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Books > Humanities > Religion & beliefs > Non-Christian religions > Religions of Indic & Oriental origin > Hinduism
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The Roots of Hinduism - The Early Aryans and The Indus Civilization (Hardcover)
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The Roots of Hinduism - The Early Aryans and The Indus Civilization (Hardcover)
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Hinduism has two major roots. The more familiar is the religion
brought to South Asia in the second millennium BCE by speakers of
Aryan or Indo-Iranian languages, a branch of the Indo-European
language family. Another, more enigmatic, root is the Indus
civilization of the third millennium BCE, which left behind
thousands of short inscriptions in a forgotten pictographic script.
Discovered in the valley of the Indus River in the early 1920s, the
Indus civilization had a population estimated at one million
people, in more than 1000 settlements, several of which were cities
of some 50,000 inhabitants. With an area of nearly a million square
kilometers, the Indus civilization was more extensive than the
other key urban cultures of the time, in Mesopotamia and Egypt.
Yet, after almost a century of excavation and research the Indus
civilization remains little understood. What language did the Indus
people speak? How might we decipher the exquisitely carved Indus
inscriptions? What deities did they worship? Are the roots of
contemporary Hinduism to be found in the religion of the Indus
civilization as well as in the Vedic religion? Since the rise of
Hindu nationalist politics in the 1980s, these questions have been
debated with increasing animosity, colored by the history of modern
colonialism in India. This is especially true of the enigmatic
Indus script, which is at the hub of the debates, and a particular
focus of this book. Asko Parpola has spent fifty years researching
the roots of Hinduism to answer these fundamental questions. In
this pioneering book, he traces the Indo-Iranian speakers from the
Aryan homeland north of the Black Sea through the Eurasian steppes
to Central, West, and South Asia. Among many other things, he
discusses the profound impact of the invention of the horse-drawn
chariot on Indo-Aryan religion, and presents new ideas on the
origin and formation of the Vedic literature and rites, and the
great Hindu epics.
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