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Author: Ram Sharan Sharma
Publisher: Orient Blackswan
ISBN: 9788125006312
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 120

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Book Description
Who were the Aryans? Where did they come from? Did they always live in India? The Aryan problem has been attracting fresh attention in academic, social and political arenas. This book identifies the main traits of Aryan culture and follows the spread of their cultural markers. Using the latest archaeological evidence and the earliest known Indo-European inscriptions on the social and economic features of Aryan society, the distinguished historian, R. S. Sharma, throws fresh light on the current debate on whether or not the Aryans were the indigenous inhabitants of India. This book is essential reading for those interested in the history of India and its culture.

Author: Charles Allen
Publisher: Hachette India
ISBN: 9357312668
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 400

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Book Description
Few themes in history have had as strong a hold on people's imagination. Fewer still have managed to alter the course of civilization. This is Charles Allen's definitive account of the Aryans, offering a grand sweep of language, mythology, contested histories and conflict. Spanning continents, cultures and societies: from the Russian steppe to the Indus valley, the Iliad to the Mahabharata, Greek to Sanskrit, Putin to Trump, and Müller to Vivekananda, Aryans astonishes with its scope. Allen, true to a style that has endeared him to a legion of admirers, weaves a narrative that is startling and illuminating. Product of a great investigation and meticulous scholarship, , Allen's last book, is his crowning achievement and marks the end of an illustrious career. 'PRAISE FOR COROMANDEL 'Coromandel is lively and its stories well chosen.' – The Economist 'An engaging and meaningful account of a very long and complex history.' – Times Literary Supplement '[Makes] history interesting by combining natural storytelling vim with a magpie-sharp eye for shiny detail.'– India Today PRAISE FOR ASHOKA 'Like an explorer in a jungle, stripping away the foliage from a long-forgotten city, Charles Allen brings to light the most extraordinary ruler in Indian history.'– Tom Holland, author of Rubicon 'A labour of love and notable scholarship, Charles Allen's Ashoka is a fitting testament to a forgotten epic of discovery. . . All who relish India's antiquity should read this book.' – John Keay, author of Midnight's Descendants 'Read this and you will see how absorbing history can be.'– Lord Meghnad Desai, author of Rediscovery of India

Author: Shrinivas Vasudeo Pradhan
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1443865923
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 315

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Book Description
The question of the original home of the Aryans and their migrations to India is only part of the problem of their “elusiveness.” Their subsequent assimilation and nativization in India also contributed to this elusive quality. This socio-cultural process can be traced through a study of their gods, rituals, and philosophy. Thus changes in the nature and function of Ṛgvedic gods; the appearance of upstart gods in the late Ṛgvedic period; the elaboration of the soma ritual with elaborate supplementary rituals; the introduction of the new ritual of Agnicayana; the rise of the eschatology of “punarjanma” (rebirth) and “saṁsāra” (eternal return) based on “karma”; and the ideal of “mukti”, or liberation from life, in place of the former ideal of a life of “śaradaḥ śatam” (a hundred autumns) are symptoms of, as well as a witness to, the transformation of the original identity of the Aryans as revealed in the Family Books of the Ṛgveda. This cultural transformation is no less significant than the “Yakṣa praṣṇa” (knotty question) of their original home and their “indubitable” archaeological traces. The book addresses itself to both these questions, and, for that purpose, takes another look at some of the archaeological material and Aryan life and thought as reflected in Vedic literature.

Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Electronic book
Languages : en
Pages : 315

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Book Description
Annotation The question of the original home of the Aryans and their migrations to India is only part of the problem of their "elusiveness." Their subsequent assimilation and nativization in India also contributed to this elusive quality. This socio-cultural process can be traced through a study of their gods, rituals, and philosophy. Thus changes in the nature and function of ásgvedic gods; the appearance of upstart gods in the late ásgvedic period; the elaboration of the soma ritual with elaborate supplementary rituals; the introduction of the new ritual of Agnicayana; the rise of the eschatology of "punarjanma" (rebirth) and "saáusÄura" (eternal return) based on "karma"; and the ideal of "mukti", or liberation from life, in place of the former ideal of a life of "Å>aradaá Å>atam" (a hundred autumns) are symptoms of, as well as a witness to, the transformation of the original identity of the Aryans as revealed in the Family Books of the ásgveda. This cultural transformation is no less significant than the "Yaká£a praá£á++a" (knotty question) of their original home and their "indubitable" archaeological traces. The book addresses itself to both these questions, and, for that purpose, takes another look at some of the archaeological material and Aryan life and thought as reflected in Vedic literature.

Author: David Barrowclough
Publisher: Fonthill Media
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 326

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Book Description
During the 1930s, in the build up to the Second World War, the Nazis established a band of specialists, the SS-Ahnenerbe, under the command of Heinrich Himmler and Hermann Wirth. Their aim was nothing less than to prove the superiority of the Aryan race, and with it the unique right of the German people to rule Europe. The occult figured as a key feature in many of these increasingly desperate quack research efforts. Part science, part espionage, and part fantasy. Archaeological expeditions were sent to Iceland, Tibet, Kafiristan, North Africa, Russia, the Far East, Egypt, and even South America and the Arctic. The Nazi Ancestral Heritage Societys chief administrator was Dr Wolfram Sievers, who cruelly conducted medical experiments on prisoners in concentration camps, and was responsible for the looting of historic artefacts considered Germanic for return to Germany. He rewarded those academics that took part with high military office, whilst those academics who contradicted or criticized the SS-Anenerbe were carted off to concentration camps where they faced certain death. This book tells the true history of the real life villains behind the Indiana Jones movies. Sometimes truth really is stranger than fiction!

Author: Edwin Bryant
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0195169476
Category : Electronic books
Languages : en
Pages : 400

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This work studies how Indian scholars have rejected the idea of an external origin of the Indo-Aryans, by questioning the logic assumptions and methods upon which the theory is based.

Author: Stefan Arvidsson
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226028607
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 367

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Book Description
Critically examining the discourse of Indo-European scholarship over the past two hundred years, Aryan Idols demonstrates how the interconnected concepts of “Indo-European” and “Aryan” as ethnic categories have been shaped by, and used for, various ideologies. Stefan Arvidsson traces the evolution of the Aryan idea through the nineteenth century—from its roots in Bible-based classifications and William Jones’s discovery of commonalities among Sanskrit, Latin, and Greek to its use by scholars in fields such as archaeology, anthropology, folklore, comparative religion, and history. Along the way, Arvidsson maps out the changing ways in which Aryans were imagined and relates such shifts to social, historical, and political processes. Considering the developments of the twentieth century, Arvidsson focuses on the adoption of Indo-European scholarship (or pseudoscholarship) by the Nazis and by Fascist Catholics. A wide-ranging discussion of the intellectual history of the past two centuries, Aryan Idols links the pervasive idea of the Indo-European people to major scientific, philosophical, and political developments of the times, while raising important questions about the nature of scholarship as well.

Author: Dorothy M. Figueira
Publisher: State University of New York Press
ISBN: 0791487830
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 218

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Book Description
In Aryans, Jews, Brahmins, Dorothy M. Figueira provides a fascinating account of the construction of the Aryan myth and its uses in both India and Europe from the Enlightenment to the twentieth century. The myth concerns a race that inhabits a utopian past and gives rise first to Brahmin Indian culture and then to European culture. In India, notions of the Aryan were used to develop a national identity under colonialism, one that allowed Indian elites to identify with their British rulers. It also allowed non-elites to set up a counter identity critical of their position in the caste system. In Europe, the Aryan myth provided certain thinkers with an origin story that could compete with the Biblical one and could be used to diminish the importance of the West's Jewish heritage. European racial hygienists made much of the myth of a pure Aryan race, and the Nazis later looked at India as a cautionary tale of what could happen if a nation did not remain "pure." As Figueira demonstrates, the history of the Aryan myth is also a history of reading, interpretation, and imaginative construction. Initially, the ideology of the Aryan was imposed upon absent or false texts. Over time, it involved strategies of constructing, evoking, or distorting the canon. Each construction of racial identity was concerned with key issues of reading: canonicity, textual accessibility, interpretive strategies of reading, and ideal readers. The book's cross-cultural investigation demonstrates how identities can be and are created from texts and illuminates an engrossing, often disturbing history that arose from these creations.

Author: Asko Parpola
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190226935
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 385

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Book Description
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 exquisitely carved seals and thousands of short inscriptions in a long-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 contemporaneous urban cultures of Mesopotamia and Egypt. Yet, after almost a century of excavation and research the Indus civilization remains little understood. How might we decipher the Indus inscriptions? What language did the Indus people speak? What deities did they worship? Asko Parpola has spent fifty years researching the roots of Hinduism to answer these fundamental questions, which have been debated with increasing animosity since the rise of Hindu nationalist politics in the 1980s. In this pioneering book, he traces the archaeological route of the Indo-Iranian languages from the Aryan homeland north of the Black Sea to Central, West, and South Asia. His new ideas on the formation of the Vedic literature and rites and the great Hindu epics hinge on the profound impact that the invention of the horse-drawn chariot had on Indo-Aryan religion. Parpola's comprehensive assessment of the Indus language and religion is based on all available textual, linguistic and archaeological evidence, including West Asian sources and the Indus script. The results affirm cultural and religious continuity to the present day and, among many other things, shed new light on the prehistory of the key Hindu goddess Durga and her Tantric cult.

Author: Bhagwan Gidwani
Publisher: Penguin UK
ISBN: 9351184579
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 1469

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Book Description
A sweeping saga of ancient india Return of the Aryans tells the epic story of the Aryans – a gripping tale of kings and poets, seers and gods, battles and romance and the rise and fall of civilizations. In a remarkable feat of the imagination, Bhagwan S. Gidwani takes us back to the dawn of mankind (8000 BC) to recreate the world of the Aryans. He tells us why the Aryans left India, their native land, for foreign shores and shows us their triumphal return to their homeland... Vast and absorbing, the novel tells the stories of characters like the gentle god, Sindhu Putra, spreading his message of love; the physician sage Dhanawantar and his wife Dhanawantari; peaceloving Kashi after whom the holy city of Varanasi is named; and Nila who gave her name to the river Nile... Richly textured and with a cast of thousands, the epic adventure of the Aryans come gloriously alive in the hands of the bestselling author of The Sword of Tipu Sultan.