250 word summary

Orality and Literature in Ancient India

· The earliest settlement in South Asia was the Indus Valley civilization (aka the Harappan civilization). The Indus Valley civilization lasted from about 2,600 BCE to 1,900 BCE.

· Cool fact: this civilization had ties with Mesopotamia when The Epic of Gilgamesh was being composed (Puchner et al 677-78)

· The Harappan people had a writing system, but it has not been deciphered yet. See below for an example:

( Harappan Script (Links to an external site.)Links to an external site.  from Laboratory of Kuang Yu Chen)

· The next group of people to to arrive were the Indo-Aryans, who settled what is modern-day Punjab, or the Pakistan/India area (Puchner et al 679) 

· The Indo-Aryan language became Sanskrit, the language of the Vedas, and of much literature in the Indian sub-continent. People wrote in Sanskrit continuously from 1,200 BCE to 1,800 CE -- that's 3,000 years!

( 15th C CE Sanskrit Pen Written Document (Links to an external site.)Links to an external site.  from the Freer Gallery at the Smithsonian)

· Sanskrit is related to Greek and Latin--"these languages share much of their grammar, use similar sentence structures, and draw on hundreds of common roots for their vocabularies" (Puchner et al 679) --> Greek, Latin, Sanskrit, and ancient Persian are thought to derive from a single parent language, called proto-Indo European

· Proto-Indo European was a language that arose in the Caucasus Mountains (on the border of the Ukraine and Georgia) -OR- in Anatolia (modern day Turkey

· The close relationship between these ancient languages supports the hypothesis that Homer, Valmiki, and Virgil's work share similarities because their languages had the same root (Puchner et al 679)

· The first written works on the Indian subcontinent were "hymns and ritual formulas (mantras)" organized into a group of texts called the Vedas (Puchner et al 679)

· HOWEVER, most stories were transmitted orally (Puchner et al 679-80) 

· Stories were transmitted (and still are today!) by priests and scholars who "are trained from early childhood to memorize an entire work in multiple forms: by phoneme (sound unit), word, verse, chapter, and book; by mnemonic summaries of the whole work, and by its 'indexed' words; and even by the reverse order of its verses" (Puchner et al 680) --> they are capable of reciting 1,028 hymns in correct order (Puchner et al 680)

· Today, there are one dozen  writing systems on the Indian subcontinent, including Sanskrit, Bengali, Hindi, Marthi, Kannada, Tamil, Urdu, and others (Puchner et al 680)

Read these website:

http://chemsites.chem.rutgers.edu/~kyc/Five%20Original%20Writing%20Systems.html#Harappan

https://www.britannica.com/topic/Sanskrit-language/media/522667/110971

Indian Pantheons: crash course world mythology: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V_NJAJGCKD8&feature=youtu.be

The Ramayana Through Dance:

https://orias.berkeley.edu/ramayana-through-dance

Ramayana Navarasa:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-G2X0Ula7-U&feature=youtu.be