Near Eastern Deities in the Rigveda

The two previously published books of this author illustrate a universal characteristic of ancient Indian proper names i.e., all names are made after the ethno-geographic elements of the lands of their origin. Names of three earliest kings of the Mahabharata were composed after the Egyptian names of three Nubian kingdoms and the presence of the same three kings in the Rigveda led to a ground breaking discovery that the historical-geographical contexts of the Rigveda was Nubia, Egypt, and the ancient states of Syria-Palestine. The discovery of Canaanite words in Bengali, and their sporadic occurrence in Prakrit, and even in Sanskrit led to identification of many Biblical names of people and countries in the ancient Indian literature. All of that together led to another epoch-making awareness that the geographical and historical contexts of all ancient Indian literature beginning from the literature of Pali texts to Epic-Puranas were also the Ancient Near East, same as that of the Rigveda and the Atharvaveda. Besides the highly dramatized central story, the Great Epic has preserved an immense amount of past data in the form of side stories, anecdotes, myths, accounts of historical nature, genealogies, list of people, list of ancient kings, supernatural beings, and above all innumerable epithets or synonyms of various gods. This book demonstrates that many of those place names, sometimes the main part or stem of those names without the Sanskrit ending, match with ancient place names in Levant. This book is based on the two oldest compositions, the Rigveda and Atharvaveda, and the mythical accounts of Epic-Puranas and Pali tales in which history was converted to myths. It shows that in spite of mythologizing of facts, like the true place names in the Egyptian myths, the names of mythical beings and places in the Indian myths were all real historical places and people of the Ancient Near East. For the first time, the new finding that the contexts of the Rigveda were Egyptian and Near Eastern opened up images of ancient civilizations entombed in the hymns for more than two millenniums. Hymns thought to be mythical or merely religious now reflect various aspects of people, their kings, and kingdoms that existed during the third and second millennium BC Egypt and ancient Syria-Palestine. The hymns cover an astonishingly large area from the coasts of Asia Minor to Nubia through Syria-Palestine and Egypt, which is evidenced by the names of their Rishi- composers. Ancient names of the Rishis or the priest authors are composed with the names of towns, cities or places where the hymns were originally composed. Apparently, the priest–poets of ancient hymns served as the royal or chief priests of those city-states or kingdoms of Levant. The book is aimed at understanding the Rigveda deities on the basis of data available in all Near Eastern sources; it leads to the conclusion that the deities are neither Indo-Aryan / Indo-European nor unique to the Rigveda, but are all well known Near Eastern deities except their names. Their names containing clues for the land of their dominance or origin are referred to here as toponymical names, for often they indicate a single and capital city or a topographic feature. It may be shocking to traditional scholars of Indology and Semitology that the Rigveda Rishis composed hymns for kings who did not belong to their race, with the exception of a few very early kings of pre-Greek races. The insight that the Rigveda identified real kings with various gods, and the achievements of various gods enumerated in hymns glorifying various gods were human actions and historical events, comes from Epic-Puranas and Pali texts. Contrary to the notion of the Indologists, there are no epithets made of abstract values without the attachment to a country or a tribe. This book brings out many historical insights into the state of affairs regarding the main land Syria-Palestine different than some great coastal cities such as Byblos. Much of the main land was under a theocratic federation, the head of which was the Elamite god Inšušinak, the god of the Asiatic colonizers of Nubia. The seat of his religious center was at Philae in the Elephantine region of Egypt, near former Aswan. The Rigveda gods indicate that from about the end of the 3rd to the beginning of the 2nd millennium BC, Nubia became a powerful seat of political power of the ancient colonizers of Asia about which nothing is known from Egyptian sources except occasional mention of rebellion in Nubia, crushing down and slaughter of Nubians, and appointment of officials with strange titles such as “king’s son of Kush” during the time of New Kingdom Kings. The Nubian gods in the Rigveda clearly indicate that Nubia was settled by the Asiatic colonizers long before the New Kingdom and probably before the 13th dynasty King Nehesy. The meaning of Nehesy ‘belonging to Nehes,’ that is, king Nehesy was Nubian is also a very significant evidence for the political control of Egypt by the Nubians. The Rigveda shows that those Nubians were West Semitics, namely Amorites, Hurrians, under Elamite leaders with whom the Rigveda priest scribes were associated all along. All those people did not leave any account about themselves or their gods except some myths inscribed in Semitic alphabets found from the excavation site of Ugarit, probably because they knew their history was being written in the secret language of the Rigveda by their priests. Of all the deities, Indra has the largest number of hymns and his name has been mentioned many more times in the Rigveda than the name of any other god. Chapter I of this book illustrates that Indra was the same god called Adad in Akkadian, but Baal Hadad in Ugaritic texts. The four gods Indra, Varuna, Ašvins, and Agni dealt with in the first four Chapters are basically West Semitic deities in spite of their Sanskrit names in the Rigveda.