Abstract
INDIAN ORIGINS.—An ingenious if highly speculative note by Mr. H. Bruce Hannah in the Journal and Proceedings of the Asiatic Society of Bengal, N.S., Vol. 21, No. 1, deals with the question of the approximate period of the Mahabharata war and the ethnological affinities of the participants in it. According to the legend the war was fought between the Kurds and their cousins the Pandavas. The concrete historical protagonists appear to have been the Kūrūs (Dasyūs and their followers) and the Pāncha-Janāh. The Pāncha-Janāh consisted of the Pūrūs or Pauravas, Yādūs or Yādavas, Tūrvaśas, Ānūs, and Drūhyūs—all mentioned in the Rig Veda. They were probably four communities of western Asia, namely, the Philistines, the Amorites of Yādai in Naharin, broken Hittites, and a Phallus-worshipping people called “The People of the Pillar,” of Heliopolis, in Deltaic Khem, who had been driven out by Rameses III. about 1156 B.C. These were the people responsible for the introduction into India of the divine names afterwards transmuted into Indra, Mitra, etc. They settled in the Punjab, where they found aborigines and a dominant race of dark white, or perhaps semi-mongoloid, stock. These latter were the representatives of a widely diffused ancient central Asiatic people known to the rosy-blond Aryanians as Dahyus or Tokhs, and descendants of the Kusa or “wolf-folk.” They were not, however, uncivilised, and they dwelt in cities. Possibly the culture discovered at Mohenjo-Daro and Harappa and the civilisation of Susa discovered by de Morgan are vestiges of this civilisation. As a result of the struggle between the Dasyūs and the Pāncha-Janāh about 1000 B.C. in the Mahābhārata war, the Dasyūs or Kūrūs established themselves and acquired some of the culture of the Aryan Kshatriyās, evolving what has come to be known as Brāhmanism and caste. Further, it is suggested that about 4000 B.C. Dahyūs from central Asia penetrated to south India and, combining with the aborigines, founded the Dravidian race.
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Research Items. Nature 118, 642–643 (1926). https://doi.org/10.1038/118642a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/118642a0