Indira laughed. "Yes that's what one can read in to history books. You are right on that. But that's only a snippet. Also you may be wrong about the Harappan civilization. It is now believed that the Harappan had already declined and had largely died out, or had moved away, by the time the Aryans came into this part of the world. It appears that the Indus River had lost much of its volume since the earth had been in a cooling trend for a few thousand years by then. During the interglacial optimum that had preceded this cooling trend, the earth had been much warmer than it is today. The air heavy with moisture. The Sahara had been a green paradise with rivers flowing, where today only sand remains. The Indus River had probably been running heavy with fertile sediments in the early days, providing an easy living for the Harappan. The easy living left the people ample time for cultural and scientific development. The practice of Yoga came from the Harappan, and also of the earliest scientific discoveries, like the 'value' of zero, and probably also the decimal numbering system, came from that early time and from that part of the world. The Harappan had not only developed irrigated agriculture, they had also developed the first written language, going back some 4,000 years. They had built towns and cities. And the most amazing thing is that we find no military installations in their cities, and no palaces. They might have been the first, and possibly only, major non-imperial society on this planet. All of that is a part of India's history too, Peter. The Indus Valley was a part of India since the dawn of civilization until 1947. It was the cradle of India. It might have been the cradle of civilization as a whole. The whole of mankind might have been rooted in India, or Indi as it was called for most of its modern history. The word, Indus, is related to the Old Persian word Hindu, and in Sanskrit it's related to the word Sindhu that was the historic local term for the Indus River. It is also believed that like the name, India, the earliest Indian language, the Vedic Sanskrit came from the Indus valley. This seems to suggest that the Aryan learned their language skills from the Harappan language that might have given rise to the language for the Vedas. This kind of intellectual development that we have seen doesn't happen in the shadow of massive genocide. Perhaps the genocide came later. The Earth's climate had been in a gradual transition at this time. As the earth cooled down, the Indus probably carried less water, less fertile sediments, and living became harder. While the Vedas proudly proclaim that the Aryans destroyed the dam and irrigation system of the Harappan, it is more recently believed that the Aryan invasion began when the earth was much drier, when living was harder, so that most of the Harappan had already left and the dam system was no longer maintained and fell apart on its own. Evidence also exists of some dire consequences followed the collapse of the dam system as the seasonal flooding of the Indus washed away most of the topsoil that the Harappan had cultivated. The bottom line is that we don't really know if the Aryans had caused the collapse of the Harappan civilization or whether the collapse had already begun much sooner. The same might have been the case for other cultures in India as well. The harsher the global climate gets, the larger becomes the upset of its effect in populations. That's part of our global history and appears to have been the cause of great mass-movements of populations, the kind of movements by which imperial power begins to take root. The development of imperial power that culminated into of the Vedic Dark Age and later into the Dark Age of Brahmanism wasn't broken until the end of the next major warming of the earth, which peaked at the medieval optimum when the Hindu Renaissance flourished. The famous erotic temples of Khajuraho where built at this time. It appears that Brahmanism vanished from the landscape of India in the light of the Hindu Renaissance that was immediately overshadowed again by the expansion of Islam that reached as far abroad as India. The Islamic Renaissance that India got drawn into gave India a new lease on life as it were. It ended the caste system. It gave us a much more human face, and some say, also a beautiful face. The Taj Mahal was supposedly built in that new era. Except it reflects the far more beautiful India of the Hindu Renaissance of a thousands of years ago. So it seem to me that the Aryan invasion that had caused those two long dark ages had not entirely wasted the human potential of India in those almost three millennia of cultural darkness. It also tells me that it was the revival of Hinduism coupled with the warming of the earth, which ended the dark ages in India instead of the Islamic invasion that came with its own blanket of darkness. Our history also tells me that India has a great deal to offer to mankind with a culture that survived longer than any culture of earth and against the greatest obstacles that were ever imposed in human history."

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Discovering Infinity a research series by Rolf A. F. Witzsche