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evolve within the hypothetical Indo-Aryan culture, but came from
another source, fully formed from the very beginning, then it
becomes easier to question whether the Aryans actually brought it
to the Indus Valley, instead of finding it already there in some form.
They might have simply merged the two forms into later Vedism
and, eventually, Hinduism. The Aryans, whoever they were, might
also have come from somewhere within the extreme northern part
of the subcontinent itself. The point is that a spiritually oriented
civilisation indistinguishable from Vedism existed in northern India
long before any Western invaders arrived.
Although research into this alternative theory is relatively recent,
four discoveries are worth examination. In 1990, the
Journal of Indo-
European Studies
carried an article entitled 'Analysis of an Indo-
European Vedic Aryan Head - Fourth Millennium
BC
' The life-
size head
has a hairstyle that the Vedas describe as being unique to the family
of Vasishtha, one of the great seers who composed parts of the
Rig-Veda
. The hair is oiled and coiled with a tuft on the right, and
the ears are riveted . . . Carbon-14 tests . . . indicate that it was cast
around 3700
BC
, with an error in either direction of up to 800
years . . . Stylistically the head is unique, with some parallels from
the realistic torso that has survived from the Harappan era of the
third millennium
BC
. . . Although identification of the head with
Vasishtha may yet be contested, it seems fairly certain that the
head is Vedic.
Second, Professor Subhash Kak of Louisiana State University applied
cryptological techniques in a computer analysis to prove a connection
between Indus Valley scripts traced back to 7000
BC
and the Brahmi
script of India of about 500
BC
. 'This suggests,' he writes, 'that the
Indus language is likely to have been Sanskritic . . . A well-known
glyph that had been read as
sapta sindhu
based on some references in
Sumerian literature is read identically when using my Indus-Brahmi
theory. Another well-known inscription could be read as listing
several Vedic gods.'
Third, many texts of the late Vedic period, such as the
Atharva
