Vishnu on the banks of the Volga river

[Andrey Klebanov]

Dear all,
here are some results of my brief (!) googling in the russian Internet:

As for the historicity of Staraya Mayna and other related questions posed by Hans Hoock (apart from this article being probably just a weird creation of someones confused/ joking mind):
there were/ are, in fact, archeological excavations going on around the area of Staraya Mayna (here are some prominent photos of the excavated artifacts: http://stmayna.ucoz.ru/photo). Some of these artifacts can be dated to around the IVth ctr. AD, most of them, however, are somewhat younger. This article from the electronic journal of Volgo-Vyatsky Academy of government service -whatever it means- ( http://nauka.vvags.ru/index.php?name=art&a=r_art&id=127 ) explains that the area around Ulyanovsk (Staraya Mayna lies just on the opposite bank of the river) might have been an important center along the Volga trade route. And according to Kozhevin's interview here ( http://www.gazeta.ru/science/2006/11/16_a_1058297.shtml ), the very old artifacts from the area around Staraya Mayna may point to a rather old age of this route (I'm absolutely NOT a specialist on this topic, so please excuse me, if I should be ignorant of any other "commonly known" facts concerning the volga trade root). The latter article also mentions briefly a finding of an unique metal plaque with an image of the "Eastern God Vishnu" dated "by the specialists from the State Museum of Oriental Art (Moscow) to approx. VII-X ctr. AD".  Acc. to Kozhevin, again, it is an important evidence for the age and importance of the above mentioned Volga trade route.

btw. Alexander Kozhevin (Александр Евгеньевич Кожевин) completed his PhD on smth. like methods of optical dating in the archeology (http://www.ulsu.ru/departments/chairs/nature_management/sotr/4/).

here is a short video along with an interview with Kozhevin from the tourist office of Staraya Mayna (http://turizm073.narod.ru/). The message is: come and see!

As a side note:
a translation of the globalhinduism article (or one of its clones) -- with addition of a "quotation from Ṛgveda" which mentions Staraya Mayna: Itham ascati pasyat syantham, ekam starayath mainaa-kaalam :))) and omission of the fascinating episode about Karl Marx at the bookstall near Cochin airport -- was published somewhere on the russian livejournal:
http://bodhilife.livejournal.com/85297.html
and has quickly spread throughout the russian Internet:
(e.g. http://nespat.com/comment_1329869564.html OR http://dymovskiy.name/archives/12188 ) - you might recognize the pictures.
the main carrier of these news here is a type of milieu similar to the Indian global-hinduism or the like - proponents of the theory of the Slavic origin of the "indo-european  civilization" (keyword: Aryan civilization). And it seems, they are not joking.

best
Andrey Klebanov


On 23.02.2012, at 11:54, Dominik Wujastyk wrote:

> Yes, I got the Polonium reference.  I was living in London and working at UCL at that time, and poor Litvinenko died in UCL hospital, right next to the building where my office was located.  It is an continuing scandal that Litvinenko's murderer, Lugovoy, now a member of the Russian parliament, has been protected by Russian authorities from prosecution.
> 
> D
> 
> 
> 
> On 23 February 2012 11:35, Artur Karp <karp at uw.edu.pl> wrote:
> I like sickle and hammer as Vishnu's attributes better.
> 
> BTW, the mention of "poloniumitis" alludes to the 2006 poisoning of
> Alexander Litvinenko, a Russian political refugee residing in London.
> 
> Cheers to All,
> 
> Artur Karp
> 



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