Puranic chronology


The Puranic chronology is a timeline of Hindu history based on the Mahabharata, the Ramayana and the Puranas. Two central dates are the Mahabharata War, which according to this chronology happened at 3138 BCE, and the start of the Kali Yuga, which according to this chronology started at 3102 BCE. The Puranic chronology is referred to by proponents of Indigenous Aryans to propose an earlier dating of the Vedic period, and the spread of Indo-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 tradition."

Hindu scriptures

The Mahābhārata and the Rāmāyaṇa are the two major Sanskrit epics of ancient India. Together they form the Hindu Itihasa. The Mahābhārata narrates the struggle between two groups of cousins in the Kurukshetra War, and the fates of the Kaurava and the Pāṇḍava princes and their successors. It also contains philosophical and devotional material, such as a discussion of the four "goals of life" or puruṣārtha. The bulk of the Mahābhārata 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. The original events related by the epic probably fall between the 9th and 8th centuries BCE.
The Rāmāyaṇa narrates the life of Rama, the legendary prince of the Kosala 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.
The Puranas is a vast genre of Indian literature about a wide range of topics, particularly
legends and other traditional lore, composed in the first millennium CE. The Hindu Puranas are anonymous texts and likely the work of many authors over the centuries. 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 competing sampradayas. The content is highly inconsistent across the Puranas, and each Purana has survived in numerous manuscripts which are themselves inconsistent.
The Mahabharata, Ramayana and the Puranas contain genealogies of kings, which are used for the traditional chronology of India's ancient history. Michael Witzel doubts the reliability of these texts as historical documents, concluding that they "have clearly lifted lineages, fragment by fragment, from the Vedas and have supplied the rest... —from hypothetical, otherwise unknown traditions—or, as can be seen in the case of the Mahābhārata, from poetical imagination."

Puranic chronology

Cyclic time and Yugas

The Puranas are oriented at a cyclical understanding of time. They contain stories about the creation and destruction of the world, and the yugas. There are four yugas in one cycle:
According to the Manusmriti, one of the earliest known texts describing the yugas, the length of each yuga 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 four yugas have a length ratio of 4:3:2:1.
The Bhagavata Purana gives a matching description of the yuga lengths in divine years.
The Kali Yuga is the present Yuga. According to Puranic sources, Krishna's departure marks the end of Dvapara Yuga and the start of Kali Yuga, which is dated to 17/18 February 3102 BCE, twenty years after the Bharata War.

Dashavatara

The Dashavatara refers to the ten primary incarnations of Vishnu, the Hindu god of preservation which has Rigvedic origins. Vishnu is said to descend in the form of an avatar to restore cosmic order. The word Dashavatara derives from, meaning 'ten', and avatar, roughly equivalent to 'incarnation'.
Various versions of the list of Vishnu's avatars exist, varying per region and tradition. Some lists mention Krishna as the eighth avatar and the Buddha as the ninth avatar, while others – such as the Yatindramatadipika, a 17th-century summary of Srivaisnava doctrine – give Balarama as the eighth avatar and Krishna as the ninth. The latter version is followed by some Vaishnavas who don't accept the Buddha as an incarnation of Vishnu. Though no list can be uncontroversially presented as standard, the "most accepted list found in Puranas and other texts is Krishna, Buddha."
The following table summarises the position of avatars within the Dashavatara in many but not all traditions:

Pre-Bharata War kings and avatars

The Puranas, the Mahabharata and the Ramayana contain lists of kings and genealogies, from which the traditional chronology of India's ancient history are derived. Megasthenes, the Greek ambassador to the Maurya court at Patna at 300 BCE, reported to have heard of a traditional list of 153 kings that covered 6042 years, beyond the traditional beginning of the Kaliyuga in 3102 BCE. The royal lists are based on Sūta bardic traditions, and are derived from lists which were orally transmitted and constantly reshaped.

Shraddhadeva Manu

The first king is Shraddhadeva Manu, the seventh and current Manu of the fourteen manus of the current kalpa, the progenitor of humanity. According to the Puranas, the genealogy of Shraddhadeva is as follows:
  1. Brahma
  2. Marichi, one of the 10 Prajapatis created by Brahma, and one of the Saptarishis.
  3. Kashyapa, son of Marichi and his wife, Kala. Kashyapa is one of the Saptarishis, the seven ancient sages of the Rigveda who are the patriarchs of the Vedic religion, and the ancestors of the Gotras of Brahmins.
  4. Vivasvan or Surya, son of Kashyapa and Aditi.
  5. Vaivasvata Manu, the son of Vivasvan and Saranyu. He is also known as Satyavrata and Shraddhadeva.
Shraddhadeva had seventy children, including Ila and Ikshvaku, the progenitors of the Lunar and Solar dynasties of the kshatriyas, which play a prominent role in the origin stories of the royal families of the Vedic period. The Mahabharata states that "it is of Manu that all men including Brahmanas, Kshatriyas, Vaishyas, Sudras, and others have been descended."

Tentative chronology

The Puranas have been used by some to give a tentative overview of Indian history prior to the Bharata War. Gulshan dates the start of the reign of Manu Vaivasvata at 7350 BCE. According to Ganguly, the Puranic gives 95 kings between Shraddhadeva Manu, the progenitor of humanity, and the Bharata War. Dating the Bharata War at 1400 BCE, A.D. Pusalkar uses this list to give the following chronology:
  1. Pre-flood tradition and the dawn of history
  2. The great flood and Manu Vaivasvata
  3. The period of king Yayāti
  4. The period of king Mandhatri
  5. The epoch of Parashurama, the sixth avatar of Vishnu
  6. The era of Rama, the seventh avatar of Vishnu
  7. The period of Krsna, the eighth avatar of Vishnu
  8. The Bharata War
According to Subhash Kak,

Bharata War

The historicity of the Mahabharata War is subject to scholarly discussion and dispute. The existing text of the Mahabharata went through many layers of development, and mostly belongs to the period between c. 500 BCE and 400 CE. Within the frame story of the Mahabharata, the historical kings Parikshit and Janamejaya are featured significantly as scions of the Kuru clan, and Michael Witzel concludes that the general setting of the epic has a historical precedent in Iron Age India, where the Kuru kingdom was the center of political power during roughly 1200 to 800 BCE. According to Professor Alf Hiltebeitel, the Mahabharata is essentially mythological. Indian historian Upinder Singh has written that:
Despite the inconclusiveness of the data, attempts have been made to assign a historical date to the Kurukshetra War. Popular tradition holds that the war marks the transition to Kaliyuga and thus dates it to 3102 BCE. A number of other proposals have been put forward:
The Vedic Foundation gives the following chronology of ancient India since the time of Krishna and the Bharata War:

Indigenous Aryans

The Epic-Puranic chronology has been referred to by proponents of Indigenous Aryans, putting into question the Indo-Aryan migrations at ca. 1500 BCE and proposing older dates for the Vedic period. According to the "Indigenist position", the Aryans are indigenous to India, and the Indo-European languages radiated out from a homeland in India into their present locations. According to them, the Vedas are older than second millennium BCE, and scriptures like the Mahabaratha reflect historical events which took place before 1500 BCE. Some of them equate the Indus Saraswati Civilisation with the Vedic Civilization, state that the Indus script was the progenitor of the Brahmi, and state that there is no difference between the people living in Indo-European part and the Dravidian part.

'10,000 years in India'

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.
M.S. Golwalkar, in his 1939 publication We 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." Golwalkar was inspired by Tilak's The Arctic Home in the Vedas, who argued that the Aryan homeland was located at the North Pole, basing this idea on Vedic hymns and Zoroastrian texts. Gowalkar took over the idea of 10,000 years, arguing that the North Pole at that time was located in India.
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. According to Kak, "the Indian civilization must be viewed as an unbroken tradition that goes back to the earliest period of the Sindhu-Sarasvati tradition." According to Sudhir Bhargava, the Vedas were composed 10,000 years ago, when Manu supposedly lived, in ashrams at the banks of the Sarasvati river in Brahmavarta, the ancient home-base of the Aryans. 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.
The idea of 10,000 years of Hindu presence in South Asia stands in stark contrast to mainstream scholarship, according to which proto-Vedic culture entered India starting 1500 BCE with the Indo-Aryan migrations, and Hinduism developed as a synthesis of Vedic-Brahmanic and indigenous religious traditions after 500 BCE.

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