Vimanas and the wars of the gods: The Rediscovery of a Lost Civilization, of a Forgotten Science and of an Ancient Lore of India and Pakistan

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Preface

An immense heritage of culture and wisdom is still hidden in the lands which lie between India and Pakistan, places very far from us, but deep laden with a charm and a beauty that words are not able to explain.

To pursue a journey of discovery and analysis, we need to scratch the glaze deposited by the time and we have to lift the Maya’s veil to rediscover the real 'origins', or the cradle, from which certain traditions are born and radiated.

Our journey has its origins in a forgotten and almost unknown civilization, extremely advanced but completely fallen into the oblivion of history, a culture that left to posterity a massive amount of texts transmitted predominantly in oral form, a knowledge that these same traditions claimed to come from ancient times and moreover from some remote civilization destroyed by an immense cataclysm.

The Vedic world is still the subject of vivid debates, of analysis that might re-write the history of our civilization and cause us to see with different eyes the origins of our human species.

The world of the Vedas was inhabited by ethereal beings and supported by a belief system that agglomerates everything.

The 'Knowledge' was the Vedas. The comparative study of religions shows that to this day, no faith is remotely comparable to that of the Vedic whose features were beyond the cult and myth, whose essence enveloped everything, embraced every gesture and every appearance.

It was a universal knowledge that infused every aspect of the material and spiritual life, a knowledge that gave rise to the highest and most extreme thinking, a world founded on the purest mind rather than the visible and the perceptible.

Suddenly, this world disappeared, swallowed by the same unknown that had been this civilization’s primary source.

As stated by Roberto Calasso "... what remains is a force that would shake every mind that is not completely subservient to what surrounds it"¹.

In approaching the traditions, the culture and spirituality of these places necessarily impose on us a new vision of the reality, a dutiful respect for worlds that have taken a different path from ours and necessarily it requires the abandonment of the schemes and dogmas that we have built in 'our' Western civilization.

Arthur Schopenhauer wrote "In India our religions do not ever take root, the ancient wisdom of the human race will not be overshadowed by the events of Galilee. On the contrary, Indian wisdom will flow to Europe and will produce fundamental changes in our thinking and in our knowledge"².

No less clear was the philosopher Friedrich Schlegel, who wrote, "India is not only the source of all things, it is superior in everything, intellectually, religiously or politically and even the Greek heritage seems pale by comparison"³.

We are aware that the significance of the concepts and information contained in this text can be tricky and not easy to 'digest', its genesis is a job that lasted many years in the search for unpublished and unknown information in the areas under study.

Some of this information has not been included for reasons of space, but we are already working on future publications that will go deeper into the specifics.

We believe that such knowledge, such unique and glamorous knowledge, deserved a publication, as exhaustive as possible, that includes all those subtleties often overlooked or forgotten, which in reality are integral parts and of immense value to a forgotten history.

An ancient proverb says 'The devil is in the detail, and it is in keeping with this proverb that we have tried to write each chapter or section as a unique collection of information, a compendium as exhaustive and documented as possible on the theme under discussion.

With that purpose we have made an extensive use of notes in, which, among other things, for the first time we have included direct references to the original sources so that those who want to learn or expand on these ideas will be able to do so with as much specificity as possible.

A final element has been a wall beyond which, until now, it has been impossible to continue the research into this very fascinating world, the rejection of evidence.

The great writer Howard Phillips Lovecraft in 1926 stated bluntly "I think the most merciful thing in the world is the inability of the human mind to correlate its many realities. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not expected that we venture too far. The sciences, which have until now proceeded on their own roads, have not done too much damage to us. But the reconstruction of the whole picture one day will open to us, it will be such a terrifying vision of reality and of our place in it that we will go crazy because of this revelation or we will run away from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age "⁴.

Certainly the vision that lies ahead will not be as terrifying as outlined by Lovecraft, a forerunner of the modern gothic novel, but it can certainly shake the foundations of our certainties and stagger many of our beliefs if it does not prepare our hearts and our minds to be able to accept the diversity and the differences with what we have erected as cornerstones of our culture and society.

We wrote this book as the epitome of a search that will last a lifetime, as the first piece of a mosaic that we would build over time.

To face this investigation has led us to the immersion in the roots of thought, of its essence, the search for the place where this has originated and where its greatness saw the most sublime flowering.

The Indian wisdom has passed quietly and protected from thought to thought until reaching the present day. Away from the deafening noise of civilization, hidden from the view of people, a few men have guarded and preserved these ancient knowledge passing them in the silence of their wisdom.

A new world is still waiting to be discovered and only the humility to accept and to investigate that, it will lead us to fully comprehend it.

Enrico Baccarini

¹ Roberto Calasso, Ardore, Adelphi, 2010.

² Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, Volume I, & 63 p. 356-357.

³ In Francois Gautier, Arise, O India, Har-Anand Publications, 2000, p. 25.

⁴ Gianni Pilo (curatore), I Miti di Cthulhu, Fanucci Editore, 1987.

Introduction by Graham Hancock

Over the last more than twenty years I had the privilege to investigate the possibility that may have been existed a lost civilization. Earlier in my life I use to be a journalist and I brought these research skills to investigate these mysteries and I was able to travel very widely around the world and look at ancient mythology and ancient traditions and to approach some incredible ancient monuments reaching certain conclusions about these.

Pakistan and India play for me a very important role in my research. Visiting, for example, the Andes mountains in South America or ancient Egypt you find yourself confronted by ancient ruins, but the culture that created those ruins is gone, is completely extinct. When you go to India and Pakistan, the Indian subcontinent, you do find yourself confronted by ancient ruins, but the culture that was involved in creating those ruins is in a strange way still alive. There is a living ancient culture, particularly in India, which I had a special flavor to research upon there and we can still encounter people in Hindu religion who are connected to a deeply knowledgeable about the ancient Indian texts.

This is a tremendous advantage of working on the Indian subcontinent. India is rather special in another way. Up until the 1920s archaeologist had no idea that existed, in that region, an incredibly ancient and high advance culture. They thought that everything came from 2000 or 3000 years ago at the most, and it was the accidental discovery of the ruins of Mohenjo Daro and Harappa that led to the reconsideration of the sudden, a vast new horizon opened into the past.

This horizon is called the Indus Valley Civilization (IVC) and the ruins of this civilization, which are five thousand years old, already show an enormous sophistication. The discovery of the Indus Valley Civilization suddenly projected the history and pre-history of India and Pakistan much more deeply into the past and when we confronted the ruins of cities like Mohenjo Daro and Harappa we are already confronted by an advanced civilization.

The people who created those cities were enormously sophisticated and the cities themselves are a remarkable work of architecture and of urban engineering and design. It would be quite impossible for them to reach that stage five thousand years ago in just a short time. There has a deep ancient background of thousands of years running behind that, very little of which has yet been revealed by archaeology.

So it’s a rather exciting prospect of a deeply ancient civilization with much more ancient origins that remain to be discovered and we have to confront with India.

What is the real background to all of this? We cannot accept that these things simply emerged out of nowhere. There has to be a deeply ancient background and I think that is the challenge that confronts archaeology to trace the evolution of the Indus Valley Civilization right back to its origins and its beginnings.

I feel they are going to find that the origins are deeply ancient going back more than twelve thousand years ago and its why the remains of certain sophisticated cities, that have been found underwater in that Indian region, are extremely important.

Indus Valley Civilization also reached certainly a high level of technology and science.

This Civilization is already fully formed five thousand years ago, three thousand years before Christ, and in such a time we had civilization of a rather similar level in Sumer, in Mesopotamia, the area that is now Iraq, and we had the first dynasty of ancient Egypt where they were already making huge monuments.

They were not living in such large urban settlements as we find in the Indus Valley. Exactly in the same period on the other side of the world, in Peru, in the coastal area of Peru there was also a large civilization creating pyramids and monuments and living in urban settings and elsewhere in the world, although we don’t see the large scale urban life, we do see large scale monuments for example the megalithic stone circles in Europe. So something was definitely going on in the world five thousand years ago. In widely different part of the world, it’s as if those civilizations have been asleep for a long time and woke up and already had the necessary skills to monuments and cities.

In my research and in my work over many years I’ve considered the possibility of a forgotten episode of human history and I’m firmly convinced that such an episode did occur, and it occurred, around a time at the end of the last Ice Age. This was a time twelve thousand years ago, maybe thirteen thousand years ago, approximately in that area, we can’t be very precise, but give a talk when the Earth was passing through a cataclysmic phase.

They have been a long period of stability when huge ice sheets, in some cases four or five kilometers deep, were sitting on top of northern Europe and on top of North America, covering vast areas of land that are today highly productive and inhabited, but at that time they were ice deserts and the ice was really deep five kilometers the hion of a mountain of ice. For some reasons that science was not being able fully to explain the Ice Age come to an end and all of this ice began to melt, and began to melt in a series of episodes.

It did not happen all in one night, it happened in a period of several thousand years, but within that period there were three or four gigantic sudden turbulent episodes of melting where huge quantities of water have been. It may that this water accumulated in some lakes on top of the ice sheets and eventually the boundary of the lake, broke and enormous amount of water were released at once and at least one or two of these episodes the results were truly dramatic.

The sea level was much lower, because all of that water was stored on the land in the form of ice. When we have this very rapid episode of melting there were occasions when sea levels will rise by as much as ten or twelve meters in a matter of days, all over the world. You had to imagine for any community which was living on the coastlines at that time how cataclysmic and catastrophic that how would to be and for some reason, again, not fully understood, these rapid episodes of melting seems to have been accompanied as well by volcanic activity and by earthquakes all around the world. There is at the last thing of great importance, is a new evidences of an impact with a comet twelve thousand nine hundred years ago, which appears to have exploded over North America causing catastrophic damage which is global in its effects.

A kind of nuclear winter where the sky was filled with ash and dust and it returned the world for a thousand years for a period of deep, intense freezing. When we take all these things into account, I believe we are looking at a time when it wouldn’t be impossible for almost traces of civilization that had existed to be destroyed. That is the period that I think we should be focusing on between thirteen thousand years ago and twelve thousand years ago.

That is a long time before the date of Mohenjo Daro and Harappa, which is seven thousand or eight thousand years earlier than the dates of these cities, so we have to ask ourselves if there was a connection?

If there is a connection how it does cross that period of seven thousand or eight thousand years which is a very long time?

I think this is where archaeology has some work to do. As I have already suggested there are missing pieces of the puzzle.

The level of sophistication of Mohenjo Daro and Harappa tells us, for sure that there is an ancient background of these cities. People had learned these skills and they didn’t just create them over a night.

They had learned them and they took a very long time to understand them, and there is some tempting evidence, even in the Indian subcontinent itself, for example the settlements of Mehrgar, which is much smaller but which is very much similar to the design as the Indus Valley sites and which is much older going back to seven thousand years ago.

Then we have the underwater ruins in Indian coasts, the ruins in the Gulf of Cambay which go back ten thousand or more years ago.

We are getting much closer to the time of a lost civilization and I suggest a theory, where a great civilization was destroyed and there were survivors and they settled in a number of different parts of the world, one of these areas was India and Pakistan where they began to create the project that became the Indus Valley Civilization.

On the other side we have in India the tradition of Manu and of the Seven Rishis that tell us of a great flood which brought the Pralaya, the cataclysm, to the world and which brought to an end a former civilization.

Of course the Manu story is a global story, we have exactly the same story in the Old Testament of the Bible with Noah, the character called Utnapishtim in the Sumerian traditions, the epic of Gilgamesh is another of these figures, who is warned by a God of a coming flood and is given the opportunity to prepare and preserves life and civilization in some way and in some places, as a survivor of the flood and the Seven Rishis it’s a rather similar thing.

I’m thinking about the survivors of the lost civilization who determined by any means to preserve something of their knowledge and their wisdom and I think they were people like these and I would put the date back to between 13thousand and 12thousand years ago.

Survivors of a global cataclysm who observed their all civilization destroyed and just as we might today if our civilization was destroyed, and some of our survivors, just as we might try to preserve the best of the knowledge and the best things that we knew and pass them to the future.

I think that happened to them as well and I think in the story of the Seven Rishis we have a memory of the survivors of the flood who did everything they could to preserve the high knowledge and wisdom of their civilization and replanted the seeds of civilization again which over a period of thousands of year flourished and became the known historical civilization such as the Hindu’s Valley Civilization.

That gives us another interesting situation, we have the descending to us of a number of texts which are truly ancient like the Vedas which may be as much as 5 thousand years old and we have texts which refer to ancient times but the texts themselves appear to be more recent. Now, this is where India is different from example to Egypt.

In Egypt the civilization came to an end at a certain point and everything to do with that civilization stopped and it was replaced and all we have are their ruins and their texts frozen in time and, usually on the rocks and monuments.

In India we have an ongoing tradition, which goes back thousands of years but still continues today.

Part of that tradition is oral, it is not written, it is spoken, it’s a very important part of the tradition that wisdom and knowledge is pass down to generation to generation by the spoken words at a certain time some wise individuals may choose to set down that knowledge down in writing, might only be a thousand years ago that they choose to set it down in writing, but doesn’t mean that this tradition isn’t very old because they are simply freezing in the form of writing a much more ancient oral tradition.

They have ancient roots, but they were set down in writing in more recent time and like the other texts they contain evidence and information which suggests that they once existed in India certain kinds of high technology, almost magical in its powers and abilities, something that later cultures would not understand but that suggests somewhere deepened in the past has been lost, very powerful and advanced knowledge perhaps very different from our own today.

We can be quite confident with Harappa and Mohenjo Daro dating, I don’t wish to suggest that those cities were 12thousand years old because that not, those cities are 5thousand years old, but those cities are also the result of an evolutionary process, there is a background to them.

It seems that this background is very far from the time we incorporate Mehrgarh, by the time we consider the ruins on the bottom of the Gulf of Cambay and by the time we consider that huge areas of northern India and Pakistan have never been subjected to any form of excavation whatsoever.

The connections between 5 thousand years ago and 13thousand years ago became much more possible and much more clear when we consider that the survivors of a lost civilization replanted the seeds of civilization in India 13thousand or 12thousand years ago and then it went on in a process whose latest form was Mohenjo Daro and Harappa, and the last form also because soon after in those cities the population vanished, the cities were deserted.

Well, this is not a problem only concerning India. Academic archaeology, I don’t want to insult the archaeologist because I believe the archaeologist for the most part are very serious and reasonable individuals who genuinely are trying to understand our past but they are locked into a particular frame of references.

In my opinion, the work that they do is not so much with the objective of making any new discovery about the past, but rather is simply confirming what they already believe to be true and evidences which does not support what they believe it tends to be rejected.

Rather than thinking there must be some problems with that theory they prefer to think that some problems with the facts and so they dismiss them.

We have all these evidences say civilization began 5thousand years ago, so archaeologists have an idea about civilization.

There was the period called upper Paleolithic, which we call the Stone Age, the late Stone Age, when human culture was at the stage of hunting and gathering extended down until 10thousand or 9thousand years ago then agriculture were created.

Soon after the creation of agriculture some early megalithic work was done, stone circles and so on, and about five to six thousand years ago, the first origin of urban civilization begin.

This is the mainstream model and that from then on we have a continuous record from 5thousand years ago until today.

It’s a nice tidy picture, archaeologist feels very comfortable with it, they think they have a lot of evidences that support it and they see no reason why they should consider any other possibility especially if they come in the form of mythology, which they despise.

Why should they take these stories seriously?

I think they are making a huge mistake and I don’t think it’s in the spirit of true scholarship.

I think scholarship should be more open to mystery and rather than rejecting intriguing enclose in ancient texts they should be investigated it and explore.

So the ancient past of India has fallen victim to the same problem, that the ancient past of all civilization has fallen too, which is that a rigid narrow-minded set of scholars and a system of filtering knowledge whereby any information that contradicts the established model is rejected.

This is the case that happened in India and that’s why there is relatively little attention being paid to the origins of the Hindu’s Valley Civilization and why even today more than ten years after side scan sonar show the existence of two gigantic city's forty meters underwater in the Gulf of Cambay.

Even today, ten years later, there still is no research, no further research on that problem.

I spent seven years scuba diving all around the world and I have dived in Dwarka, in Mahabalipuram in southeast India, and in Poompuhar in southeast India.

I got the permission to dive in Mahabalipuram and we were the first people ever to dive there, we dived and we found a gigantic underwater city, without any doubt, at all it’s definitely a city.

Huge block of stone, walls completely intact some of them buried in the sand, but the top of the wall is there. Gigantic structures and, as the fishermen said, structures which were not just close to the shore, but extend five or six kilometers from the shore down to depths of more than 30 meters under the water.

When a structure of the south of India is submerged by more of 30 meters, we know from geological studies that structure has been underwater for at least twelve thousand years.

I reported these findings were many artifacts to archaeologist dived with me, there were immediate problems, first of all the notions of an advanced urban civilization that had been submerged by a flood of the south coast of India didn’t fit at all with the establish view of history in this country.

Secondly, I and some other foreigners had been involved in making this discovery; this was very annoying to Indian archaeologist. If a big discovery is made, it should be made by Indian archaeologist. We were not allowed to return and do any further diving on the site.

Totally stopped after that and furthermore the Indian archaeologist themselves did not do any further diving on the site either, it was like they wanted to pretend that they didn’t exist, they would just hopefully go away. After few times occurred the terrible Tsunami in the Indian Ocean, two years after we made our discovery and for half an hour the bay in front of Mahabalipuram was emptied of water and everybody saw the city sitting there.

Then, after that tragedy and that catastrophe, it couldn’t be hidden anymore and very slowly some Indian archaeologists have begun to investigate this mystery because they can’t deny anymore.

I studied the subject for many years and the conclusion I’ve come to, is that the Lost Civilization was global, it wasn’t confined to one area I think it was a maritime seagoing civilization. I think it had at least the level of ocean technology to explore the entire world by ship and create very high quality maps of the world some of which have survived.

During Ice Age, the world was very different from the world today. The sea level was 120 meters lower and the interior of most of the continents was uninhabitable or, if habitable, very undesirable, extremely arid and incapable of supporting large populations.

The best areas of land in the world at that time, where the areas along coastlines and in those areas I think we need to look at for the traces of the Lost Civilization all around the world, whether on the coast of India, whether off the coast of southeast Asia. You know a continent size landmass, which the geologist refers to Sundaland, was submerged very rapidly in one of those three global super floods around eleven thousand years ago, and off the coast of Australia, across the Pacific Ocean, we have Easter Island.

Easter Island was a part of a much larger land mass, today it’s a tiny island, but when the sea level was 120 meters lower was a part of a series of large island which were all upon the water. Everywhere around the world, in the areas there were flooded at the end of the last Ice Age, that’s where we need to look a civilization that was not looking inland, to the interior, but was looking for the resources of the sea and was connected one to another by boats.

For how long has existed this civilization before it was submerged? I think that we are looking at a civilization, I would guess that was probably around from 40,000 or 50,000 years ago until the end of the last Ice Age.

A very long period of time, but that again is going to call for further research, all we have at this time is the compelling evidence for a civilization at the end of the last Ice Age and for its destruction. It’s interesting looking at the ancient Egyptian traditions that speak of the time of the Gods, going back before the time of man, and they said that that time was 36,000 years ago and is repeatedly referred to in the ancient Egyptian traditions at the beginning of the time of the Gods, the Zep Tepi.

I find the mythology incredibly interesting and I think it contains many truths. It’s a convention among scholars to dismiss mythology as fantasies of the ancients. I don’t agree with that view and just to move to the side for a moment, one example of that which I concentrated a great deal is the worldwide tradition of a great flood. Scholar says they just made it up, but we know that the end of the ice age came and that all the world was indeed subjected to tremendous flooding and the sea level rose by one hundred and twenty meters. That is a flood, a global flood by anybody’s standard, so that tempts me to believe that a great deal of truths may be hidden in myth.

On the other hand, we should be very careful when we interpret what has been signed when we hear about incredible weapons that the gods had, like the Brahamastra weapons which explode with the power of the Sun.

We are inclined to jump to the conclusion they were talking about nuclear power because we have nuclear power, but maybe they have some completely different kind of technology, may be referring to a technological instrument but why do we have to conclude that it was nuclear power. Nuclear power requires a particular kind of infrastructures and I don’t see a lot of evidence for that infrastructure in the ancient world.

I’m very open to the idea of ancient high technologies, I just think that we have to open our mind further and consider that the ancients may have had different technologies, utterly different from our own. So on one level I do take those myths seriously. I think that the ancients may well have had weapons of great power, but I rather out if they were as simple as nuclear weapons in a way.

A similar situation is for flying technology described in ancient Hindu texts.

It’s actually not only ancient India, but also the evidence for some kind of flying technology is found all around the world. We have to consider for example, that the Nazca lines in Peru, the only way to see those figures is to fly several thousand feet about them.

When you walk between the lines you don’t have any shape of the pattern at all, only when you to going to the air do you see the effect. So these rather suggests that, whoever made the lines was able to fly above them and to see them. We have found, indeed, it’s in the Cairo Museum in these days, in Egypt, a very aerodynamic model of airplane. The nose is that of a bird, but it has an upper high tail and it has the air flow section of a sophisticated flying machine and it’s been tested in the wind tunnel and it is an airplane and it was found in a tomb that was more than two thousand years old.

Did they arrive this design, by accident or was there as myths and traditions from all around the world suggest, was there some kind of flying technology? Similar models of airplanes, Artifacts that look like airplanes, have been found in Colombia in South America.

So when we take all these into account and then we review the detailed descriptions of flying machines in the ancient Indian traditions I think at the very least we need to take them seriously because those ancient Indians texts when they speak of the Vimanas going into the matter in some depth they talk about the kind of engine had they had which appears to have involved mercury in some way.

They talk about their ability to fly high into the sky and to cover enormous distances and travel at great speed. It doesn’t sound to me like simply the fantasy of some ancient science fiction writer, it sounds to me like they are describing a technology and if such technology exists or existed then by definitions, it is a technology of a lost civilization because no civilization known to archaeology was capable of those abilities and those powers.

I think rather, than saying as the archaeologist do we have no evidence of these therefore it does not exist, I think they should be intrigued and fascinated by the texts and by the other suggestions of fly that exist all around the world and be prepared to investigate these much further than has been done so far.

Several scholars speak for this lost civilization of an extraterrestrial origin, or an advancement of ancient Hindu due to their intervention.

I’ve nothing against aliens, I think the universe is full of life, I think that’s what the universe is for as a matter of facts, home for life, but I see no reason whatsoever to conclude that any of mysterious ancient monuments around the world that I have studied, and I have studied a lot of ancient monuments around the world, I see no reason to conclude that any of them were made by aliens or required the involvement of aliens.

I think that is an unnecessary hypothesis. Often it’s the case that the simplest explanation is the better one and in my opinion the far more explanation for these amazing ancient monuments, let’s consider the great pyramid of Giza for example, let’s consider the gigantic wall of Sacsayhuamán in the Andes near Cuzco, is that there was a much earlier human civilization which attained a high level of knowledge which developed certain technologies that may be rather different from the technology that we have today.

There is something we can do that they couldn’t do and there is something they could do that we can’t do. We don’t have to project our own idea of technology constantly on the past, we have to accept that may be other ways of doing things, including the powers of the mind and psychic powers, which our civilization neglects but which in earlier civilization might have spent a great deal of time developing.

I think the simpler explanation for all of the mysterious monuments around the world is that there has been a lost civilization which passed down its knowledge, through survivors in certain ways, into historic times a continuous tradition of the survival of wisdom and knowledge of the past including architecture knowledge. If I were to find in a stratum from 12,000 years ago a titanium engine, I might be required to consider the possibility of extraterrestrial involvement.

When we talk about extraterrestrial let’s not forget we are talking about alien civilizations which have reached the level of technology where they can cross interstellar space, they can travel at light speeds or close to the speed of light. This is an unbelievably high and sophisticated level of technology. I’m not denying that such a level of technology may exist, but I don’t see any evidence for it in the great pyramid or in any of the megalithic sites all around the world. The great pyramid is an incredible monument, it weights six million tons, it’s aligned to truth north within a tiny fraction of a single degree but human beings can do that. We don’t need aliens in order to explain how they got done. Let’s first of all, you know, prove that aliens exist at all before we start saying they build all our monuments. I think it’s human works that we are looking at, I think the best answer is a lost human civilization, but I would like to be proved wrong.

Nowadays we have much that still be discovered and much more to be understood.

The book of Enrico Baccarini continues the way that I’ve signed and it is a new millstone to understand our ancient past and the heritage that an ancient civilization ha left to be discovered again.

Graham Hancock

June 2013

CHAPTER I - The Forgotten origins, mythical ancestors

"The doubt is not pleasant, but, thee certainty is ridiculous.

Only fools are sure of what they say".

Voltaire

The history of human civilization is a wide territory still completely unexplored, a space in which archaeology, science and research have attempted unveil to the eyes of men the origins and the events that are related to the evolution of the various civilizations.

This path, although we have tried to make it linear and coherent, it is actually a boundless territory dotted with gaps and certainties, safeties and doubts.

History is generally defined as the past that affects the present and influences the future, a past that has yet to be understood and to be built and in which the truths of today may be substituted, sometimes, and new objective realities are able to change the paradigm previously established.

Officially we use this word considering the period of time that begins with the appearance of the writing and the first written sources are placed about around 3500 BC, while the prior period is arbitrarily defined 'prehistory'. However, there is a forgotten past where lost knowledge is residing, a truth that could profoundly and radically changes the concept of time which has gone before us, discoveries that open up to new scenarios and a cognitive interpretation of the civilization of our planet.

Prehistory was absolutely not a dark age in which man survived away from the ideas and civilization. The 'cavemen', in a constant struggle for survival, formed a glimpse of this period, but before them, there were existed, places like the settlement of Gobekli Tepe (Turkey), which they were dated back to 12,000 years, and they showed a stunning level of evolution.

It is becoming wider and wider a totally different scenario compared to what theorized until today where, next to the simplicity of the so-called caveman, islands of progress and civilization and highly evolved technology were joined, which constituted the primary cause of our progress and development but due to some disastrous climate change were destroyed and fell into total oblivion of history.

However, not everything was lost and, according to the most ancient legends of our planet, the survivors were able to re-create new realities in many places which would become the first known civilizations in the history, some people who had shared the memory of the disaster and the floods which had decimated their race.

In modern times, the concept of legend or myth has become a reality almost unintelligible, often filtered through a fantastic vision that has totally detached each objective and historical adherence from its original meaning projecting their real matrices into a limbo of confused abstraction. All this when the man of the XX century stood like as the largest creator of the myths of the history through the cinema, the fiction or the science fiction.

The modern legends form a screen through which we can alienate ourselves from the surrounding world, a way to escape to retreat when we are scared or bored. For the peoples of antiquity the myths formed, however, a fundamental point of reference, in many cases the very foundation of their inner world and their civilization.

Myths acquitted, not only social or educational, but also documents or historical roles and working as a tool to preserve knowledge and celebrate past events.

Undoubtedly, even if in the past time the legends suffered a transposition that re-drew their boundaries and structures, their bases were originated from the need to ensure the memories of past events for a long time.

With the word 'history' we have identified a modern perception of a gradual evolution of the events, a linearity that had its origins in the ideas of Heraclitus (V century BC) and Giambattista Vico (XVII century AD) and that it was taken, with their formulation of historical courses and recourses, as an inviolable model of modern historiography. In philosophy, the linear thinking is characterized by complex thought because it attempts to explain the world according to predetermined logic related to the principles of causality, of non-contradiction, of hierarchy and order, and in which every event is reduced, simplified and categorized. Our entire modern conception of science and history is based on linear thinking with theories that are anchored to the processes of cause and effect and in which all, or nearly so, proceed logically.

The most modern scientific formulations, such as quantum theory, or the historical and archaeological evidence arise in recent decades like the site of Gobekli Tepe, however, they have begun to undermine this established order by showing how some anomalies exist, and have existed, a reality that strongly disrupts many of our certainties by projecting the knowledge gained to date within a new vision of reality. Human history is part of a lineage still fully to discover and decipher.

A quick glance

Before entering into the enchanting world of the "Vimanas and the wars of gods we feel useful to see again with our readers everything that the myth’’ of some people near us have always said about their origins where the academic historicity has always passed over. The occidental civilization has made us to have a vision of the world in an anthropocentric way because it is based on an occidental supremacy referring to the history of our world.

We are growing up thinking that from our small vital European space all the civilizations in the world were derived, or that their evolution was due thanks to our liberator and civilize intervention. Such egocentric conception of the historical process has shown how much wrong our culture could have been made! The human history, as we know, has certainly welcomed many civilizations born and disappeared during many millenniums. Where the nature has not been the artificer of such distractions, the human being has made himself as the most important supporter of the ravaging fury against the different or inferior cultures. Some priceless property has been destroyed by the fire, one of the most famous is the Alessandria’s library and that one of Pergamo’s in Turkey, but also on the far east has had the same fate. The Nalanda’s library, the most important of the ancient India, was destroyed in 1235 by the hordes of the Islamic invaders led by Muhammad Bakhtiyar Khilji.

Dated from the 11 century B.C. Nalanda’s grandeur ended with a clash where 3000 monks¹ died and to the destruction of more than 900,000 books (90 lakh).

It is interesting the witness of a pilgrim who was a Tibetan translator, Dharmasvamin² who arrived a few months later, after the Moslem invasion, and he found among the ruins only one survivor an old monk of about ninety years old called Rahulasribhadra, who was used to teach Sanskrit to a few pupils. He was advised that some Moslem troop were arriving, Dharmasvamin persuaded the old monk to save himself and he brought him on his shoulder together with a scarce food and some sutra saved from the fire. This was a Nalanda’s last breath of his life. The Jhansi’s bookstore, placed on Uttar Predesh (India), owned more than 20,000 books, and it was destroyed by the British soldiers at the end of the XIX century.

The human had been able to create the most superb beauty of the universe, but also to have actualized the most awful and the nefarious abomination of his mind. Near these impious realities there is also some highest witness that these lands had on our past time. A case, not unique, that is considered one of the most important cultural realities that the East generated is Takshila’s university. It was built in 700 B.C. sheltered more than 10,500