An
Atlantis in the Indian Ocean
(Review of Stephen Oppenheimer: Eden in the East)
By Koenraad Elst
http://www.swordoftruth.com/swordoftruth/articles/revelation/revelation.html
One of the many insulting epithets thrown at AIT
disbelievers is that they are no better than "Atlantis freaks".
Actually, this is not entirely untrue. Some AIT skeptics who have applied their
minds to reconstructing ancient history, have indeed thought of centres of human
habitation in locations now well below sea-level. When Proto-Indo-European was
spoken, the sea level was still recovering from the low point it had reached
during the Ice Age, about 100 metres lower than the present level. It was in the
period of roughly twelve to seven thousand years ago that the icecaps melted and
replenished the seas, so that numerous low-lying villages had to be abandoned.
After
all, it is a safe bet that more than half of mankind lived in the zone of less
than 100 m above sea level. In the context of the present debate on global
warming, it is said that a rise in sea level of just one metre would be an
immense catastrophe for countries like Bangla Desh or the Netherlands. The
Maledives would completely disappear with a rise of only a few metres. But more
importantly, most big population centres today are located just above sea level:
Tokyo, Shanghai, Kolkata, Mumbai, London, New York, Los Angeles etc. If the sea
level would rise 100 m, most population centres including entire countries would
become a sunken continent, a very real Atlantis. Consequently, there is nothing
far-fetched in assuming the existence of population centres and cultures, 10 or
15 thousand years ago, in what are now submarine locations on the continental
shelf outside our coastlines.
In a recent book, Eden in the East: the Drowned
Continent of Southeast Asia (Phoenix paperback, London 1999 (1998)), Stephen
Oppenheimer has focused on one such part of the continental shelf: the region
between Malaysia, Sumatra, Java, Borneo, Thailand, Vietnam, China and Taiwan,
which was largely inhabitable during the Ice Age. Thinking that this was then
the most advanced centre of civilization, he calls it Eden, the Biblical name of
Paradise (from Sumerian edin, "alluvial plain"), because West-Asian
sources including the Bible do locate the origin of mankind or at least of
civilization in the East. In some cases, as in Sumerian references, this
"East" is clearly the pre-Harappan and Harappan culture, but even more
easterly countries seem to be involved.
Oppenheimer
is a medical doctor who has lived in Southeast Asia for decades. He is clearly
influenced by Marxism, e.g. where he dismisses religion as a means to
"control other people's labour", with explicit reference to Karl
Marx's Das Kapital (p.483). His book is based on solid scientific research
(genetic, anthropological, linguistic and archaeological), and is in that
respect very different from the numerous Atlantis books which draw on
"revelations" and "channeling".
The most airy type of evidence, in its massiveness
nonetheless quite compelling, is comparative mythology: numerous cultures, and
especialy those in the Asia-Pacific zone, have highly parallel myths of one or
more floods. These are not opaque allusions to Freudian events in the
subconscious but plainly historical references to the catastrophic moments in
the otherwise long-drawn-out rise of the sea level after the Ice Age. For,
indeed, this rise was not a continuous process but took place with occasional
spurts, wiping out entire tribes living near the coast. The last such sudden
rise took place ca. 5500 BC, after which the sea level fell back a few metres to
the present level.
According
to Oppenheimer, the Southeast-Asian Atlantis, provisionally called Sundaland
because it now is the Sunda shelf, was the world leader in the Neolithic
Revolution (start of agriculture), using stones for grinding wild grains as
early as 24,000 ago, more than ten thousand years older than in Egypt or
Palestine. Before and especially during the gradual flooding of their lowland,
the Sundalanders spread out to neighbouring lands: the Asian mainland including
China, India and Mesopotamia, and the island world from Madagascar to the
Philippines and New Guinea, whence they later colonized Polynesia as far as
Easter Island, Hawaii and New Zealand.
Oppenheimer aligns with the archaeologists against the
linguists in the controversy about the homeland of the Austronesian language
family (Malay, Tagalog, Maori, Malgasy etc.): he locates it in Sundaland and its
upper regions which now make up the coasts of the Southeast-Asian countries,
whereas most linguists maintain that southern China was the land of origin. Part
of the argument concerns chronology: Oppenheimer proposes a higher chronology
than Peter Bellwood and other out-of-China theorists. My experience with IE
studies makes me favour a higher chronology, for new findings (e.g. that
"pre-IE" peoples like the Pelasgians and the Etruscans, not to speak
of the Harappans, turn out to have been earlier "Aryan" settlers) have
consistently been pushing the date of the fragmentation of PIE back into the
past.
Another
reason for not relying too much on the theories of the linguists is that
Austronesian linguistics is a very demanding field, comprising the study of
hundreds of small languages most of which have no literature, so the number of
genuine experts is far smaller than in the case of IE, and even in the latter
case linguists are nowhere near a consensus on the homeland question. Linguistic
evidence is very soft evidence, and usually the data admit of more than one
historical reconstruction, so I don't think there is any compelling evidence
against a Sundaland homeland hypothesis. Conversely, archaeological and genetic
evidence in favour of the spread of the Austronesian-speaking populations from
Sundaland seems to be sufficient.
It is quite certain that some of these Austronesians
must have landed in India, some on their way to Madagascar, some to stay and mix
with the natives. Hence the presence of some Austronesian words in Indian
languages of all families, most prominently ayi/bayi, "mother" (as in
the Marathi girls' names Tarabai, Lakshmi-bai etc.), or words for
"bamboo", "fruit", "honey". More spectacularly,
linguists like Isidore Dyen have discerned a considerable common vocabulary in
the core lexicon of Austronesian and Indo-European, including pronouns, numerals
(e.g. Malay dva, "two") and terms for the elements. Oppenheimer
doesn't go into this question, but diehard invasionists might use his findings
to suggest an Aryan invasion into India not from the northwest, but from the
southeast.
But he does mention the legend of Manu Vaivasvata
saving his company from the flood and sailing up the rivers of India to settle
high and dry in Saptasindhu. Clearly, the origins of Vedic civilization are
related to the post-Glacial flood, probably the single biggest migration trigger
in human history.
The
Tamils have a tradition that their poets' academy or Sangam existed for ten
thousand years, and that its seat (along with the entire Tamil capital) had to
be moved thrice because of the rising sea level. They also believe that their
country once stretched far to the south, including Sri Lanka and the Maledives,
a lost Tamil continent called Kumarikhandam. If these legends turn out to match
the geological evidence quite neatly, our academics would be wrong to dismiss
them as figments of the imagination. But the Indian or Kumarikhandam counterpart
to Oppenheimer's book on Sundaland has yet to be written. This indeed is
probably the most important practical conclusion to be drawn from this book:
extend India's history by thousands of years with the exploration of
now-submarine population centres.
Another language family originating in some part of
Sundaland was Austro-Asiatic, which includes the Mon-Khmer languages in
Indochina (its demographic point of gravity being Vietnam) but also Nicobarese
and the Munda languages of Chotanagpur, at one time possibly spoken throughout
the Ganga basin. It is the Mundas who brought rice cultivation from Southeast
Asia to the Ganga basin, whence it reached the Indus Valley towards the end of
the Harappan age (ca. 2300 BC). In this connection, it is worth noting that
Oppenheimer confirms that "barley cultivation was developed in the Indus
Valley" (p.19), barley being the favourite crop of the Vedic Aryans (yava).
Unlike the Mundas who brought rice cultivation from eastern India and ultimately
from Southeast Asia to northwestern India, and unlike the Indo-European Kurgan
people whose invasion into Europe can be followed by means of traces of the
crops they imported (esp. millet), the Vedic Aryans simply used the native
produce. This doesn't prove but certainly supports the suspicion that the Aryans
were native to the Indus Valley.
Concerning
the political polemic, the usual claim that the caste system with its sharp
discrimination was instituted by the invading Aryans to entrench their supremacy
is countered by the finding that even the most isolated tribes on India's hills
turn out to have strict endogamy rules, often guarded with more severe
punishments for inter-tribal love affairs than exist in Sanskritic-Hindu
society. Here, Oppenheimer confirms that in the Austro-Asiatic and Austrone-sian
tribal societies, where many of India's tribals originate, inequality is deeply
entrenched: "Yet the class structure which cripples Britain more than any
other European state, is as nothing compared with the stratified hierarchies in
Austronesian traditional societies from Madagascar through Bali to Samoa. (...)
This consciousness of rank is thus clearly not something that was only picked up
by Austronesian societies from later Indian influence." (p.484) Social
hierarchy is not a racialist imposition by the Aryans, but a near-universal
phenomenon especially pronounced among Indo-Pacific societies including most
non-Aryan populations.
Stephen Oppenheimer makes a very detailed and very
strong case for the importance of the culture of sunken Sundaland for the later
cultures in the wide surroundings. India too certainly benefited of certain
achievements imported from there. What is yet missing is a similar study for the
equally important and likewise neglected culture of the sunken lands outside
India's coast.
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