saraswati civilisation

[Koenraad Elst]

Dear Mr. Eric Robert,

Given the prohibition on discussing the Vedic-Harappan nexus on this list,
I'll take the risk of informing you
that your question about the Harappan cities along the the Vedic river
Saraswati threatens to violate this prohibition.  But as long as we
don't mention either "Aryan" or "invasion" (I hope "theory" is still OK), I
guess we can get away with the following.

Satellite photography has allowed the tracing of the course of the
once-mighty Saraswati.  Along its course, cities of Harappan culture and age
have been found, in some places also post-Harappan settlements on the former
river bed.  It is by no means far-fetched to infer a causal relation between
the decline of the Harappan civilization and changes in the water-system
including the drying of the Saraswati.  I've seen very slightly conflicting
estimates for the drying between 2100 and 1500 BC, at any rate roughly
synchronous with the end of the Harappan high culture.  Let's count on
Science to provide more details in the near future.

In reading around about this topic, you may well come across the theory
recently publicized by astrophysicist Dr. Rajesh Kochar, that the Vedic
Saraswati was really in Afghanistan, being the Harahvaiti/Helmand river
(where no such cities
have been found).  I find it a bit odd that those Vedic poets described
Indian flora,
fauna, rivers, mountains, tribes, in a language brimful of loanwords from
Indian languages, yet lived along a non-Indian river.

Yours sincerely,
Koenraad Elst
http://members.xoom.com/KoenraadElst/