Index
An investigation of South Asian history built on primary sources, corpus data and published genetics — with the limits of each stated on the page rather than in a footnote.
Stated in one sentence, at the strength the evidence supports.
Cited to text, corpus count, or dataset. Versions pinned.
Who transmitted this, and what they gained from what it says.
The strongest case against, made properly.
Named in advance, so the claim is falsifiable.
Those five fields appear on every entry. The third is the one that does the most work: almost every text in this canon was kept by people with an interest in what it says.
Instruments
Interactive. The data is real, the gaps are visible, and the controls let you check the claim yourself rather than take it.
1,330 couplets on how to live, with no caste word and no Veda
Named after a woman in a Jain story, from a list in a Buddhist text
Sanskrit, Śiva and the Buddha crossed the ocean. The caste order did not
Three Chinese monks spent fifty years in India and wrote it down
What survives, and how much of it this platform has used
What the record cannot contain, and things named after their carriers
Map · time slider
140 sites, 299 dated object-windows, 25 texts placed by localisation grade, 7 trade routes weighted by evidence strength. Verification badges are shown honestly — most are still grey.
Tests: 2 known non-errors, both adjacent-site coincidencesChart · filters
Moorjani 2013 dates for 18 groups, split by whether the date means what it is usually quoted to mean. For most upper-caste groups it does not.
Needs rebuild on the three-way ancestry modelArguments
Each takes one mechanism and follows it through the sources.
Method
Ask who benefits from a critique and you can predict what it leaves standing. Four revolts, sorted by whose revolt it was.
Place
The tradition named its deepest layer after the wilderness, then burned it. Khāṇḍava, Ekalavya, Śambūka, and a corpus count showing the ascetic vocabulary is the newest in the Rigveda.
Provenance
Six text dossiers. Who kept each one, what they gained from what it says, and what survives the discount.
Language
Sindhu → Hindu → India. tamiḻ → drāviḍa. Regular sound laws, annotated at every step — and a section on where resemblance is not derivation.
Knowledge
A lunar system of undetermined origin with a Babylonian–Greek horoscope laid on top. The Greek layer supplied the chart; the nakṣatra layer still supplies the clock.
Sources
Primary material presented without an argument wrapped around it.
c. 6th–3rd c. BCE
Seventy-three poems by named women. The earliest surviving collection of poetry by multiple women in any language, and largely unread.
Corpus · 164,758 tokens
Full lemmatised corpus with Arnold's metrical strata. Includes three findings that failed their own tests and were withdrawn.
Working record
The long synthesis, stance-tagged throughout: argued, open, logged, rejected.
Working notes
Not a public page. An internal record, kept so that claims which did not survive checking are not quietly recycled — and so that anyone picking this up later knows which attractive-sounding results have already been tried and abandoned.
Significant at token level (z = 4.63); flat at type level; absent entirely on surface forms (z = 0.32). An artefact of dictionary normalisation. Do not revive.
The opposite. IE speakers average 72 generations, Dravidian 108 — and the northern dates are younger because those groups reject the single-pulse model.
Only Mesopotamia named. The Indus script is undeciphered; there is no Indus text naming anywhere.
Attributed by elimination. Much of the mask's blue is coloured glass.
Contested. Tamil Īḻam may be independent or prior. Direction unresolved.
It is present. kṛṣṇáyoni, "black-wombed," RV 2.20.7, Archaic stratum.
135 occurrences, 69 in the family books. More frequent than Viṣṇu.
Pravāhaṇa is Pañcāla; Aśvapati is northwestern Kekaya.
Resolved scholastically — the twelve-day sapiṇḍīkaraṇa and the transit model.
Enheduanna, c. 2300 BCE, is earlier. The defensible claim is earliest anthology by multiple women.
Krishnamurti places it in the early third millennium. Telugu's branch may predate 2000 BCE.
A model output from modern genomes plus ancient outliers found outside India. One low-coverage Harappan genome exists; no ancient DNA from South India of that period.
Merges Iranian-farmer-related and Steppe ancestry. Rebuild on the three-way model; the sharper published finding is that priestly-status groups carry more Steppe ancestry than their Indus-Periphery proportion predicts.
yavanānī is in Kātyāyana's vārttika on 4.1.49, c. 3rd c. BCE — not the sūtra.
Standing rules: earliest-attested is the only claim a documentary record supports · undeciphered is not negative · a developmental sequence beats a first attestation · version-pin every citation · state what would change the conclusion.