Was India the Puntland

Search for inter-civilization influences and interactions lead to fascinating results… they lead to the discovery of the common human heritage and the unity of human civilization…

These are the words of Dr. Wael a freelance researcher. He started as an architect and somewhere down the line became interested in the historical studies of the human architectural endeavor, especially the ancient Egyptian architecture….and then as they say, the rest was history…

Today I met him for the third time… and like the other two meetings… he left me as a more informed and a pondering person… I met him first at the Indian Culture Centre in downtown Cairo…when he delivered a lecture on the Ancient Egyptian Naval Fleets that visited Southern India…during the reign of Pharaohs (especially Queen Hatepshut) and how there has been a very strong relation between Ancient Southern Indian civilization and Egyptian.

His theories seem to be far- fetched…. And often lopsided in favor of India….because accepting his theory means that we may have to consider India as the oldest civilization and the fountainhead of the major civilizations of the world, especially the old civilizations that are located in the Indian Ocean Rim and adjoining areas…the Mesopotamia, the Yemeni, the Ethiopian, the Meroe and most importantly the Egyptian civilization. But the insight he provides during corroborating his theories is wonderful and sets us thinking… not essentially in the direction that he intends us to…but in many other directions… of inter-civilization interactions…

Why do we find Pyramid shapes in disparate locations of human civilization?- in South America, in North America, in North Africa, in Iraq and most recently in Europe (reports suggest that some Pyramid like structure was uncovered in Bosnia). He claims that all the pyramid like structures actually have a same root. It tried to depict a holy mountain peak… he claims that this holy peak was part of legend that connect all the civilizations… and often in all these civilization… there was a belief that mountains peaks are closest to the God… and man descended on a mountain peak from the heavens above… (In fact in Hindu tradition it is believed that Lord Shiva performed his creation dance in one of the Mountain peak…the Arab tradition also believes that Prophet Adam descended on a mountain peak… so it is just might be possible that this belief had some pre-historic root…when ancient civilizations believed that Mountain have a divine proximity to the God…)

As a disclaimer, I must say that this theory has to assume a lot of things and therefore I do not fully subscribe to this theory… there are some who say that architecturally the most stable structure is the Pyramid structure… and therefore quite a lot of civilization tried making it… that may be the case, but discovering the same stable structure cannot be a mere coincidence. So even the most acceptable theories have some preponderance, therefore a scientific enquiry must not be stopped.

He then shifts his attention to some hieroglyphics that mention… that the pharaonic civilization had very strong relations with another civilization called the Punt… which can as well be Punat because in hieroglyphics it is impossible to find the exact vowels. Some even believe that the Egyptian civilization actually originated from this place called Punt…and the first civilized people arrived from Punt (again this is just a possibilities… there are some other sources that claim that Egyptian settlement started 8000 years ago…thereby predating any known human settlement and that could have grown into something as grand as Pharaonic civilization after 2000 years).

The reference of Punt comes in Egyptian temples and hieroglyphics only and therefore there is no cross references to check the exact location of Punt… some say it is today's Somalia. But Dr. Wael has two arguments… One that there has been no ancient or pre-Christ civilization traces found in Somalia… the closest civilizations have been that of Yemen and the Axumites in Ethiopia… Axumites came much after the Pharaohs…Yemen, indications indicate was contemporary… so was Puntland Yemen? - Two he say that there was a British researcher in the early last century, who did extensive research on the length of journeys taken from Egypt to Puntland…the timings and the speed of oceanic winds… to arrive at the conclusion that the Egyptian fleets must have traveled much more than the distance from Egypt to Yemen or Somalia… his calculations indicated that in the southward direction…the Puntland must have been close to Tanzania… and Madagascar. So was Tanzania or Madagascar…Puntland?

As regards to the Tanzania being the Puntland… in the 1950s, some left historian, to fight the European colonialism, enunciated theory of Tanzania being the Puntland and that actually the Egyptian civilization originated from Negroid civilization… but this theory was severely discredited and nullified.

Mr Wael then shifts our attention to the pictures in the Temple of Hatepshut…in Luxor…where there are pictorial representations of Queen Hatepshut's visit to Puntland… the Puntland is represented as a advanced civilization, with lots of coconut trees and industry and people have a typical feature (that do not match with negroids of Tanzania or Somalia and are in fact closure to the Dravidian features)… the houses are on the sea-coast and are on raised platform (he explains it as a land of recurring Tsunamis and draws our attention to the fact that the eastern coast of Africa has very little history of Tsunami, whereas the Indian East coast has a very high incidences of Tsunami)… moreover, the clothes wore by the people are very much similar to what the South Indian still wear today.

So he believes that the Puntland was actually India… he claims that the if time and oceanic wind calculations are re-done today then it would be established that the places where Egyptian fleets used to go was India… he claims that Egyptian civilization therefore drew inspirations from the South Indian and also Mesopotamian civilization, that were contemporary to it…

So was there any ancient civilization in South India and Srilanka… we don’t have many evidences… may be it needs a thorough research….. Some days ago I read a news that the Adam's Bridge is not all that natural… it seems that it has elements of a man made structure… can it be so? Was there a thriving civilization in South India and Srilanka… that is still to be discovered… and we are not giving enough credence to Adam's bridge as a possible clue.

He left me with an interesting analysis….according to Arab traditions Prophet Adam descended in Sri Lanka at Adam's Peak. The place in Arab tradition is called Noot (نوط). In ancient Arabic the word Al (which precedes any proper noun was depicted by word Ha… if we add Ha with Noot, it becomes Hanoot (هنوط), very close to Hanood (the Arabic for Indians)

As an aside… Adam's Peak is the only place which is venerated by four religions… and where the oriental and western religion meet… the Hindu's consider it to be the place where Lord Shiva performed his dance of creation, Buddhist consider it the place where Lord Buddha gave his most important sermon while visiting Sri Lanka, Muslim consider it the place where Prophet Adam descended and Christian consider it the place where Saint Thomas came.