Review: Cave of Forgotten Dreams (2010)

In Southern France, the Ardèche River flows through a spectacular landscape. Surrounding the river are white limestone cliffs, covered with vegetation, rising up over hundreds of feet. Over the river runs the Vallon-Pont-d’Arc, a natural arc like the one at Arches National Park. The cliffs on either side of the river are perfect places for hiking and that is what Jean-Marie Chauvet and his two friends, Éliette Brunel and Christian Hillaire were doing in December, 1994 when they chanced on a narrow entrance within the cliffs.
When you enter through this obscure shaft which was hidden for twenty millenia, you reach a dark cave with high ceiling where there is not much to see. If you have seen any Ramsay Brothers or Ram Gopal Varma movie, this is the point where you scream and run as fast as possible. Fortunately Chauvet and his friends explored the caves and as they went through the network of chambers they saw not just animal bones or stalactites, but undulating cave walls painted with spectacular animal images. And they were 30,000 years old.
Some of us may enter Mt. Athos, but we will never enter the Chauvet Cave. The cave is closed to public. But then if the French culture minister is a big fan of your movies you may get the once in a life time opportunity to film inside the cave. This is how the Bavarian film maker Werner Herzog (Aguirre) got permission to make this 3D documentary. But even then there were too many restrictions. The crew had to minimal (3 people). They had to use only hand held cold lights and always stay on the narrow walkway. They would be allowed inside only for a few hours every day. Despite such restrictions, the result is a spectacular film.
Since the cave was naturally sealed by a landslide for more than 20,000 years, it is like walking into a time capsule. The walls are filled with drawings of horses, bisons, lions, bears and mammoths. In one depiction, there are a bunch of animals running and to give the impression of running, the artist chose to depict the animal with multiple legs, similar to how you do in modern cartoons. You can call them the precursor to animation. Drawn during the period when Neanderthal man roamed alongside humans and Europe was covered with glaciers, the images are lifelike. They seem to be telling various stories: of fighting and mating and of hunting and movement.

The sequencing takes us in through that cliff-face door, away from sunlit faces and landscapes and down the torchlit shaft leading to the cave’s long chambers. These stretch back some eight hundred feet. The cave’s miracles of geology—the extravagance of its glittering stalagmites and calcite curtains—surpass those of the Pont d’Arc outside. But the chambers also have undulating walls, and it was on these that the ancient artists chiefly worked. We are given a foretaste of their images: we exit; we return to this item, to that; we leave again. “It is a relief to go outside,” Herzog explains: inside the caves we get to feeling “as if we were disturbing,” as if our distant ancestors’ eyes were still upon us. But finally we surrender to the flow of their art, immersed at length in the interplay of torchlight, rippling cave flanks, scorings, charcoalings and red ochre.[Cave of Forgotten Dreams]

But there are no human depictions.

One thing, though: There’s a partial depiction of a female, the lower part of a female body, somewhat embraced by a bison. It’s very strange that this motif reappears 30,000 years later in some etchings of Picasso—the Minotaur and the female.But why no human beings? You see depictions of human beings 20,000 years later, 18,000 years later, at the beginning of Neolithic times. By the end of Paleolithic—during the Magdalenian epoch of Paleolithic culture—that’s where you start seeing human depictions.[Werner Herzog Finds at Least Three Dimensions in the “Cave of Forgotten Dreams]

The documentary also reveals the amount of care taken by the French to protect the caves. This has not been developed into a tourist site because the visitors’ breath could bring mold on the paintings like what happened in Lascaux. Even the scientists stay on the narrow metal path so as not to plant their foot prints next to the 20,000 year print of an extinct cave bear. For tourists, they are planning a replica site nearby.

The other impressive thing is the research that has been done in these caves. Every inch has been laser scanned and specialists have looked at every artifact. Near the opening there is a wall with hundreds of hand prints and they belonged to a man who had crooked fingers. Deep in the caves, researchers found another painting which was done by a man who too had crooked fingers. The Chavuet painters used torches and some of them rubbed those flames against the cave walls leaving 28,000 year old charcoal fragments. A surreal moment is when Herzog tells us about two sets of foot prints: one belongs to a bear and the other to a child. Did the bear eat the child, or were they friends or were the foot prints made thousands of years apart? Again, we don’t know.
What makes this a non-boring documentary is Herzog’s commentary. His imagination is quite wild. Standing in the silence, looking at the art, he says one can hear one’s own heartbeat and the sound track switches appropriately. The cave paintings remind him of Fred Astaire’s dancing with the shadows and we get a visual from Swing Time. Then he gets the most wonderful characters to explain the past: a circus employee turned archaeologist, a scientist who walks in reindeer skin, a perfume maker who sniffs for smells in caves. These are very unique Herzog touches.
This is probably the only documentary I have seen in a theater and it was worth it.
Furthur Reading:

What does the world’s oldest art say about us? The New Yorker article that inspired Herzog.
Cave of Forgotten Dreams (2010), NYTimes Review
Werner Herzog Finds at Least Three Dimensions in the “Cave of Forgotten Dreams
Herzog on Fresh Air

Indian History Carnival – 41: Vasco da Gama, Universal Hinduism, Ravi Varma, Babylon

The boy who wanted to kill Vasco da Gama — Poster of Urumi or The Boy Who Wanted to Kill Vasco da Gama (from Wikipedia)

Koenraad Elst has a review of David Frawley’s Universal Hinduism (Voice of India, Delhi 2010),

In Universal Hinduism (Voice of India, Delhi 2010), American scholar and Hindu convert David Frawley sets out to clear up this confusion. He takes the reader through the basic data that set Hinduism apart from the others, and specific Hindu schools from one another and from Buddhism. He also discusses what it has in common with the world’s eliminated and surviving Pagan religions, and sometimes with forms of Islam and Christianity too. In his typical kindly style, he gives every practice and every belief its due, but keeps his focus on the potential of Sanatana Dharma to heal modern society as well as to lead man to enlightenment.

Anuraag mentions an Indian woman who ran an inn in Babylon in the 5th century BCE.

Kish was the site of another intriguing find. A bronze chariot rein ring, which probably seems related to the African giraffe or a species of deer from Iran. Called Sivathere of Kish, it has been object of many studies – an unknown hoofed mammal of the Middle East. Initially thought to be related to the Sivatherium – a large, short-necked giraffid, originally described for S. giganteus from the Siwalik Hills of India.

A major motion picture which is running to packed houses in Kerala is Santosh Sivan’s Urumi, set in the period when Vasco da Gama made his third voyage to India. The movie, it turns out, is not historical, but belongs to a category called alternate history. Arun Mohan writes about the historical inaccuracies in the movie.

Likewise, the scriptwriters weren’t much aware of that, Guns and cannons were part of Kerala even when Portuguese first came to Kozhikode in 1498. Guns and cannons were introduced to Kerala, through Arab traders and Chinese. However the difference was, we had gun technology of 13th or 14th century even in 16th century as most of rulers didn’t invest much in improving new gunpowder technology. Rather focus and attention was developing on Kalaripayittu. In the movie, we are made to believe, Chirakkal Princess doesn’t know what to say for Gun and calls it as Thee Thuppi! Whereas the word Pirangi and Thokku etc were much in Malayalam dictionary even in 14th century. So why to use the word Thuppakki? In 1502, Zamorins had fired more than 1200 cannons against Portuguese ships. However the Portuguese had better range, more firing power and manuveourability which our cannons didn’t have that time.

The event which sets the movie Urumi in motion is the massacre of 300 Muslims who were returning back from the Hajj. Maddy writes about the less mentioned violent streak of Vasco da Gama

The meeting of the Portuguese armada and the pilgrim ship resulted in an event that can perhaps be called one of the cruelest actions in history, though it has been glossed over by people of that time and many years thereafter. Upon seeing the Meri, The Portuguese ships fired warning shots, but the pilgrim ship did not retaliate even though it had artillery. The ship was loaded with very rich people and 10 of the richest Muslims of Calicut were on board, led by Jauhar Al Faquih. Gama proceeded to negotiate with this man, who first offered money & spices, which was refused by Gama. He then offered Gama one of his wives, his nephew as ransom and offered to load 4 Portuguese ships with spices. These discussions went on for 5 days. He also offered to arrange friendship between Gama and the new Zamorin. Gama refused and demanded all the wealth on the ship. The proud Al Faquih responded by asking Gama to ask for it himself as he had taken over command of the ship. Gama did that and obtained much money and jewels and in return first provided five boats of food items. He then disarmed the ship and boarded it, ordering his men to set fire to various parts of the ship and after it had caught fire, sailed away. The valiant pilgrims somehow put out the fire, but seeing this, the Gama came back to finish it off.

Sriram writes about how Ravi Varma made a name in Madras, based on Rupika Chawla’s book Raja Ravi Varma, Painter of Colonial India

Ravi Varma became known to the citizens of Madras in 1874 when he entered his Nair Woman at her Toilette for display at the Fine Art Exhibition in the city. He was awarded a gold medal for this work and four years later, he arrived in the city, this time to attend the next Fine Art Exhibition where his Shakuntala Patralekhan (Shakuntala writing a letter) won a gold medal. The painting was also acquired by the Duke of Buckingham and Chandos, who was then Governor of the Presidency. Buckingham was evidently very impressed with Ravi Varma’s work for two years later, he sat for a portrait of himself by the artist. He was now to be amazed by the speed with which Ravi Varma worked and noted “though he had given no less than 18 sittings to an eminent continental artist, he had not produced half so faithful a likeness as the Indian artist had done”.

If you find interesting blog posts on India history, please send it to varnam.blog @gmail or as a tweet to @varnam_blog. The next carnival will be up on June 15th.
Thanks: kupamanduka

60 Minutes Feature on Mt. Athos

Mt. Athos in Greece is a unique place where Orthodox monks live a monastic life. Though Greece protects the peninsula, it is self governed by the monks of the 20 monasteries of the Eastern Orthodoxy. Special permission is needed to visit Mt. Athos and only a few visitors are allowed each month. Mt. Athos does not permit women to enter and this ban has been in place since 1045 CE, since the time of the Byzantine emperor Constantine Monomachos. Mt. Athos does not even permit female animals (female cats are allowed since they catch rats).
Most of us will never set foot in this autonomous monastic state where orthodoxy has been preserved for a millenia. So the next best option is to watch the CBS 60 Minutes feature on this. (Part 1, Part 2). Ironically, the CBS clips are sponsored by viagra.

The First Buildings

We know that agriculture was invented about 12,000 years back in various places around the world, starting with the Fertile Cresent. Many models have been proposed to explain why humans left a foraging for farming. With the discovery of the 11,500 year old temple at Göbekli Tepe in Turkey, we also know that religion played an important role quite early in the settled life.
Now we have new evidence of how people lived during that transitory period. The earliest permanent buildings found during this period were not individual homes, but places for communal living or gathering.

Finlayson, Mithen, and their colleagues conclude that the evidence from WF16, combined with evidence from other sites, suggests that the earliest villages were not made up of houses, but rather communal structures where people came together to process their wild harvests and possibly also to engage in community performances. “These settlements appear to be all about community and not about emerging households,” the team writes, adding that this “ritualized community activity” might have helped to bring together the work force necessary to harvest the wild crops.
The authors don’t speculate on where the farmers lived, and there is no way to be sure. Researchers working at similar sites have surmised that they lived in small camps near the central site, but such open air habitations are very difficult to find and often leave little or no archaeological traces.
Archaeologist Trevor Watkins, emeritus at the University of Edinburgh in the United Kingdom, says he “agrees strongly” with the authors’ conclusion that the social changes that took place during the transition from hunting and gathering to farming were at least as important as the later economic changes that led to full-blown domestication of plants and animals. But he thinks that it’s still possible that some of the other buildings at WF16 were used as domestic dwellings. Nevertheless, Watkins says, the communal activities at WF16 and other Neolithic sites probably created “powerful bonds of collective identity” in the earliest farmers that kept them together in stable societies “over many generations.”[First Buildings May Have Been Community Centers]

In Pragati: Book Review – Churchill's Secret War by Madhusree Mukherjee

Three days after Germany invaded France, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg, Winston Churchill inspired Britain with the words, “I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears, and sweat.” These words—Blood, Toil, Tears, and Sweat—is the title of a book by John Lukacs which analyses Churchill’s motivational speeches during World War II as American and Russian forces battled the Axis in Europe and the Pacific. The titles of other books—The Last Lion: Winston Spencer Churchill, Visions of Glory, Churchill: A Study in Greatness—reveal the exalted position Britain’s war-time prime pinister occupies in world history, specifically Western history.
While reading Blood, Toil, Tears, and Sweat it was unclear what was more funny—Mr Lukacs’ repetition of the title words every few pages or his admiration of Churchill’s speeches extolling the virtues of freedom ignoring the enslaved people of the colonies. For such historians Churchill proved his mettle by leading the country through the war and coming out victorious. Like how many American historians do not see the irony in Thomas Jefferson asserting all men are equal while owning slaves, members of Churchill fan club do not see anything wrong in pronouncing him as the upholder of freedom and democracy despite his unapologetic imperialist stance and inhuman behavior towards the colonies.
In Madhusree Mukherjee’s book, Churchill is neither a lion nor a man of great moral rectitude. He was a man who could have prevented three million Indians from starving to death, but did not. Clouded by racist views of Indians, he even stopped other countries from helping the starving population, antagonised the US president with his stand on India and argued that the Atlantic Charter did not apply to British India. Despite all these, when the first words of Paul Johnson’s biography states that Churchill was most valuable man to the whole of humanity in the 20th century, one has to wonder about the lack of perspective behind that testimonial.
The famine
Between 1941 and 1942, three events occurred which turned out to be disastrous for the people of Bengal. First, fearing the Japanese invasion of India, the War Cabinet ordered a scorched earth policy in areas which would have to be surrendered. Rice was removed or destroyed. Money was advanced to businessmen to buy and hoard. Along with this, boats, much needed by farmers, fishermen and potters for their livelihood were destroyed.
Continue reading →

Multiple Big Bangs and Hindu Cosmology

Recently Briane Greene was on National Public Radio regarding his new book The Hidden Reality: Parallel Universes and the Deep Laws of the Cosmos which talks about brain churning concepts like parallel universes. He also theorizes that the universe did not have a single begining, instead there were multiple big bangs which created multiple universes. At this point the host said it reminded him of Hindu cosmology.
I am not sure if Hindu cosmology talks about multiple universes and their creation and destruction, or just about the creation and destruction of one universe. Much before Brian Greene, Carl Sagan had noted in Cosmos

“The Hindu religion is the only one of the world’s great faiths dedicated to the idea that the Cosmos itself undergoes an immense, indeed an infinite, number of deaths and rebirths. It is the only religion in which the time scales correspond, to those of modern scientific cosmology. Its cycles run from our ordinary day and night to a day and night of Brahma, 8.64 billion years long. Longer than the age of the Earth or the Sun and about half the time since the Big Bang. And there are much longer time scales still.
…A millennium before Europeans were wiling to divest themselves of the Biblical idea that the world was a few thousand years old, the Mayans were thinking of millions and the Hindus billions”

In his new book Indian Culture And Indias Future Michel Danino writes about the achievements of Āryabhaṭa (476 CE) like computing π, values of sines, diameter of earth, and computation of orbits of planets. Āryabhaṭa was also fascinated with the concept of yugas, in which the universe (in singular) is destroyed and re-created. He wrote “Time is without begining or end”

16th Century Europe

In 1492 Christopher Columbus set of to Asia and reached the Americas. Six years later Vasco da Gama reached Calicut. Following these, Europeans made many such voyages, started trading companies and eventually colonized the world. But what was Europe like in those days? Movies like 1492: Conquest of Paradise and The Sea Hawk give us some images, but they do not present the complete picture.
The University of Wisconsin-Madison has posted lectures given by Prof. George L. Mosse in the Fall of 1969. One of the lectures (mp3) deals with this question and the image of Europe of that period is not pretty.

By 1500, economic conditions were severe: a price revolution was starting, but it was also a time of bad harvests. 1500 saw a total crop failure in all of Germany that resulted in peasant uprisings, looting and pillaging, to such a proportion that in 1501 Europe for the firsts time saw a paid police force to maintain order. Additional scourges were diseases and epidemics. First and foremost, the Black Death: To the populations of Europe, this seemed like a willful and arbitrary punishment. Between 1499 and 1502, whole populations were decimated. A new disease, syphilis, joined the plague. This prompted preachers to call for repentance, penance and pilgrimages. The Plague was more frightening than the syphilis, because it occurred suddenly and greatly disfigured its victims. All of this leads to a heightened religious sensibility and a search for answers by all parts of the population.
To find answers, people turned to a kind of literature that had come down from the Middle Ages and was most popular: books of prophecies. Their content was simple, promising hope for the future: darkness would be followed by light, and after the Anti-Christ would come Christ. The roots of these books lay partly in the bible (which, Mosse tells the students, he is sure they have never read), especially in the Books of the Apocalypse. The Apocalypse is written in symbolic terms. Before the book of the seven seals can be opened, “the wine must be pressed and the harvest reaped” that means, before Christ’s return there will be bloody wars and mass the conversion of the heathens, especially of the Jews, to Christianity. Man lived in the expectation that the world was coming to an end; Luther believed it, and so did all protestant reformers and many of the intellectuals. With it came astrology. The stars were now in an evil conjunction. Saturn was “the evil planet”. The Anti-Christ would come up from the darkness; for a short while the Jews would rule the world before their conversion. Then the book of seven seals would be opened. (For example, Shakespeare firmly believed in astrology).[European Cultural History 1500-1815 – Summary]

Read the whole thing: European Cultural History 1500-1815 – Summary

Movie Review: The Sea Hawk (1940)

Poster via Wikipedia There is a funny scene at the beginning of The Sea Hawk which explains the state of Europe in the 16th century. The English privateer Geoffrey Thorpe (Errol Flynn) — leader of a group of privateers known as Sea Hawks — captures the Spanish ship and takes the Ambassador and his niece on board. As Thorpe makes some moves against the beautiful Dona Maria, she refutes his advances and forcefully tells him that she does not talk to pirates. Thorpe smiles and asks Dona Maria how the Spaniards managed to get the Indians to part with their treasures. The speechless lady stomps away and at this very moment Thorpe, the writers and the viewers know that she has fallen for him.
The movie is set in a period which is almost a century after Vasco da Gama set foot in India and a decade before the first fleet of East India Company visited Jehangir. Spain was the super power following the conquest and looting of paradise by Columbus and his followers. England’s standing in the world at that time, according to one historian, “was pretty rubbish.” Queen Elizabeth could not raise capital for any venture and made money by robbing Spanish fleets, who in the European Amway style made money by robbing people of the New World. The Queen had deputed a number of privateers (euphemism for pirate), licenced by the state for this task.
This was the time of Francis Drake and William Shakespeare. This was also a time of religious wars. When Elizabeth took over, she was initially lenient towards the Catholics, but when the Catholics saved the souls of few prominent people, she took notice and outlawed the practice of the religion. Besides this she also supported the Dutch Protestants and this did not go well with King Philip II of Spain, who once was the King of England due to his marriage to “Bloody” Mary. Philip wanted to send an armada to invade England, remove Elizabeth from the throne and return England to the Catholic fold.
While he was preparing the armada, Philip did not want Elizabeth to have any suspicion. It was for this reason that he sent the Ambassador and his niece to London. When she hears that the Ambassador was captured by her privateer, the ancestor of Prince William admonishes Thorpe in the court, but after that takes him to her private chamber and accepts gifts from the loot. She also approves his plan for going to the Americas and looting the Spaniards, right at the source.
This turned out to be a bad idea. Conspirators in the court join forces with the Spanish Ambassador and send a team to ambush Thorpe. He is taken to Spain where he faces another great European invention — the Inquisition Court where he is sentenced to a life in the galleys. From there he escapes, returns back to London and reveals the Spanish conspiracy.
This is a fun movie to watch with an array of one dimensional characters in expensive costumes, very impressive sets, with plenty of sword fighting and the 1970s Rajendra Kumar-Asha Parekh style look-don’t-touch style romance. The hero is smart, good looking, adventurous or as they say – swashbuckling. The heroine too is bold, beautiful and has of an independent mind. With a few songs, it would have made for a perfect Indian movie. In fact, parts of this movie were used in the first 70mm Malayalam movie — Padayottam (1982).
Though it was made in 1940s, the action scenes are quite spectacular, especially the initial scene where Thorpe’s ship chases and captures the Spanish ship, the ambush in Panama, and the final fight between Thorpe and the spy in the English court. The movie was released during WWII and there was some symbolism to the Queen’s speech in the movie. As one reviewer notes:

Around the time of the movie’s release in July 1940, Great Britain found itself standing alone against the growing threat of Nazi Germany. Sixteenth century Spain. Nazi Germany in 1939-1940. I get the feeling that Miller and especially Koch knew what they were doing when writing the movie’s script. Especially since Spain (under Franco’s Fascist rule) happened to be one of Germany’s allies in 1940. The strongest indication of ”THE SEA HAWK” being an allegory of World War II’s early years came in the form of the Queen’s speech in the final scene that hinted for all free men to defend liberty, and that the world did not belong to any one man. She might as well have been speaking to the British subjects of 1940, instead of 1588.

As always, the irony escapes these British script writers.

God's Wife and Competitors

Baal (via Wikipedia)
(Baal, right arm raised. Bronze figurine, 14th-12th centuries, found in Ras Shamra, ancient Ugarit img via Wikipedia)
We know the three Abrahamic religions as monotheistic: there is an all powerful unique male god with no equivalent. The popular perception is that Israelites have been monotheistic from the beginning and the traditional view holds that Abraham made a pact with God to worship only him and his followers continued that practice. Thus Joseph took this belief to Egypt, Moses bought it out of Egypt and Joshua went to Caanan and wiped out the polytheists. The monotheists also believe that the polytheistic world is a lie and the eventual destination for them is hell.
A new BBC documentary by Dr. Francesca Stavrakopoulou steps out of the theological realm, looks at Bible as literature and comes up with the conclusion that the monotheists themselves were polytheists; they worshipped divine beings, quite similar to the ones in the Indian and Greek pantheon of gods. God himself had a competitor and the documentary also makes the revolutionary claim that the God of the monotheists had a female companion.
Once you stop reading the Bible with the preset monotheistic mindset, it reveals many secrets, even though the humans who wrote them attempted to conceal this information. Thus Baal, the Caananite god, was a competitor to the God of the Israelites. Baal was a warrior god, often seen in representations raising his hand to use the thunderbolt weapon. He was the Indra of the Middle East and was important for the people of Caanan who depended on the rains. But in the Bible, Baal and his prophets are ridiculed and in the documentary and Francesca argues the reason is that people were straying from the idea of monotheism and it was necessary to put down other gods.
There is archaeological evidence for the worship for Baal as well as another deity El, who was the Chief Caananite God. El was the head of the pantheon and one who maintained order in the world, like Varuna in the Pre-Upanishidic era. In this pantheon, there were gods for Dawn and Dusk much like other cultures around the world.
While the Biblical God is called Yahweh, he is called El in some places. Jacob calls El, the god of Israel. He is also the god of the Exodus. El tells Moses that he had revealed himself to Abraham as well, similar to what Krishna tells Arjuna in 4.1. A rabbi on the program explains that all these variants are the name of the same God and it indicates what attribute God wanted to reveal to the devotee. The rabbi then agrees that you could read polytheism into it, but that is not the traditional understanding.
For Francesca, in ancient Israel, polytheism was the norm, not the exception and there are clues all over the place. God is mentioned sitting on a throne with diving beings on his right and left. According to Psalm, “God standeth in the congregation of the mighty; he judgeth among the gods”. According to Genesis, “Then God said, “Let us make man in our image” and in Exodus, “Who is like you, O LORD, among the gods?.” Thus in Israelite theology, Yahweh managed a council of divine beings, quite similar to the Caananite theology.
For the Caananites, El had a wife named Asherah, who was considered the goddess of fertility. She had an erotic representation with huge breasts and a pubic region marked with a tree of life motif. Many figurines excavated in Jerusalem and dated to the peak of the Israelite period show that Asherah was still worshipped. Francesca shows that if you skip the translations and read the Bible in Hebrew, Moses refers to God arriving with goddess Asherah. In fact evidence shows that she was even worshipped in the Temple of Jerusalem. An inscription discovered in a shard (dated to 8th century BCE) in Sinai mentions God along with Asherah. Thus God having a female partner maybe a minority position among believers, but not among scholars.
This polytheism is not surprising since the scholarly view is that Israelites were not migrants from outside, but natives of Canaan. Following a social collapse in Caanan, Israel rose and was made of Canaan commoners, the few escaped slaves from Egypt, and dispersed people. They created a new identity, adopted the stories of Moses, Abraham and Joshua and came up with the idea of a monotheistic God from a desert people called Shashu. Thus these people with new identity could have co-existed alongside the polytheistic Caananites and shared some of their practices.
So what happened to Baal, El, Ashera and the divine council of gods? Why were they removed, ridiculed or concealed? The purge of polytheism followed the Babylonian invasion of Jerusalem which happened during the time of Buddha in India. The Israelites were defeated, their temple destroyed and their all powerful God could do nothing about it. This would have been sufficient for most groups to lose their culture, but the Israelites persisted. During exile, while trying to make sense of their defeat, they wrote the Bible. Those authors transferred the power of Caananite gods to Yahweh, blamed the defeat partly on polytheism, and created new myths and histories. According to the NOVA documentary, Bible’s Buried Secrets:

Israelites were reminded that they had broke the covenant with God and hence were incurring his wrath. Still this was not taken seriously till the time the Babylonians exiled the Caananites. It was during this exile that one of the scribes of that era, known as “P”, took all the previous revisions and created the present version of the Bible. The documentary suggests that the Abraham story was created then, by this scribe, to enforce the concept of the covenant. The scribe lived in Babylon and Abraham was placed in the nearby Ur; Abraham’s goal was to reach the promised land, so was the dream of the exiles.
It was also during the exile that the observances like sabbath were emphasized. Israelites learned to pray in groups and to worship without a temple, king or priests. This was the formation of modern Judaism.

This re-write during exile was responsible for dis-empowering women, demonizing other gods and eradicating polytheism which was common till the 6th century B.C.E.
Postscript: You can watch the documentary in four parts on YouTube

Guest Post: Michel Danino on Andrew Lawler's article on Saraswati

Path of Saraswati/Ghaggar-Hakra from Wikipedia
(Carte de la sarasvati védique from Wikipedia)
(Science, Vol 332 had an article titled In Indus Times, the River Didn’t Run Through It by Andrew Lawler. In the article, three independent studies were cited to argue that Ghaggar-Hakra was a seasonal stream during the Mature Harappan phase (2500 – 1900 B.C.E) and not the mighty river mentioned in the Vedas. The studies also show that the river may have dried up around 10,000 years back. I asked Michel Danino, the author of The Lost River:On the Trail of the Saraswati, for his comments on these studies – Ed)
A few thoughts on the recent challenge posed by a few geological studies mentioned on this group (mainly Sanjeev Gupta et al.; H. Maemoku et al.). Some links to them (1,2, 3,4)
Those studies conclude that “the data suggests there was no big river here” (near Kalibangan in northern Rajasthan, on the bank of the Ghaggar) or that “the Ghaggar was not the mighty Saraswati during mature Harappan period because sand dunes on either side of the Ghaggar had been formed before that”. This is contrary to the view adopted by most archaeologists that the Ghaggar and its tributaries flowed during Harappan times, watering the hundreds of sites that have been found in this region. (Since the mid-nineteenth century, the Ghaggar was additionally identified with the Sarasvati river of the Rig-Veda.)
In reality, the issues are not so simple. First there is nothing really new in the claim that we don’t have a “mighty Sarasvati” during the Mature phase. In my recent book Lost River: On the Trail of the Sarasvati, I listed various evidences showing that the Ghaggar was dwindling during the Mature phase. In summary:

The Pakistani archaeologist M Rafique Mughal’s observation of a break in the settlement pattern between the Early and Mature phases (around 2600 BCE) just west of the international border for some 100 kilometres. His conclusion was that the Ghaggar had stopped flowing into Cholistan before the Mature phase; this means it was much weakened by that time.
In the same region, the German scientists M.A. Geyh and D. Ploethner detected a huge and shallow body of fresh groundwater. A tritium-based isotope study pointed to “a range of the actual water age from 12900 to 4700 years BP”, i.e. till about 2700 BCE, which matches Mughal’s conclusion.
A 2008 U.S.-Pakistan study directed by Peter Clift tested the Ghaggar-Hakra’s floodplain in Pakistan’s Punjab and concluded, “Provisional age data now show that between 2000 and 3000 BCE, flow along a presently driedup course known as the Ghaggur-Hakkra River ceased, probably driven by the weakening monsoon and possibly also because of headwater capture into the adjacent Yamuna and Sutlej Rivers.” This is again consistent with the above.

What is new and challenging in the recent geological studies is a suggestion that the Ghaggar went dry many millennia earlier. Actually that statement is found in A. Lawler’s article in Science, not in S. Gupta et al.’s abstract — and we don’t have the full papers as far as I know. Maemoku et al.’s conclusion that “the Ghaggar was not the mighty Saraswati during mature Harappan period because sand dunes on either side of the Ghaggar had been formed before that” can be readily dismissed because the age of the sand dunes is irrelevant to the question of water flow at various later dates.
Apart from the above views of Mughal, Geyh and Ploethner, and Clift, there are several major objections to a completely dry Ghaggar during Mature times. For instance:

There were undoubtedly numerous streams flowing down from the Shivaliks, and most recent climatic studies agree that the climate was wetter during the Mature phase, though on the way to aridity: all these streams (Sarsuti, Markanda, Dangri, Ghaggar, Patialewali, Wah and the three Naiwals being the chief ones) carried more water than they do at present. Moreover, nowadays, whatever water flows seasonally in those streams is largely diverted to irrigation through canals; in Harappan times, the diversion would have been much less. As a result, all this surplus water must have accumulated somewhere — where, if not in the Ghaggar? In fact, during last year’s abundant summer monsoon, the Ghaggar was full to the brim well into India’s Punjab, and we have records to show that it flowed all the way to Anupgarh decades earlier. Because of higher precipitation and lesser diversion, its flow in Harappan times could have been larger as well as for longer periods of the year.
Why are sites such as Banawali or Kalibangan built on the edge of well-defined paleochannels if those channels had no flowing water?
In particular, there are two crucial messages from Kalibangan’s urban layout: 1) the absence of large reservoirs (such as those at Dholavira) and a relatively small number of wells, both of which together point to a perennial source of water nearby; 2) the recessed entrance to the upper town precisely facing the Ghaggar below. The architectural message is unmistakable: the Kalibangan citizens had access to a flowing Ghaggar, both for water supply and for communication.
An earlier study by JK Tripathi et al.concluded that “The Palaeo-Ghaggar must have been a mighty river”. Though I regard that study as substandard (I explained why in my book), I mention is to show that experts can and do disagree.
Another case of disagreement can be found among the recently mentioned abstracts, see p. 23 of the pdf file: P. Clift et al., “Evolving Holocene Drainage Geometries and Environmental Conditions in the Indus River Basin”. I quote from the abstract:

“This trend became more intense after 4.5 ka [i.e. 2500 BCE ] when the last evidence for an active river was found in the region close to the archeological sites. … We suggest that in the Early-Mid Holocene the area of heaviest Harappan Settlement was one of significant fluvial confluence. The Sutlej and an independent Beas River flowed much closer to the Thar Desert than they do now. Moreover, we propose that the Yamuna, which now flows east into the Ganges, must have contributed to the sediment flux in the recent geological past, although the precise age of capture is, so far, not yet well determined. The end of the Mature Harappan Phase of settlement around 1900 BCE appears to shortly postdate the end of major river flow in the region, as the Sutlej migrated north, capturing the Beas. This change in the course of the Sutlej, together with the probable loss of the Yamuna resulted in the much smaller Ghaggar-Hakra being unable by itself to maintain significant flow into the desert, especially in the context of a weakening summer monsoon. The effect of this reorganization may have been as catastrophic to agriculture as the proposed abrupt weakening of the summer monsoon rains.”

This scenario is the same as that proposed by numerous experts earlier. It implies a flowing Ghaggar, partly fed by waters from the Sutlej and the Yamuna. Why hasn’t Lawler mentioned this alternative view in his Science article? And why do Sanjeev Gupta et al. fail to notice recent contributions from the Sutlej into the Ghaggar system, which are well attested by an Islamic chronicle of the 15th century and by the 1908 Imperial Gazetteer (which mentions the Sutlej finally leaving the Ghaggar in 1796)? I think the answer lies in the treacherous nature of the sediments in the Ghaggar region, which are notoriously difficult to interpret (even earlier, there were major disagreements among experts, e.g. Raikes and Courty).

These new geological efforts are welcome but I think we need to give them a few years to expand their scope and stabilize their findings. We also need to hear detailed discussions from geologists who have worked on the Sarasvati problem for a long time, such as KS Valdiya, VMK Puri, BC Verma etc.
Finally, nothing less than a multidisciplinary approach will provide a convincing answer to the question of water sources for the hundreds of Harappan sites in Haryana, Indian Punjab and northern Rajasthan: not just geology, but climatology, isotope studies of palaeo-waters, and of course archaeology (especially more refined studies of the evolution of settlement patterns). We are still far from such a multidisciplinary convergence.