TheEpic-Puranic chronology is a timeline ofHindu mythology based on theItihasa (theSanskrit Epics, that is, theMahabharata and theRamayana) and thePuranas. These texts have an authoritative status in Indian tradition, and narratecosmogeny, royal genealogies,myths and legendary events. The central dates here are theBharata War and the start of theKali Yuga.
These texts often discuss very long lengths of time, such as the widespread statement thatVaivasvata Manu lived 28yuga cycles before the writer's time, which, if the usual yuga cycle of 4,320,000 years is meant, is 120 million years.[1][2][3]
There are many possible variations of the timeline, because there are many of these texts and many different manuscripts of some individual texts, which sometimes contradict each other about what happened when and the lengths of time between them, although some events are fairly universal.[4][5]
Western historians usually regard the Epic-Puranic chronology as partly mythical, though containing elements of fact. In particular, the prevailingIndo-Aryan migration theory, based on archaeological, linguistic and genetic evidence, is that theAryans entered India from Central Asia some time after 2000 BC, along with horses and the precursor of the Sanskrit language, meaning that most of the events in the epics and Puranas could not have taken place earlier than this. This contradicts the epics and Puranas, according to which many of the events that they describe took place much earlier than this and there have always been Aryans in India.
Among Indian authors, on the other hand, the historical accuracy of these traditions is a subject of lively (and sometimes politically charged) debate.[6] The Epic-Puranic chronology is referred to by proponents of theIndigenous Aryans theory to propose an earlier dating of theVedic period, and the spread of theIndo-European languages out of India, arguing that "the Indian civilization must be viewed as an unbroken tradition that goes back to the earliest period of the Sindhu-Sarasvati Valley traditions (7000 BCE to 8000 BCE)."[7]
TheMahabharata and theRamayana are the two majorSanskritepics ofancient India.[8] Together they form theHinduItihasa.[9] TheMahābhārata narrates the struggle between two groups of cousins in theBharata War, and the fates of theKaurava and thePāṇḍava princes and their successors. It also containsphilosophical and devotional material, such as a discussion of the four "goals of life" orpurusharthas (12.161). The bulk of theMahabharata was probably compiled between the 3rd century BCE and the 3rd century CE, with the oldest preserved parts not much older than around 400 BCE.[10][11]
TheRamayana narrates the life ofRama, the legendary prince of theKosala Kingdom. Various recent scholars' estimates for the earliest stage of the text range from the 7th to 4th centuries BCE, with later stages extending up to the 3rd century CE.[12]
ThePuranas (literally "ancient, old",[13]) is a vast genre of Indian literature about a wide range of topics, particularly legends and other traditional lore,[14] composed in the first millennium CE.[15][note 1] The Hindu Puranas are anonymous texts and likely the work of many authors over the centuries.[4]Gavin Flood connects the rise of the written Purana historically with the rise of devotional cults centering upon a particular deity in the Gupta era: the Puranic corpus is a complex body of material that advance the views of various competingsampradayas.[16] The content is highly inconsistent across the Puranas, and each Purana has survived in numerous manuscripts which are themselves inconsistent.[4]
TheMahabharata,Ramayana and thePuranas containgenealogies of kings,[17] which are used for the traditional chronology of India's ancient history.Ludo Rocher in his book "The Puranas" (1986) provides a long list of chronological calculations based on Puranic lists with a warning that they are "often highly imaginative".[18]
ThePuranas are oriented at a cyclical understanding of time. They contain stories about the creation and destruction of the world, and theyugas (ages).[19] There are fouryugas in one cycle:
According to theManusmriti (c. 2nd CE),[20] one of the earliest known texts describing theyugas, the length of eachyuga is 4800, 3600, 2400 and 1200 years of the gods, respectively, giving a total of 12,000 divine years to complete one cycle. For human years, they are multiplied by 360 giving 1,728,000, 1,296,000, 864,000 and 432,000 years, respectively, giving a total of 4,320,000 human years. These fouryugas have a length ratio of 4:3:2:1.[21]
TheBhagavata Purana [3.11.18-20] (c. 500-1000 CE) gives a matching description of theyuga lengths in divine years.
TheKali Yuga is the presentyuga. According to Puranic sources,Krishna's departure marks the end ofDvapara Yuga and the start ofKali Yuga,[note 2] which is dated to 17/18 February 3102 BCE,[22][23] twenty years after the Bharata War.[24]
These very long periods of time obviously present a problem for attempts to square the texts with archaeological evidence, as some characters are described as living inTreta Yuga or earlier, putting them before modern humans evolved. The word "yuga" sometimes seems to have been used for other lengths of time, such as a generation,[25] a five-year cycle starting with the conjunction of the sun and moon in the autumnal equinox,[26] or periods of 4800, 3600, 2400 and 1200human years.[26] Some authors have proposed that the accounts in question were originally referring to one of these shorter "yugas" and confusion occurred later.[27]
The epics and Puranas also contain many extensive genealogies of monarchs and sometimes of other people such as priests and scholars, which provides some idea of what happened when. Sometimes the timelines suggested by these are very different from those suggested by other information in the texts such as references to when in the Yuga Cycle events took place. An example is the date of the Bharata War, as discussedbelow. There are cases where the later sections of the Puranic genealogies are known to contradict other historical texts, or each other.[28]
The Puranas, the Ramayana and the Mahabharata contain lists of kings and genealogies,[17] from which the traditional chronology of India's ancient history are derived.[29] Megasthenes, the Greek ambassador to the Maurya court at Patna atc. 300 BCE, reported to have heard of a traditional list of 153 kings that covered 6042 years, beyond the traditional beginning of theKali Yuga in 3102 BCE.[30] The royal lists are based on Sūta bardic traditions, and are derived from lists which were orally transmitted and constantly reshaped.[30]
The first king isVaivasvata Manu, the seventh and currentManu of the fourteen manus of the currentkalpa, the progenitor of humanity. According to the Puranas, he is the son ofVivasvat (also known as Surya), the Sun god, and his wifeSaranyu. He is also known as Satyavrata and Shraddhadeva.
Vaivasvata Manu had seventy children, includingIla andIkshvaku, the progenitors of theLunar andSolar dynasties of the kshatriyas, which play a prominent role in the origin stories of the royal families of the Vedic period.[31] TheMahabharata states that "it is of Manu that all men including Brahmanas, Kshatriyas, Vaishyas, Sudras, and others have been descended."[32][note 3]
The Puranas have been used by some to give a tentative overview of Indian history prior to the Bharata War.[18] Gulshan (1940) dates the start of the reign of Manu Vaivasvata at 7350 BCE.[18] The Puranas give 95 kings in theIkshvaku dynasty betweenShraddhadeva Manu (aka Manu Vaivasvata), the progenitor of humanity, and theBharata War.[33][7] Dating the Bharata War at 1400 BCE, A.D. Pusalkar (1962) uses this list to give the following chronology:[33]
Popular tradition holds that the Bharata War marks the transition toKali Yuga. The mathematicianAryabhata (6th century) calculated theKali Yuga epoch, based on planetary conjunctions, as 18 February 3102 BC. This date has become widespread in Indian tradition. Some sources mark this as the disappearance ofKrishna from the Earth.[35] TheAihole inscription ofPulikeshi II, dated toShaka 556 (634 AD), claims that 3735 years have elapsed since the Bharata battle, putting the date of the Bharata War at 3101 BC.[36][37][38]
Another traditional school of astronomers and historians, represented by Vriddha-Garga,Varahamihira (author of theBrihat-Samhita) andKalhana (author of theRajatarangini), place the war 653 years after theKali Yuga epoch, corresponding to 2449 BC.[39]
Puranic genealogies give a different date, saying that the war took place about 1,000 years before the beginning of theNanda dynasty, leading to a date of about 1400 BC[40] (F. E. Pargiter, comparing various different Puranas, suggested that the original number was 1,500 which was wrongly copied in various texts as 1000, 1015, or 1050, giving a date of about 1900 BC[41]).
The historicity of the war is subject to scholarly discussion and dispute.[42][43] The existing text of theMahabharata went through many layers of development, and mostly belongs to the period between c. 500 BC and 400 AD.[44][45] Within theframe story of theMahabharata, the historical kingsParikshit andJanamejaya are featured significantly as scions of the Kuru clan,[46] andMichael Witzel concludes that the general setting of the epic has a historical precedent in Iron Age (Vedic) India, where theKuru kingdom was the center of political power during roughly 1200 to 800 BC.[46] ProfessorAlf Hiltebeitel says that the Mahabharata is essentially mythological.[47] Indian historianUpinder Singh has written that:
Whether a bitter war between the Pandavas and the Kauravas ever happened cannot be proved or disproved. It is possible that there was a small-scale conflict, transformed into a gigantic epic war by bards and poets. Some historians and archaeologists have argued that this conflict may have occurred in about 1000 BCE."[43]
Despite the inconclusiveness of the data, attempts have been made to assign a historical date to the war.
Attempts to date the events using methods ofarchaeoastronomy have produced, depending on which passages are chosen and how they are interpreted, estimates ranging from the late 4th to the mid-2nd millennium BC.[48]
The epics and Puranas give lists of various dynasties of kings after the war, which are sometimes confirmed by other sources and sometimes contradicted by them (and sometimes contradict each other).[56]
The Vedic Foundation gives the following chronology of ancient India since the time of Krishna and the Bharata War:[web 1][note 4]
The history of India up to (and including) the times of theBuddha, with his life generally placed into the6th or5th century BCE, is a subject of a major scholarly debate. The vast majority of historians inthe Western world accept the theory ofIndo-Aryan migrations withc. 1500-1200 BCE dates for the displacement ofIndus Valley Civilisation byAryans and the earliest texts of theRigveda, with Sanskrit being descended from the language that the Aryans brought with them. This is supported by linguistic and some archaeological evidence, but conflicts with the chronology given in the epics and Puranas, according to which the Vedas, written in Sanskrit, date from many years earlier than this. Many Indian scholars, on the other hand, support some version of theIndigenous Aryans theory, in which, as in the epics and Puranas, the Indian civilisation is of an indigenous nature and the earliest sections of the Rigveda date fromc. 4000 BCE, or even earlier.[58][59]
Early Indian history does not have an equivalent ofchronicles (like the ones established in the West byHerodotus in the 5th century BC orKojiki /Nihongi in Japan): "with the single exception ofRajatarangini (History of Kashmir), there is no historical text inSanskrit dealing with the whole or even parts of India" (R. C. Majumdar).[60] While there are texts in Sanskrit, thePuranas, that profess to include the early Indian history, the Western scholars assume them to be compiled bybrahmins in the1st millennium CE, thus being contemporary with the described facts only from the time of theGuptas (3rd century CE) and in general legendary.[61]
The Epic-Puranic chronology has been referred to by proponents ofIndigenous Aryanism, putting into question theIndo-Aryan migrations at ca. 1500 BCE and proposing older dates for the Vedic period. The conventional position is that theAryans migrated into Northern India from Central Asia after 2000 BCE, bringing with them their language, which was the precursor of Sanskrit, the language of the Vedas, Itihasas and Puranas. The "indigenists", however, claim that the Aryans are indigenous to India,[62] and the Indo-European languages radiated out from a homeland in India into their present locations.[62] According to them, the Vedas are older than the second millennium BCE,[63] and texts like the Mahabharata reflect historical events which took place before 1500 BCE. Some of them equate theIndus Valley Civilisation with theVedic Civilisation,[62] state that the Indus script was the progenitor of theBrahmi,[64] and state that there is no difference between the people living in the (northern) Indo-European part and the (southern) Dravidian part.[63]
The idea of "Indigenous Aryanism" fits into traditional Hindu ideas about their religion, namely that it has timeless origins, with the Vedic Aryans inhabiting India since ancient times.[note 15]
The Indigenous Aryans theory has no relevance[clarification needed], let alone support, in mainstream scholarship.[65][66][67][68][69][70][71]
M. S. Golwalkar, in his 1939 publicationWe or Our Nationhood Defined, famously stated that "Undoubtedly [...] we — Hindus — have been in undisputed and undisturbed possession of this land for over eight or even ten thousand years before the land was invaded by any foreign race."[72] Golwalkar was inspired by Tilak's[note 16]The Arctic Home in the Vedas (1903), who argued that the Aryan homeland was located at the North Pole, basing this idea on Vedic hymns and Zoroastrian texts.[73] Golwalkar took over the idea of 10,000 years, arguing that the North Pole at that time was located in India.[73][note 17]
Subhash Kak, a main proponent of the "indigenist position", underwrites the Vedic-Puranic chronology, and uses it to recalculate the dates of the Vedas and the Vedic people.[74][75][76] According to Kak, "the Indian civilization must be viewed as an unbroken tradition that goes back to the earliest period of the Sindhu-Sarasvati (or Indus) tradition (7000 or 8000 BC)."[74] According to Sudhir Bhargava, the Vedas were composed 10,000 years ago, whenManu supposedly lived, in ashrams at the banks of theSarasvati River in Brahmavarta, the ancient home-base of theAryans. According to Sudhir Bhargava, people from Brahmavarta moved out from Brahmavarta into and outside India after 4500 BCE, when seismic activities had changed the course of the Sarasvati and other rivers.[77]
(1.18.6) On the very day, and at the very moment the Lord [Krishna] left the earth, on that very day this Kali, the source of irreligiousness, (in this world), entered here.
(5.38.8) The Parijata tree proceeded to heaven, and on the same day that Hari [Krishna] departed from the earth the dark-bodied Kali age descended.
(2.103.8) It was on the day on which Krishna left the Earth and went to heaven that the Kali age, with time for its body set in.
The word yuga occurs at least thirty-eight times in the Rigveda, but the meaning is rather doubtful. In a few places yuga means yoke ... In many places it appears to refer to a very brief period ... Generally yuga appears to mean in the Rigveda 'generation' (lessening the life of human generations) ... In other places 'yuga' must be given the sense of a 'long period of time' ...
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