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--- Sowmy <csowmy@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> From: "Sowmy" <csowmy@xxxxxxxxxx>
> To: <sampathkumar_2000@xxxxxxxxx>
> Subject: The Hindu Vedas and ancient Egypt.htm
> Date: Tue, 3 Jun 2003 12:08:47 +0300
> 
> The Hindu Vedas and ancient Egypt.htm

> 
> Dear Mr. M.K. Sudarshan,
> 
> Namaskaaram. I am Sowmyanarayanan, a recent member of the
> Tiruvengadam group. I was at your grihum the last sravanam and feel
fortunate getting the chance to take part in such an august
gathering.
> 
> Pls read the above article at yr leisure. This appeared in the
> "Hindu" sometime back. As the author reveals somewhat similar
sentiment as you did in yr posting, about the pyramids on the
yahoogroup, I cannot resist sending> this article to you.
> 
> Pardon me for lifting yr email id and sending a message offlist.
> 
> Regards,
> Sowmy.

---------------------------------
The Hindu : Vedas and ancient Egypt


Vedas and ancient Egypt 

Through the Vedas we can reclaim the spiritual heritage of 
the entire ancient world that can help take us beyond the 
current materialistic culture and the many problems it 
continues to bring us. 


THE VEDAS represent a monumental spiritual literature, by far the
largest, that remains from the ancient world. We could therefore call
the Vedas, `the pyramids of the ancient mind.' The Vedas are the
oldest record of the great dharmic traditions of the
East, with not only the Hindu but also Buddhist, Jain,
Sikh and Zoroastrian traditions part of the same greater 
stream of spiritual striving. Apart from the biblical tradition, 
this dharmic or Indic tradition is one of the two dominant
streams of world spirituality that has endured throughout
the centuries and remains vital to the present day, as
the global popularity of Yoga, Vedanta and Buddhism
clearly reveals. 
If we look at the Vedic tradition, we see that it was
based upon an ancient priestly order that was extensive and 
sophisticated, comparable to the priestly orders of ancient Egypt
or Babylonia. This priestly order was concerned not
merely with rituals but also with spirituality, yoga,
philosophy, medicine, astronomy and architecture that
form the basis of the various Upavedas and Vedangas. 

This spiritual culture of ancient India can easily be
compared with that of ancient Egypt, which was similarly guided 
by extensive priestly orders, their sophisticated rituals and
an emphasis of mysticism and magic. As ancient Egypt was
arguably the spiritual centre of the West in the ancient
world, so India can be said to be the spiritual centre of
the ancient East. 
The Greek bias 

One of the main mistakes that western scholars have made
is to approach Vedic civilisation using ancient Greece as their 
starting off point. They look at the Vedas like the works of
Homer, reflecting traditions like the Greeks who only
came on the scene during the late ancient period (after
1500 BCE). They view the Vedic people like the ancient
Greeks as mainly a warrior people, on the move, as part
of various proposed Aryan invasions/migrations of the 
time. They place Vedic culture in the mould of the type of primitive 
tribal Indo-European culture much like what they propose
was at the root of Greek civilisation. The Western date
of 1500 BCE for the Vedas was made to parallel their 1500
BCE date for the early Greeks (though biblical
constraints also entered into the picture). 
However, Homer and the oldest Greek literature of the
Iliad and the Odyssey at best resemble Hindu epics like the 
Mahabharata that came at the end of the Vedic period (but without 
the same depth of Vedantic thought or a dominant guru
figure like Krishna). The Homeric model was of a less
spiritual and more recent culture to which the
materialistic western civilisation could comfortably
trace itself. It did not reflect a mystic, rishi or yogi 
culture like that of the Vedas or that of ancient Egypt. 
Along with this mistake, western scholars have tried to
use language as the determinative factor for judging 
ancient cultures #8212; as if groups that spoke languages belonging
to the same language family must possess a similar or
contemporaneous culture as well. However, we should note
that language families have persisted through various
historical ages and different types of cultures. For
example, we cannot make medieval Russian and ancient 
Persian contemporaneous or similar in civilisation because of some 
linguistic affinities. On the other hand, cultures of the
same time period have similar civilisations in spite of
language differences. The ancient Romans, for example,
had much in common culturally with the Carthaginians who
had a similar life-style and lived in the same part of
the world, in spite of speaking languages that did not 
belong to the same family. 
Therefore, we must look at the Vedas according to the
cultural affinities of ancient civilisations, not merely 
according to linguistic affinities. As a type of spiritual/priestly 
culture, Vedic civilisation resembles more that of earlier
Egypt or Babylonia than that of Greece. 
The Greeks, though speaking a language with affinities
with Vedic Sanskrit, represented a later ancient culture 
already moving away from the spiritual and hieratic civilisations of 
the early ancient world. 

A reevaluation 

Western scholars invented the term `henotheism' to describe how any
one of the many Vedic Gods could represent all the Gods (a situation
that prevails among the Puranic Gods as well). We should note that
they used the same term for the ancient Egyptian religion which had a
similar view of multiplicity in unity among its many Gods. The Vedic
and Egyptian Sun Gods follow the same model of henotheism, being both
the One God in essence and many different Gods in function. 

Many symbols are common to ancient Egypt and India 
including the worship of the Sun and Sun kings, the sacred bull, the 
hawk or falcon, and the seeking of immortality as the main
goal of life. Indeed the Vedic ritual of the Yajur Veda
reflects a similar spirit to the Egyptian Book of the
Dead. Like the Vedic, the Egyptians not only had a love
of magic and the occult, but with their symbols like the
cobra at the crown of the head, suggest a knowledge of
Yoga as well. Yet such connections have been ignored 
because they are cultural rather than linguistic in basis. 

Egyptian culture endured from before 3000 BCE down to the
early Christian era. Isis and Osiris were worshipped in Rome 
as well as in the Old Kingdom of Egypt. Similarly, Vedic deities 
need not be limited to the later eras in which they are
still mentioned. Their worship could easily extend back
to the 3000 BCE date that we commonly find in Puranic
texts as marking the beginning of the Kali Yuga. 

The archaeological record of India is of a monumental
civilisation that persisted from 3000 BCE, if not 
earlier, not only into the late ancient era, like Egypt, but with a 
modified continuity up to the present day. In India today
we find the same types of rituals and temple worship
still being practised as once occurred in ancient Egypt
and Babylonia. That this type of spiritual ancient
civilisation has survived only in India suggests how deep
seated and original it must have been in the country. 
While ancient India did not leave monuments like the
pyramids of Egypt, it did leave extensive urban remains and its 
great Vedic literature, its pyramids of the mind. Connecting
the monumental spiritual literature of the Vedas, not
only with the great urban civilisation of ancient India,
but with a similar spiritual civilisational model as
ancient Egypt, will provide us with a better approach to
the Vedas that can help unravel their spiritual secrets.
Through the Vedas we can reclaim the spiritual heritage
of the entire ancient world that can help take us beyond 
the current materialistic culture and the many problems it continues 
to bring us. 

DAVID FRAWLEY 




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