Author: Stephen Knapp

Starting from India and heading to the west, this area had strong contacts with ancient India from many years ago, and is said to have been a part of greater Bharatvarsha before the war of Kurukshetra, which is said to have been about 5,000 years ago. In the Ramayana we find wherein Valmiki describes present Afghanistan as Gandarvadesh. It was Pushkal and Taksha, two sons of Bharat, the brother of Lord Sri Rama, who defeated the Gandharvas to rule there in the capital that had been built as Pushkalavati (known as Pukli in Afghanistan) and Takshashila, now in Pakistan. Gandarvadesh became Gandhar in the Mahabharata era. A…

In a widely propagated and popularly accepted theory, Christopher Columbus is the man credited with the discovery of America. However, in his book, American Discovery, Gunnar Thompson writes, American Discovery was a multi-ethnic achievement. The first explorers came from Siberia during the Pleistocene Ice Age. They were followed by countless voyagers from Asia, Africa, and Europe. Among their ranks were Indo-Sumerians, Phoenicians, Celts, Britons, Danes, Norwegians, West Africans, Egyptians, Polynesians, Chinese, Japanese, Koreans, Romans, Greeks, Arabs, Hindus, and many others. Eventually, the New World became a meeting ground of races and a congress of ethnic diversity–the first United Nations. It…

Long, before the advent of Islam, even as early as the third millennium BCE, India had cultural bonds with the Mesopotamian civilization, now the region of Iraq and Iran.  As explained by N. N. Bhattacharya, there are plenty of references to establish a very close contact between India and the Islamic world. Actually, Iraq was an area that had been a part of the Vedic civilization at one time. The extreme antiquity of India’s trade with the West-Asia (now known as middle-east) is an established fact. In the Rig Vedic age, Afghanistan and its neighboring countries were culturally a part…

Excerpts from the book Mysteries of the Ancient Vedic Empire by Stephen Knapp Japanese scholar Okakura observes, in his Ideals of the East: “The religion and culture of China are undoubtedly of Hindu (Vedic) origin.” Vedic tradition went from India to China and on to Japan. The practice of meditation, for example, was Ch’an in China and became Zen in Japan. However, some of these traditions also arrived in Japan through the sea route from Tamil Nadu. This explains how some Sanskrit terminology was adopted into Japanese through Tamil phonology, or why Sanskrit mantras are written in the Siddham script…

(An Excerpt from Advancements of Ancient India’s Vedic Culture, by Stephen Knapp and reposted from http://www.stephen-knapp.com/indias_ancient_and_great_maritime_history.htm)We should first take into account that ancient India, which was centered around the Indus Valley years ago, and was already well developed before 3200 BCE, stretched from Afghanistan to the Indian Ocean and points farther east and north, the largest empire in the world at the time. But its influence spread much farther than that. During its peak developments, it had organized cities, multistory brick buildings, vast irrigation networks, sewer systems, the most advanced metalwork in the world, and a maritime trade network that…

(reposted from http://www.stephen-knapp.com/ramayana_sites_in_sri_lanka.htm)The Ramayana is an ancient Sanskrit epic attributed to the poet Valmiki and an important part of the Hindu canon. One of the most important literary works of ancient India, the Ramayana consists of 7 chapters (Kanda), and narrates the story of Rama’s wife Sita being abducted by Ravana, the demon (Rakshasa) king of Lanka.According to the Ramayana, King Ravana brought Sita Devi from India in a “Pushpaka Vimana” which is widely known in Sri Lanka as the “Dandu Monara Yanthranaya,” or Large Peacock Machine in Sinhala.The Ramayana has fascinated many generations, and had a profound impact on art…