Vedic Foundations and Hindu Cosmology

The religious history of the Indian subcontinent begins, in the view of many scholars, well before the arrival of the Vedic-speaking peoples who authored the earliest Hindu scriptures. The Indus Valley Civilization (also called the Harappan Civilization), which flourished across the basins of the Indus and the now-vanished Sarasvati rivers from roughly 3300 to 1300 BCE, with its mature urban phase around 2600 to 1900 BCE, has left behind material remains that some historians of religion read as antecedents of later Hindu practice. Among the most discussed finds is a steatite seal from Mohenjo-daro, catalogued as seal 420, depicting a horned, seated figure surrounded by animals, which the archaeologist Sir John Marshall proposed in the 1930s to be a prototype of Shiva in his aspect as Pashupati, "Lord of Animals." Terracotta figurines interpreted by some as mother-goddess images, along with stones some scholars associate with later linga veneration, have likewise been cited as possible precursors of Hindu devotional forms, though the Indus script remains undeciphered and no contemporary textual explanation of these images survives.