![[1280px-Clevelandart_1973.160.jpg]] *Zebu bull on a seal from the Indus Valley culture.* British historians in the nineteenth century suggested that Sanskrit and many elements of India's [Vedic](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vedas) culture had been brought from outside, by immigrants or invaders from the west. Many Indians resisted this narrative, calling it the "Aryan Invasion Myth". As we'll see, going forward, Indian prehistory and history are very complex, so the truth is probably not entirely one thing or the other. One interesting very recent potential discovery, facilitated by new computational techniques, suggests the Sanskrit language may be much older in India than previously believed. An Indian computer scientist and cryptographer named [Yajna Devam](https://independent.academia.edu/yajnadevam) has claimed in an article written in 2022 that he has decoded over five hundred inscriptions or “seals” from the Indus Valley Civilization, which we will discuss in the next chapter. He claims that the language used in the seals is Sanskrit, which would mean that Indians were speaking Sanskrit a thousand years before the arrival of the Vedic culture which we will also cover later. He also suggests that many of the cultural elements that were thought to have been Vedic actually existed and were mentioned in these ancient seals. This would mean that by the time of the Indus Valley Civilization, which rose about 4,600 years ago, this language and culture were already well established in India. You can get a sense of his argument from this YouTube video ([https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Xr0mbtMlzk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Xr0mbtMlzk)), which is one of the shorter presentations he has done so far. Although this controversy is relatively new, the heat it has generated with both its advocates and opponents shows how disagreements about even ancient history can be extremely relevant to the identities that inform people’s ideas of religion, ethnicity, and nationality today. These identities lead to political actions, so you can imagine how a new understanding of the origins of Indian language and culture could have implications in both national and international politics. In the next chapter we will discuss the Indus Valley Civilization as well as several other River Valley kingdoms that rose in the copper and bronze ages. ---- Next: [[3.1]] Back: [[2.12 - Aryans and Bias]]