beginning chapters argue that, in Vedic knowledge, consciousness is not reducible to physical atoms, making some similar points to Thomas Nagel in his book Mind and Cosmos. It also argues that there is evidence humans have been around longer, or been in the Americas longer, or developed writing and civilizations earlier, than is conventionally assumed. The book references Cremo's Forbidden Archaeology, along with other articles in newspapers and journals, some more recent than Cremo's book.

I found the section about Max Muller and the dating of the Vedas interesting. The great 19th century linguist Max Muller had a stab at dating the production of the Vedic texts, giving a date of 1200 BC for the Rig-Veda as the earliest. Then later in life he confessed in print:

Whether the Vedic hymns were composed 1000, 1500, or 2000 or 3000 BC, no power on earth will ever determine.

- quoted in Moriz Winternitz, A History of Indian Literature (1927, Vol. 1, page 293).

Nevertheless Muller’s date of 1200 BC is generally seen as authoritative and became quoted from one generation of textbooks to the next.

Muller’s scholarly output was considerable. What inspired him? Was he himself a follower of eastern religions, as the Italian scholar of Tibet, Giuseppe Tucci, was himself a Buddhist?

Muller was a “stern fundamentalist Protestant” (Devamrita Swami, page 50). In an 1896 letter to his wife, he wrote:

I hope I shall finish the work, and I feel convinced, though I shall not live to see it, yet the edition of mine and the translation of the Veda will hereafter tell to a great extent on the fate of India. . . . It is the root of their religion, and to show them what the root is, I feel sure, is the only way of uprooting all that has sprung from it during the last three thousand years.

– Max Muller, Life and Letters (1902, Vol. 1, pp. 357-8; quoted in Devamrita Swami, pp. 50-51.)

Muller was recruited by the British colonial regime in India. The chairman of the Education Board arranged that Muller would receive funds from the British East India Company to translate the Vedic texts in a way that would destroy the Indians’ reverence for them. The money was never paid in full, but with paltry help from the British government, the German Muller, basing himself in England, would go on to produce an amazing output: fifty-one volumes of his monumental series “Sacred Books of the East".

– Devamrita Swami, page 50.

 

[Chu]

You might find it very interesting to read The Horse, the Wheel, and Language: How Bronze-Age Riders from the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World by David W. Anthony.

If I remember correctly, he dates the Rig Veda at around 2000BC, and makes pretty convincing arguments about it. He also makes some parallels between the civilization that could be at the origin of the texts (such as those who had chariots, or the rituals described in the Vedic texts, etc.), and Homer.

He makes interests comments about how the idea of being Aryan, linked to these texts, had nothing to do with ethnic origins, but it was a term used to describe those who followed the prescribed rituals correctly. It one did what they texts suggested, one was considered Aryan. "Funny" how it got so distorted later in history.

 

[Merlin]

According to Wendy Doniger, Max Mueller is the last person to read on Eastern Civilization as his writing (translations) are 'incomplete and unsound' (Pg 12, The Rig Veda - Penguin, 1981) . . .
Archaeo-Astronomy, no longer a pseudo science, keeps pushing the clock back for epics, to quote a few published books in this field:-

1. Homers Secret Iliad and Homers Secret Odyssey by Kenneth Wood pushes Troy to approx 5000 BC

2. When did the Mahabharata War Happen by Nilesh Nilkanth Oak pushes the Great War to approx 5000 BC

3. The Historic Rama by Nilesh Nilkanth Oak pushes Rama to approx 10,500 BC (Interestingly, Graham Hancock in 'Fingerprints of The Gods' mentions 10,500 BC as The Year of The Great Deluge - I forget which page though :)

The close similarity to the dates above (5000 BC and 10,500 BC) across civilisations shows we need to re-look at the Epics once more - as marker of great celestial changes.

To quote Santillana, Hamlets Mill pg 376 "It is not the 'Beliefs' and 'Religions' which circle together and fight each other restlessly; what changes is the celestial situation.'