Free Republic

The defunct underwater wing of the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI) is set for a revival with the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) and the government keen to establish the scientific veracity of Dwarka, the mythological submerged capital of Lord Krishna's kingdom, and the Rama Setu, a set of limestone shoals believed to date back to the Ramayana... "The National Institute of Oceanography has the expertise. They will be training our fleet of young divers," said Dr RS Fonia, ASI joint director general. The ministry of culture, the nodal ministry for ASI, is also looking at options to bring on board...

Dwarka is one of the most ancient cities of India. The city, five miles long and two miles wide, is located 120 feet underwater in the Gulf of Cambay off the western coast of India. The discovery was particularly astonishing to scientists as the area predates all other finds in the area by at least 5,000 years, suggesting a much longer history of the civilization than was first assumed (carbon dating estimates the site to be almost 10,000 years old). Marine scientists used sonar images and sum-bottom profiling to locate the lost ruins and it is believed the area was...

UNDERWORLD - Graham Hancock Posted by Greg at 12:09, 30 Apr 2004 Let's get this straight, right from the outset - UNDERWORLD is not FINGERPRINTS OF THE GODS. I say this, because I know that fans of Graham Hancock's work like to compare his latest efforts with the monolithic benchmark that is FOTG. And this simply isn't a valid comparison - FOTG smashed its way into our consciousness in the main because it introduced us to (or re-introduced to some) the amazing mysteries that were present in what we thought was a mundane old world. A decade or so on,...

Experts survey seabed off Gujarat for Dwarka evidence New Delhi, Aug 17 : A group of archaeological experts and Indian Navy divers have conducted the first scientific survey off the Gujarat coast to establish whether or not the ruins on the seabed are of the mythological city of Dwarka, the capital of Hindu god Krishna. "The area off the Samudranaraya temple at (present day) Dwarka is known to contain structures which have been widely reported and interpreted by renowned scholars. However, no scientific study of the area had been conducted so far," Alok Tripathi of the Archaeological Survey of India...

British linguist Max-Muller has invented the Aryan invasion theory that ancient Aryans invade India at about 1500BC, driven out the Dravidians from their land, have imported the Hindu civilization along with Sanskrit language from the steppes of central Asia. The theory was the justification for the British occupation of India, as Winston Churchill remarked. Although there was no archeological evidence to support this theory, it has become the most important doctrine on the ancient Indian history. Although it was opposed by prominent historians like Ramesh Chandra Mazumdar and archeologists like Rakhaldas Banerjee and S.P.Gupta, the pro-British historians of India so...

Submerged city may be older than Mesopotamia Utpal Parashar Dehra Dun, December 3 A submerged coastal city near Poompuhar in Nagapattinam, Tamil Nadu, is the focus of a major expedition being conducted jointly by the Indian Naval Hydrographic Department (INHD) and the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI). Both the organisations are trying to piece together the city's past, which some noted marine archaeologists consider to be the birthplace of modern civilisation. The once flourishing port city is located about one mile off the Nagapattinam coast. "We have been able to locate a section of the city at a depth of...

'Lost river' could rewrite history books February 19 2002 at 08:33AM Madras India, - The discovery of an ancient city on the seabed off India's western coast has scientists salivating at the prospect of a fundamental rewrite in the chronology of ancient human society. Preliminary tests have suggested the site in the Gulf of Cambay off Gujarat state could date as far back as 7 500 BC, several thousand years older than what were previously known to be the first significant urban settlements. The discovery was made purely by chance last year as oceanographers from the National Institute of ...

The recent International Conference on Harappan Archaeology produced an unexpected announcement from archaeologists BR Mani and KN Dikshit, both of the Archaeological Survey of India, who claim that new dates from excavations show the Harappan culture began around 2000 years earlier than previously thought.The ruins of the Harrapan city of Mohenjo-daro remained undocumented for over 3,700 years, until their discovery in 1922 by Rakhaldas Bandyopadhyay, an officer of the Archaeological Survey of India. He was led to the mound by a Buddhist monk, who reportedly believed it to be a stupa. Image: Wikimedia commons Redating of Harappan culture Based on...

The mysterious fall of the largest of the world's earliest urban civilizations nearly 4,000 years ago in what is now India, Pakistan, Nepal and Bangladesh now appears to have a key culprit — ancient climate change, researchers say. Ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia may be the best known of the first great urban cultures, but the largest was the Indus or Harappan civilization. This culture once extended over more than 386,000 square miles (1 million square kilometers) across the plains of the Indus River from the Arabian Seato the Ganges, and at its peak may have accounted for 10 percent of...

Professor VD Mishra said that new researches have revealed that agricultural practices in India started in Mesolithic period (6-7,000 BC), much before the Neolithic period (4000 BC) as is generally believed. This discovery has proved that agriculture in India started simultaneously with other parts of the world. He said that Sativa rice, discovered from excavations at Chopni in Belan valley, has proved that India did not lag behind in agriculture... Joshi said that encroachments around historical monuments should be stopped because it harms our heritage. Citing an example, he said that Gwalior Fort could not be declared World Heritage due...

Excavations reveal 7,000 year-old Harappan sites Staff Report PESHAWAR: Gandi Umar Khan, around 55 kilometres west of Dera Ismail Khan, is the most important archaeological site of the Indus Valley civilization in the North Western Frontier Province. Gandi Umar Khan is spread over an area of 220 by 200 meters and has a maximum height of 8.5 metres. The site was discovered in 1997 by the University of Peshawar. The Directorate of Archaeology and Museum NWFP conducted an extensive survey of the Gomal Plain in March 2003 and discovered 95 sites out of which exist 53 sites of different periods...

Evidence of an ancient "lost river civilisation" has been uncovered off the west coast of India, the country's minister for science and technology has announced. Local archaeologists claim the find could push back currently accepted dates of the emergence of the world's first cities. Underwater archaeologists at the National Institute of Ocean Technology first detected signs of an ancient submerged settlement in the Gulf of Cambray, off Gujarat, in May 2001. They have now conducted further acoustic imaging surveys and have carbon dated one of the finds. The acoustic imaging has identified a nine-kilometre-long stretch of what was once a ...

Lost civilisation from 7,500 BC discovered off Indian coast Archaeologists have found a civilisation dating back to 7,500 BC off India's western coast. The find is 5,000 years older than any previously unearthed civilisation in the subcontinent. Researchers uncovered pottery, beads, sculptures, a fossilised jaw bone and human teeth at the Gulf of Cambay site.(DNA tests?) Previously, the oldest known civilisations were the Harrapan and Indus Valley communities - which date from around 2,500BC. Murli Manohar Joshi, minister for human resources and ocean development, told The Times of India: "The findings buried 40 metres below the sea reveal some ...

Pre-Harappan bricks found in Gulf of Cambay TIMES NEWS NETWORK[ SUNDAY, JULY 18, 2004 10:09:31 PM ] VADODARA: In an underwater exploration in the Gulf of Cambay, National Institute of Ocean Technology (NIOT) scientists discovered almost 9,500-year-old bricks made of clay and straw. Archaeological experts of the MS University who, too, are involved in a part of the exploration near Surat and the coast of Gulf of Cambay, however, feel that a further insight into the size of the bricks can confirm its age and its period. The bricks, believed to be pre-Harappan, have been identified to be of the...