I have been studying archology related information, Astronomy to seek information about the spread of Sanatana Dharma throughout the world.
And I also check the Linguistic affiliations along with Cultural similarities.
The Sanatana Dharma civilisation, as distinct from the Sarasvati Valley civilisation has been dated as the oldest in the world.
This coupled with the existence of Super Continents and reference to this by Tamil ,another ancient Language of India, the date of which is as old as Sanatana Dharama, had spurred me to dig deep into the subject.
Based on this, it transpires that a Group from South India, the Dravida desa, left the South because of a Tsunami (referred to by the Puranas and Tamil literature repeatedly) , led by Shiva and His son Ganesha moved through the Middle East , Europe,Africa, to Arctic before traveling back to Saraswati Valley through Russia, and Iran, while another led by Satyavrata Manu, the ancestor of Lord Rama moved to Ayodhya to found the Ikshvaky Dynasty(Ikshvaku was the son of Satyavrata Manu).
I have been following this trail in conjunction with the immigration and settlements in Europe and elsewhere.
I have been able to find references, evidence, cultural links and archeological finds.
I have posted articles on all these, under Hinduism.
Now to Mesopotamian Connection.
Located near the Turkish- Syrian border in the middle of an arid plain, Haran is one of the oldest Mesopotamian settlements.
The settlement of Haran is mentioned in a treaty which was enacted in the Temple of Sin (Sin was the Mesopotamian Moon God) at Haran in thereign of Hammurabi (1728-1686 BC). Several Assyrian kings describe rebuilding this temple. The last king of Babylon, Nabonidus (556-539 BC) also rebuilt the Temple of Sin. Excavations have revealed a large mud-brick building which dates to the end of the 3rd millennium BC. It is thought this might be the predecessor to the temple of the Sumerian and Mesopotamian Moon-God Sin.
The insignia of the Moon God Sin bears a remarkable likeness to that of the Vedic God Shiva. In fact, Shiva is also known as Som-nath (सोमनाथ) which means ‘Lord of the Moon’. Shiva’s insignia includes the crescent moon and the bull called ‘Vrishabha’ or ‘Nandi’ who was the vehicle of Lord Shiva.
The earliest known form of the name ‘Sin’ is ‘Suen’ which may well be a distortion of the Sanskrit ‘Shivam’ – the name of the Vedic Moon God. What is even more interesting is that ‘Haran’ (हरन), is another name for Lord Shiva.
..Sin /ˈsiːn/ (Akkadian: Su’en, Sîn) or Nanna (Sumerian: DŠEŠ.KI, DNANNA) was the god of the moon in the Mesopotamian mythologyof Akkad, Assyria and Babylonia. Nanna is a Sumerian deity, the son of Enlil and Ninlil, and became identified with Semitic Sin. The two chief seats of Nanna’s/Sin’s worship were Ur in the south of Mesopotamia and Harran in the north.’..
“The Mesopotamian literary corpus is one of the oldest literatures in the world. It is infused with the divine, because religion played a crucial part in the way Mesopotamians expressed their thoughts about human life. Mesopotamian religion was polytheistic, with a pantheon consisting of hundreds if not thousands of gods of varying importance. This website offers information about the fifty most important gods and goddesses and provides starting points for further research.’..
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The IVC has been tentatively identified with the toponym Meluhha known from Sumerian records; the Sumerians called them Meluhhaites. It has been compared in particular with the civilizations of Elam (also in the context of the Elamo-Dravidian hypothesis) and with Minoan Crete (because of isolated cultural parallels such as the ubiquitous goddess worship and depictions of bull-leaping).[108] The mature (Harappan) phase of the IVC is contemporary to the Early to Middle Bronze Age in the Ancient Near East, in particular theOld Elamite period, Early Dynastic to Ur III Mesopotamia, Prepalatial Minoan Crete and Old Kingdom to First Intermediate Period Egypt.
After the discovery of the IVC in the 1920s, it was immediately associated with the indigenous Dasyu inimical to the Rigvedic tribes in numerous hymns of the Rigveda. Mortimer Wheeler interpreted the presence of many unburied corpses found in the top levels of Mohenjo-Daro as the victims of a warlike conquest, and famously stated that “Indra stands accused” of the destruction of the IVC. The association of the IVC with the city-dwelling Dasyus remains alluring because the assumed timeframe of the first Indo-Aryan migrationinto India corresponds neatly with the period of decline of the IVC seen in the archaeological record. The discovery of the advanced, urban IVC however changed the 19th-century view of early Indo-Aryan migration as an “invasion” of an advanced culture at the expense of a “primitive” aboriginal population to a gradual acculturation of nomadic “barbarians” on an advanced urban civilization, comparable to the Germanic migrations after the Fall of Rome, or the Kassite invasion of Babylonia. This move away from simplistic “invasionist” scenarios parallels similar developments in thinking about language transfer and population movement in general, such as in the case of the migration of the proto-Greek speakers into Greece, or the Indo-Europeanization of Western Europe.
It was often suggested that the bearers of the IVC corresponded to proto-Dravidians linguistically, the breakup of proto-Dravidian corresponding to the breakup of the Late Harappan culture. Today, the Dravidian language family is concentrated mostly in southern India and northern and eastern Sri Lanka, but pockets of it still remain throughout the rest of India and Pakistan (the Brahui language), which lends credence to the theory. Finnish Indologist Asko Parpola concludes that the uniformity of the Indus inscriptions precludes any possibility of widely different languages being used, and that an early form of Dravidian language must have been the language of the Indus people. However, in an interview with the Deccan Herald on 12 August 2012, Asko Parpola clarified his position by admitting that “Sanskrit has also preserved a very important part of the Indus heritage” and that even Sangam Tamil had possible influences of the Brahmins .
Proto-Munda (or Para-Munda) and a “lost phylum” (perhaps related or ancestral to the Nihali language) have been proposed as other candidates for the language of the IVC.Michael Witzel suggests an underlying, prefixing language that is similar to Austroasiatic, notably Khasi; he argues that the Rigveda (composed by the Indo-Aryans after the decline of the Harappans) shows signs of this hypothetical Harappan influence in the earliest historic level, and Dravidian only in later levels, suggesting that speakers of Austroasiatic were the original inhabitants of Punjab and that the Indo-Aryans encountered speakers of Dravidian only in later times.
Citation.
Based on data prepared by the HEA-funded AMGG project.
http://oracc.museum.upenn.edu/amgg/index.html and
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indus_Valley_Civilization
http://vediccafe.blogspot.in/2014/12/the-ancient-city-of-haran-in-turkey.html
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