India and the West before Darius

Extract

Before 1918 it was believed that India's contact with the western world began about 3000 years ago with the intrusion into a barbaric peninsula of the half-legendary Vedic Aryans. It was only with the Empire of Darius that India began to figure substantially in the historical records accessible to us. In 1938 we know in the Indus valley a fully-literate and very advanced urban civilization flourishing fully fifteen centuries before the supposed date of the Aryan invasion. We know too that the ancient Indus cities were in regular and intimate contact with the Sumerian cities of Iraq; a stream of Indian manufactures flowed into Mesopotamia, Indian ideas could travel by the same channels. I need not remind you how deeply modern Western civilization is indebted to the ancient Sumerian, how many of the fundamental inventions that make civilization possible are traceable to the Tigris-Euphrates region, how intimately, through the Hebrews and the Greeks, Mesopotamian traditions have been injected into the very core of our spiritual culture. There lie the roots of our mathematics and astronomy, of the myths that, through the Bible, colour our outlook from early childhood. But we can now infer that India too contributed to the formation of the cultural tradition we thus inherit.