Hindu kingdoms in West Asia
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Hindu kingdoms in West Asia in the second millennium BC are thought by some scholars to include the Mitanni of Syria and the Kassites of Mesopotamia.

Some scholars try to equate the deities venerated by the Mitanni with Vedic deities, and trace the names used by the aristocracy to Indo-Aryan roots. In a treaty between the Hittites and the Mitanni, the deities Mitra, Varuna, Indra, and Nasatya (Ashvins) are invoked. Other scholars point to Kikkuli's horse training text including technical terms such as aika (eka, one), tera (tri, three), panza (pancha, five), satta (sapta, seven), na (nava, nine), and vartana (vartana, round). Another text has babru (babhru, brown), parita (palita, grey), and pinkara (pingala, red). The Mitanni warriors were called marya, the term for warrior in Sanskrit as well. Other scholars are not convinced the similarities cannot be explained by a common source or lexical borrowings.

The Mitanni's chief festival was the celebration of the solstice (vishuva) which was common in most cultures in the ancient world.

Another possible indication of influence is the appearance of Yantras, geometric designs such as the Sri Yantra, which are much older than the Star of David, yet are identical often, using two equilateral triangles overlapping to form the star pattern, or grouped patterns in Yantras.

Also interesting is to see the Mesopotamian styles in sculpture portraying the Buddha, particularly Maithreya Buddha. Buddha was, after all, a Hindu prince, and is believed by some Hindus to be an avatar of Vishnu.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hindu_kingdoms_in_West_Asia



















Vedic Indians of Ancient Greece and Mid-East
by Lodhe

The average person does not connect India with the ancient Middle East, but the existence of some trade between these two regions is documented, even in the Bible. Note the reference to spikenard in the Song of Solomon (1:12; 4:13-14) and in the Gospels (Mark 14:3; John 12:3). This is an aromatic oil-producing plant (Nardostachys jatamansi) that the Arabs call sunbul hindi and obtained in trade with India. It is axiomatic that influence follows trade, and the vibrant culture of India could not help but impact on anyone exposed to it. The influence on Judaism came for the most part indirectly, however, via the Persians and the Chaldeans, who dealt with India on a more direct basis. (Indeed, the Aryans, who invaded and transformed India over 1500 years before Christ, were of the same people who brought ancient Persia to its greatest glory. Persia's name today - Iran - is a corruption of Aryan.) The ancient Judeans absorbed much of this secondhand influence during the Babylonian captivity of the sixth century BC, and during the inter testamental period, when Alexandria became the crossroads of the world, intellectuals both Jew and Gentile were exposed to a variety of ideas, some of which originated on the Indian Subcontinent.

From Pythagoras, who believed in the transmigration of souls, apparently because of his contacts with religious teachers from the east, Pindar, who believed in metempsychosis, Plato, who could not have been ignorant of Karma, through Klaxons, the Indian sage, who accompanied Alexander, Apollonius of Tyana, who came to Taxila to study under the Brahmins, Clement of Alexandria, the early Christian teacher of the second century AD, who refers to Buddhists and Brahmins in his work and Plotinus, who went to Persia to meet the Brahmins, the Contacts between India and Greek thinkers seem to have been continuous.

According to Klaus K. Klostermaier, in his book A Survey of Hinduism pg 18-19: "The kings of Magadha and Malwa exchanged ambassadors with Greece. A Maurya ruler invited one of the Greek Sophists to join his court, and one of the greatest of the Indo-Greek kings became famous as the dialogue partner of the great Buddhist sage Nagasena, while in the opposite direction, Buddhist missionaries are known to have settled in Alexandria, and other cities in the Ancient West. It is evident then, that Indian thought was present in the fashionable intellectual circuit of ancient Athens, and there is every reason to suppose that Indian religious and philosophical ideas exercised some influence on early and classical Greek philosophy. Both Greeks and Romans habitually tried to understand the religions of India by trying to fit them as far as possible into Greco-Roman categories. Deities in particular were spoken of, not in Indian but in Greek terms and called by Greek names. Thus Shiva, was identified as "Dionysos," Krsna (or perhaps Indra) as "Heracles." The great Indian epics were compared to those of Homer. Doctrinally, the Indian concept of transmigration had its counterpart in the metempsychosis taught by Pythagoras and Plato; nor was Indian asceticism altogether foreign to a people who remembered Diogenes and his followers."



http://www.veda.harekrsna.cz/connections/Western-Asia.php

www.desifront.com

quickly before someone else claims the domain.

stupid remark

just because it says aryan?

how dumb

You'll be surprised how much Indian Aryan supremacists and Nordic Aryan supremacists have in common.

Pakistani supremacists should have the privilege of being lumped in here as well.

Genetic evidence on the origins of Indian caste populations.Bamshad M, Kivisild T, Watkins WS, Dixon ME, Ricker CE, Rao BB, Naidu JM, Prasad BV, Reddy PG, Rasanayagam A, Papiha SS, Villems R, Redd AJ, Hammer MF, Nguyen SV, Carroll ML, Batzer MA, Jorde LB.
Department of Pediatrics, University of Utah, Salt Lake City, Utah 84112, USA. mike@genetics.utah.edu

The origins and affinities of the approximately 1 billion people living on the subcontinent of India have long been contested. This is owing, in part, to the many different waves of immigrants that have influenced the genetic structure of India. In the most recent of these waves, Indo-European-speaking people from West Eurasia entered India from the Northwest and diffused throughout the subcontinent. They purportedly admixed with or displaced indigenous Dravidic-speaking populations. Subsequently they may have established the Hindu caste system and placed themselves primarily in castes of higher rank. To explore the impact of West Eurasians on contemporary Indian caste populations, we compared mtDNA (400 bp of hypervariable region 1 and 14 restriction site polymorphisms) and Y-chromosome (20 biallelic polymorphisms and 5 short tandem repeats) variation in approximately 265 males from eight castes of different rank to approximately 750 Africans, Asians, Europeans, and other Indians. For maternally inherited mtDNA, each caste is most similar to Asians. However, 20%-30% of Indian mtDNA haplotypes belong to West Eurasian haplogroups, and the frequency of these haplotypes is proportional to caste rank, the highest frequency of West Eurasian haplotypes being found in the upper castes. In contrast, for paternally inherited Y-chromosome variation each caste is more similar to Europeans than to Asians. Moreover, the affinity to Europeans is proportionate to caste rank, the upper castes being most similar to Europeans, particularly East Europeans. These findings are consistent with greater West Eurasian male admixture with castes of higher rank. Nevertheless, the mitochondrial genome and the Y chromosome each represents only a single haploid locus and is more susceptible to large stochastic variation, bottlenecks, and selective sweeps. Thus, to increase the power of our analysis, we assayed 40 independent, biparentally inherited autosomal loci (1 LINE-1 and 39 Alu elements) in all of the caste and continental populations (approximately 600 individuals). Analysis of these data demonstrated that the upper castes have a higher affinity to Europeans than to Asians, and the upper castes are significantly more similar to Europeans than are the lower castes. Collectively, all five datasets show a trend toward upper castes being more similar to Europeans, whereas lower castes are more similar to Asians. We conclude that Indian castes are most likely to be of proto-Asian origin with West Eurasian admixture resulting in rank-related and sex-specific differences in the genetic affinities of castes to Asians and Europeans.



This does support the Aryan theory

^^ True it supports the theory but that's in no way definitive proof of the Aryan Invasion and the caste. There are many ways to counter the argument brought forward too, as it only takes into account the DNA structure of sample groups from modern society.

Until I see who made up these sample groups, and see the study taking into account the history of India, it's caste system and the different people who have inhabited it, rather than just taking into account the biological make up of some Indians, then the study loses any real firm evidence it tries to bring forward.

However, it's not too important whether it's true or not, because whatever happened we can't change the past. Rather, we need to remove the discriminating hierarchy from society.

Ofcourse there were Invasions and Exoduses in and out of India...no doubt