Author: Asko Parpola
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190226935
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 385
Get Book Here
Book Description
Hinduism has two major roots. The more familiar is the religion brought to South Asia in the second millennium BCE by speakers of Aryan or Indo-Iranian languages, a branch of the Indo-European language family. Another, more enigmatic, root is the Indus civilization of the third millennium BCE, which left behind exquisitely carved seals and thousands of short inscriptions in a long-forgotten pictographic script. Discovered in the valley of the Indus River in the early 1920s, the Indus civilization had a population estimated at one million people, in more than 1000 settlements, several of which were cities of some 50,000 inhabitants. With an area of nearly a million square kilometers, the Indus civilization was more extensive than the contemporaneous urban cultures of Mesopotamia and Egypt. Yet, after almost a century of excavation and research the Indus civilization remains little understood. How might we decipher the Indus inscriptions? What language did the Indus people speak? What deities did they worship? Asko Parpola has spent fifty years researching the roots of Hinduism to answer these fundamental questions, which have been debated with increasing animosity since the rise of Hindu nationalist politics in the 1980s. In this pioneering book, he traces the archaeological route of the Indo-Iranian languages from the Aryan homeland north of the Black Sea to Central, West, and South Asia. His new ideas on the formation of the Vedic literature and rites and the great Hindu epics hinge on the profound impact that the invention of the horse-drawn chariot had on Indo-Aryan religion. Parpola's comprehensive assessment of the Indus language and religion is based on all available textual, linguistic and archaeological evidence, including West Asian sources and the Indus script. The results affirm cultural and religious continuity to the present day and, among many other things, shed new light on the prehistory of the key Hindu goddess Durga and her Tantric cult.
Author: Jane Mcintosh
Publisher: Westview Press
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 248
Get Book Here
Book Description
Some 5000 years ago, civilized societies emerged in the valleys of four great rivers: the Nile, the Euphrates, the Yellow, and the Indus. Of these primary Old World civilizations, that of the Indus remains the least known and the most enigmatic, though, paradoxically, it has left perhaps the most lasting influence on the societies that followed it. In this lucid account - abundantly illustrated with maps and photographs, including sixteen pages in full color - archaeologist Jane McIntosh addresses what we know about the rise and fall of the civilization of the Indus and Saraswati valleys, what it might be reasonable to speculate, and what we still hope to learn. While drawing on archaeological and linguistic evidence to create a portrait of the civilization from the inside, McIntosh also carefully pieces together a wider picture of the Indus civilization using evidence from its trading partners in Mesopotamia, the Persian Gulf, the Indian subcontinent, and Southwest Asia. The result is an outstandingly vivid recreation of one of the world's great but all-but-lost ancient civilizations.
Author: Madhav Deshpande
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 514
Get Book Here
Book Description
Samskrta-Subodhini: A Sanskrit Primer marks the culmination of Professor Deshpande's experience of teaching Sanskrit at the University of Michigan for over twenty-five years. Tested in classes at Michigan and elsewhere and successively improved for over twenty years, the teaching materials in the book now offer an effective tool to learn and teach Sanskrit. It aims at teaching Sanskrit as a language, rather than as a religious or mystical entity. It also simplifies the process of learning Sanskrit by dissociating this language-learning process from the heavy burdens imposed both by the tradition of Indo-European linguistics and the tradition of indigenous Sanskrit grammarians in India. By treating Sanskrit as a productive language, rather than as a dead language merely to be deciphered, the book represents a significant advance over the traditional Western approach to the study of Sanskrit. Work on this book began in 1976, and now almost two generations of Professor Deshpande's students have used successively improved versions. The book's examples include many modified versions of classical Sanskrit passages from epic texts such as The Mahabharata and The Ramayana. The book also contains examples from Hindu, Buddhist, and Jain traditions, as well as samples of Sanskrit poetry and satire. Madhav M. Deshpande is Professor of Sanskrit and Linguistics in the Department of Asian Languages and Cultures, University of Michigan, where he has been on the faculty since 1972. His research relates to the fields of Paninian linguistics, historical linguistics, and sociolinguistics, as well as the cultural and linguistic history of India. Besides his research publications, Professor Deshpande has participated in Sastric and literary debates in Sanskrit and has also published Sanskrit poems and plays.
Author: Charles Philip Brown
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 92
Get Book Here
Book Description
Author: A. Venkatasubbiah
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Kalās
Languages : en
Pages : 98
Get Book Here
Book Description
Author: Kālidāsa
Publisher: Calcutta : Writers Workshop
ISBN:
Category : Epic poetry, Sanskrit
Languages : en
Pages : 242
Get Book Here
Book Description
Extended narrative poem on the life and activities of Raghu, Hindu mythological king of the Solar dynasty and his successors.
Author: Kālidāsa
Publisher: Motilal Banarsidass Publishing House
ISBN: 9788120800120
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 280
Get Book Here
Book Description
ABOUT THE BOOK:The Kumarasambhava of Kalidasa is a tour-de-force of literary effort of a very high order, and is in fact the oriflamme of Indian Poetic genius. It is a gem among Kalidasa's poetic works. It Sings of divine love and of the strife betwee
Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 38
Get Book Here
Book Description
Author: Kashinath Vasudev Abhyankar
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Sanskrit language
Languages : en
Pages : 472
Get Book Here
Book Description
Author: Vaman Shivaram Apte
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : English language
Languages : en
Pages : 494
Get Book Here
Book Description
