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The invention and development of the chariot around the third millennium revolutionized the art of warfare and dominated the battlefields for some 3000 years. It seems to have evolved in the borderlands between the steppes and the riverlands. It is believed that the Āryan borrowed the idea of chariot from Sumerians around 2000 bc. It is presumed that these Āryans entered Iran and departed in three branches. One marches westward towards Syria, another eastward towards India and a third stays back in Iran. The absence of chariot in Indus valley civilization suggests that chariot arrived in India with Āryans, who settled here around 1500 bc. They used it as a lethal war machine to conquer the natives. The Chariot has played a vital role in Indian warfare through the ages, spanning over Vedic, Epic, and Puranic times, as attested to by literary and archaeological evidence. The Turk invasion marked by the dominance of cavalry arm brought the curtain down on chariot as a war machine. However, it survived in the Indian milieu in some other incarnations.
In Ancient Indian Warfare, the author has pieced together all the available archaeological data and made a thorough study of the entire range of Vedic literature in a bid to present for the first time as complete a picture of warfare as these sources permit. He deals with a period so far given scant attention, or none at all. He stops where virtually all the other writers on the subject begin. The Epic and Buddhist material has been used to support, elucidate and complete the picture of the rearly period. The archaeological evidence has been utilized as fully as possible to add the weight of material proof to literary testimony. The author explores the domestication of horses and elephants and their use for military purposes; the invention of wheeled vehicles and the battle-chariot; the use of metals for the manufacture of weapons; the nature of ancient arms and armour; forts and fortifications; military order and organisation; and the uneasy birth of a moral consciousness evidenced in the development of a code of war.
Whether Vedic people were indigenous habitants or emigrants is a hotly debated current issue. Both sides involved in the debate have been vehemently using the available evidences, with twists – caused at times due to sheer neglect and at times even fraudulently - to bring home their point of view, somehow. Nevertheless, what is the truth? Were there ever any migrations of so-called PIE language speakers, located at some hypothetical and yet uncertain homeland, to spread the language and culture? Are migrations necessary from any hypothetical homeland to result into a net of the languages? What was the geography of Rig Veda? Was the Avesta contemporaneous to the Rig Veda? Did any relation ever exist between the Vedic people and the Indus-Ghaggar civilisation? Is there any relationship between the Vedic religion and the modern Hindu religion? While answering to these vital questions, this book postulates a theory on the issue of the so-called IE languages and origins of the Vedic as well as the Zoroastrian religions. It diligently explains how the religious and cultural ethos of the Indus-Ghaggar Civilisation has flowed to us uninterrupted and exposes the schemes of the Vedicist scholars, who are attempting to claim its authorship!
Because of their enormous size, elephants have long been irresistible for kings as symbols of their eminence. In early civilizations—such as Egypt, Mesopotamia, the Indus Civilization, and China—kings used elephants for royal sacrifice, spectacular hunts, public display of live captives, or the conspicuous consumption of ivory—all of them tending toward the elephant’s extinction. The kings of India, however, as Thomas R. Trautmann shows in this study, found a use for elephants that actually helped preserve their habitat and numbers in the wild: war. Trautmann traces the history of the war elephant in India and the spread of the institution to the west—where elephants took part in some of the greatest wars of antiquity—and Southeast Asia (but not China, significantly), a history that spans 3,000 years and a considerable part of the globe, from Spain to Java. He shows that because elephants eat such massive quantities of food, it was uneconomic to raise them from birth. Rather, in a unique form of domestication, Indian kings captured wild adults and trained them, one by one, through millennia. Kings were thus compelled to protect wild elephants from hunters and elephant forests from being cut down. By taking a wide-angle view of human-elephant relations, Trautmann throws into relief the structure of India’s environmental history and the reasons for the persistence of wild elephants in its forests.
Often spoken of as the 'Fifth Veda', i.e., as a text in continuity with the four Vedas and outweighing them all in size and import, the Mahābhārata presents a complex mythological and narrative landscape, incorporating fundamental ethical, social, philosophic, and pedagogic issues. In a series of position pieces and essays written over a span of 30 years, Alf Hiltebeitel, Columbian Professor of Religion, History, and Human Sciences at The George Washington University, articulates a compelling new approach to the epic: as a literary work of fundamental theological and philosophical significance rich in metaphor and meaning. In this three-part volume, the editors gather some of Hiltebeitel’s seminal writings on the epic along with new pieces written especially for the volume. This two volume edition collects nearly three decades of Alf Hiltebeitel’s researches into the Indian epic and religious tradition. The two volumes document Hiltebeitel’s longstanding fascination with the Sanskrit epics: volume 1 presents a series of appreciative readings of the Mahābhārata (and to a lesser extent, the Rāmāyaṇa), while volume 2 focuses on what Hiltebeitel has called “the underground Mahābhārata,” i.e., the Mahābhārata as it is still alive in folk and vernacular traditions. Recently re-edited and with a new set of articles completing a trajectory Hiltebeitel established over 30 years ago, this work constitutes a definitive statement from this major scholar. Comprehensive indices, cross-referencing, and an exhaustive bibliography make it an essential reference work. For more information on the second volume please click here.
Enlarges our understanding of the term "scripture" through a comparative study of Veda and Torah.